Extra Credit Blog

I would like to compare Sissy to Little Lord Fauntleroy. I would especially like to draw on the relationships between the boys and their mothers. They are both rather "girly" boys. Both Sissy and Ceddie are very different from the typical rough and tumble boys such as Tom Sawyer and Raggid Dick. They are proper and polite and they do not need to manipulated to get what they want. They are very much "Momma's boys" and strive to please. Although Sissy seems to be much more of a "girly boy" he like Ceddie are both able to be boys when needed. Kellogg says, "Willie was all boy or all girl, as the occasion required." (563) This also applies to Cedric especially in the scene where he is playing amongst the other boys.

The boys are very different in the fact that Cedric has money and is a Lord as opposed to Willie who has very little money and has to ultimately go to work to support his mother, and his new sister, Margie. Cedric also is trained and is proper. While Willie is a country boy and is just well mannered. He also has more of the domestic skills as opposed to Cedric who is just more of a Momma's boy and pleaser.

I would also like to comment on how Sissy ends. It leads up to a very predictable ending and then right at the end takes a twist. I totally would have thought that Sissy and Margie would have ended up together. Although that would have been a little weird since he said Margie would be his sister. I like the little twist at the end. It makes the story such a good and keeps the audience captive up to the very end.

Three Men and A Baby

I would like to draw more on the transformation of the men in The Luck of Roaring Camp.

A baby changes everything. This was no exception for the men in the camp. They were given a new human life and had no choice but to take care of it. I'm not so sure that it was their decision to change because of the baby, but it was the baby that changed them. They had to completely rearrange their lives all because of this child that they really had no responsibility for. It reminds me in a way of the Shakespeare quote, "Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them." Raising a child is a great task... not everyone aspires to be a parent and not everyone can do it. These men had the responsibility of raising a child thrust upon them.

They wanted to do everything to be good parents to this child. They do things that they would not normally do to be good parents to this child. For instance the christening. "Tommy was christened as seriously as he would have been under a Christian roof, and cried and was comforted in as orthodox fashion." They took on completely different personalities. I find it interesting because they have almost found maternal instinct even though they are clearly not female. Something changes within a man when he becomes a father. Things that we was too "manly" to do before he suddenly does all the time. He becomes mushy in a way.

Short Stories

I find that short stories are often hard to just skim over. All the details come at you quick and dirty. There is not the fluff and crying that we have seen in earlier novels. The author simply doesn't have the time to elaborate on the situation and other events. In the Wide, Wide, World we spend pages and pages and pages hearing about all of Ellen's sorrows. We spend seven pages picking out a Bible. Desiree's Baby is only 5 pages long. There is simply no time for crying. We don't see the drama. There is clearly drama seeing as Desiree's husband says that she is not fully 100 percent white, when we find out that. Ellen was often hard to follow because she was all over the place. I found myself wanted to stop reading the novels about ten to fifteen pages into the novels, but the short story is easier to finish.