Response to governance and leadership

Throughout the text, the female narrator—Doreen—uses language as implicit imagery which subconsciously works upon the mind of the reader to identify women as objects and entities to be controlled by men. For instance, in situation the home as the natural location for a woman’s place to be, she writes not only that “home is the hearth, the place where woman makes fire” but, even more suggestively, where she also “cooks herself into the husband’s heart.” One of the first observations made in the narrative that comment directly upon the idea of separation of station of male and female is the assertion that “Women nurture the earth like they do children and husbands.” While one can read this as a signification of husbands being like children and, as such, interpret it as a critique of patriarchy, it must also be interpreted that despite this, the job of taking care of men even as children still falls to women. Probably the most strikingly subtle use of language to indicate much more than is being explicitly stated is the particular peculiarity of the verb engaged in Doreen’s confessional admission “I was grazed into my place in the kitchen.”