Rhonda Eng 232 A New England Nun

In order to appreciate Mary Wilkins work I feel that it is relevant to recap some of her history. She was a very sick little girl due to her poor living situations. She lived in England and her stories are based on the life of those in England. After the war there were very few people that lived in the rural areas of England because they had to find better jobs. Those that stayed in the rural areas were unable to make a successful life of their own and many of them never got married.

In the story "A New England Nun" I feel that Mary was trying to portray this same aspect of never getting married. Many were left behind in a rural area with the lack of opportunity. We get this sense that it is a rural area when they are talking about everyone is ranked the same. That no one has more or less then the other person in that neighborhood. With Louisa and Dagget we know that it was rural area when it comes to relationships. Louisa and Dagget had waited for fifteen years to get married. At the end we later realize that marriage was something neither one of them wanted.

Louisa reminds me of my grandma in the sense of her obsessive compulsive behaviors. My grandma was a knitter and she was very picky when it came to her work. When I read about the part when Dagget knocked the stuff off the table I couldn't help but laugh. I automatically started recanting my grandma's reaction when we knocked her stuff over. Then we have the obsession of everything clean and organized. She had an end table that sat in the living room with crossword and word search puzzles. When we would go over there she would let us use those puzzles to play with. Low and behold though if you didn't put them in the right where they were originally. Boy she would get so mad!