Blog Week 3

In the literary works “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed”, by Edna St. Vincent Millay and “The Gilded Six-Bits” by Zora Neale Hurston there is a common theme of love and the roles of women. In all these literary works it deals with the difficulty of a relationship and the different obstacles that come along when you’re in love.
In “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed” the speaker of the poem is a woman. In the beginning of the poem she seems very in love with the person that is next to her. As the poem continues on her true feeling about the man becomes known to the reader. She feels controlled by him which is shown on line 9, “And leave me once again undone, possessed”. Even though she has love for him she feels it will be best for her to leave him for a while and see if they can work things out. This poem shows that men are dominant over women. The woman in this poem is trying to change this by taking a stand a putting a stop to feeling controlled in the relationship.
In “The Gilded Six-Bits” it also has the theme of love but it has a different approach. The woman in the story, Missie May, will do anything for her relationship and love. She lets her husband control her which is shown when she reached for a second helping of tater pone and her husband, Joe, wouldn’t allow her to have anymore. She begged but in the end she ended up doing what made her husband happy. This is different then in the poem because she lets herself be controlled by her husband. She doesn’t think for herself and lets her husband dominate her life. This story is very similar to the “The Birthmark”, by Nathaniel Hawthorne because the woman in this story will do anything to please her husband and if her husband isn’t happy she doesn’t want to live anymore. All these works deal with the position women take in love and relationships. “I , Being Born a Woman and Distressed” shows that women can stand up for themselves in relationships while the other two works shows women being controlled and not being able to think for themselves.