Realism

In the story "The Story of an Hour", there is a character named Louise Mallard. Louise is an old lady with heart trouble, and has just lost her husband but has no idea. Someone has to tell her and the person that takes responsibility to do so is her sister. When her sister tells her the news, she goes to her room and asks to be alone. When she goes to her room it describes the room as her looking out her open window. She says "Free! Body and soul free!", this here is when she expresses her feeling of her love and hate for her husband. Even though she loved him sometimes, now she was free to live by herself, for herself with no one to tell her what to do. As she became one with her soul, she walked out and stubble down her stairs and her husband was there at the door, but as he walked in, she died at the sight of him.

The social issue in this short story is marriage. Back in the day marriage wasn't fair for women. They had to do what their husband said whether they wanted to or not. They weren't able to be their own person. The way "The Story of an Hour" writes this is in the line, "There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in the blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature."

This is an example of realism for the fact that it is actually expressing how some women felt back then. It's proving to you that is was bad enough to where if their husband died they would find joy in it, and become their self once again.

In the story "The Battle with Mr.Covey" by Frederick Douglass, Frederick is talking about himself. He is a slave who has been working hard for Mr. Covey for a long time. One day out in the field he started to become tired and sick, "I broke down; my strength failed me; I was seized with a violent aching of the head, attended with extreme dizziness; I trembled in every limb." Mr. Covey then comes out and starts kicking and yelling at him to get up and work, but Frederick can't with all his strength, "I tried to do so, but fell back in the attempt." After all this, Frederick runs off with his head bleeding, and through the woods his feet get torn up by the thorns, "My hair was all clotted with dust and blood; my shirt was stiff with blood. My legs and feet were torn in sundry places with briers and thorns."

I think the social issue of this story is that having slaves is wrong, especially the way they treated them back in the day. They treated slaves as if they weren't real people, as if they had no say in what they wanted to do with their day let alone their own life. This was a big problem back then that no one realized until now.

Frederick wrote this as a personal experience. Something he had to go through, which was terribly wrong, but made him tremendously strong. I think he wrote this for all the people who really do care, and for the ones who don't. To open up the eyes of those who felt that there was nothing wrong, to show them his point of view and his life day to day. For those to jump in his shoes and maybe feel sympathy for what he had to go through.

In todays society, if you turn on the television there are many examples of realism. My example would have to be the movie, American Gangster. This movie stars Denzel Washington, and is based on a true story. The social issue would have to be drugs and crooked cops. The movie is about a man who is a drug lord and smuggled herion into Harlem. He would do so by hiding the stash inside the coffins of American soldiers returning from Vietnam.