Guy de Maupassant’s “Old Mother Savage” Essay

We be every taught that our identicalness lies in the roles we play throughout life, in different words, in our actions. William Shakespe ar wrote, All the worlds a stage / And entirely the men and women merely players. / They fall in their exits and their entrances (As You Like It, II, vii). Whenever people act impertinent of their parts whenever we miss our entrance, our identity is challenged. This can be seen everyday in all walks of life and in all arenas. For example, a teen produce who ingests responsibility for his child is look upon with surprised admiration while a teen stick is look up with distain for becoming pregnant in the first place. Placing standards and expectations upon people can be a vastly healthy thing, that what happens when those standards and expectations be engender too rigidto all consuming?Rigid, all-consuming, roles obligate been required of women since time remembered. Even in the twenty-first century, the career char is exempt expected to maintain a family. Gloria Steinhem puts it succinctly I invite stock- shut up to hear a man ask for advice on how to accede marriage and a career. Men are expected to place steep priorities on their careers. The implication is that a man will receive slight criticism for neglecting his family for his career, while a woman will be criticized astutely for having a career without also being an excellent wife and render. some(prenominal) of these identity feminine roles experience been so inflexible that m whatever women cannot stop over free in order to severalisey the woman inside.When circumstances push them out of their traditional roles, they find themselves wondering, Who am I? What is my purpose? goose de Maupassant in his short story Old Mother Savage (1885) depicts a classic example of this. His main character is a mother in German occupied France who is deprived of her identity roles i.e. wife and mother. Since she has nothing else to throw her life purpose, she becomes homicidal and a bit suicidal. In this story, Maupassant is arguing that women who have uncompromising and limited identity roles can become violent to themselves and others.Maupassant paints a vivid picture of how nineteenth century countrywomen of France presented themselves to the world at large. The fabricators friend,Serval, describes her as not at all timid marvelous and gaunt, neither given to joking nor to being joked withthe men folk come in for a little fun at the inn, yet the women are always very grave (p. 161). Victoire Simon, Old Mother Savage, is a kind, withal reclusive woman. She had erstwhile offered the Maupassant wine when he passed by her cottage 15 years earlier tired and thirsty an obvious kindness (p. 160), yet Serval, Maupassants friend who tells the story of Old Mother Savage, implies that a staid attitude is normal for the women of the area.Maupassant presents his readers with a woman who has been taught very specific actions for conduct. Sh e dresses so that her tightly boundgrey hair is never seen in public. She was taught vocation and never learned how to stretch her mouth in laughter. By the time Maupassants readers meet Victoire, her identity is irrevocably tied to performing the duties of wife and mother. just now like all the other wives of the region, she is nothing without the duties of either wife and/or mother.Victoire has her identity challenged thrice. The first challenge occurres many years before when the capture, an aging poacher, had been shot by gendarmes police (p. 160). This provides a serious blow to her wife identity but she buries the lose because after all half her identity is still intactshe is still a mother. The role of mother is more popular than that of wife since, she cannot control the actions and their consequences of her keep up. He, to some extent, failed in his role of husband and father by getting caught at poaching and subsequently shot for the offense. Victoire, on the other h and, is still around to perform all the motherly duties of care a home, cooking meals, and mending clothes, which she does religiously.The second challenge to her identity comes when contend is declared and her male child, now thirty-three, goes to fight in the Franco- Prussian War. Victoire is alone. She knows her duty but has no one to perform it for save for herself. Her life consists of going to the village once a week, to buy herself bread and a little meat so get back home at once (p. 161). She does tho what is obligatory to keep herself alive until she can resume her duty as mother. In her mind there is nothing else for herno gossiping with the village la blend ins no sewing a new garment for herself no cups of tea with aneighbor. Her world ceases to function without her duty to her male child.The death stroke to her identity began with the reaching of the Prussians. She is required to billet quaternity of the occupying German soldiers, since she was known to be wel l off (p. 161). These young men, astir(predicate) the same age as her tidings would clean up the kitchen, scrub the flagstones, chop wood, peel potatoes, wash the house-linendo, in fact, all the housework, as four good sons might do for their mother (p. 161). She would cook and mend for them, as a good mother would do. She still had a purposeto be a mother even if it was to deputy sons. For a month these soldiers are sons not enemies then she receives word that her son has been killed in the contend.Suddenly, her world is shattered without her son she has lost her last sheet of purpose. The gendarmes had killed the father, the Prussians had killed the sonand suffering flooded her heart (p. 162). With her husband buried for years, her son dead she has no identity and consequently no purpose in life. Within moments, she plans a special form of revengenot only will others suffer as she has, not only will soulfulness die for to avenge her son, but she will be sure to die in conseq uence of her actions.Suddenly, the four German sons become four German soldiersthe enemy. Simple folk dont go in for the luxuries of chauvinistic hatredthe poor and lowlypay the heaviest pricetheir masses are killed off wholesale (p. 162). Ones like these German soldiers billeting in her home polish off her boy. It is quite possible that she would have assumed a German mother was caring for her son like she was caring for the German men. She is, after all, a simple folk, who would not have more knowledge of the intricacies of war beyond the billeting of the German soldiers. Therefore, not only did German soldiers kill her son, but also a German mother failed in her duty toward her son. done a carefully executed plan conceived in the brief afternoon of discovering the fate of her son, Victoire kills the soldiers. She burns her cottage to the ground with the soldiers trapped inside. When the German military officer asks her how the fire started, she said, I lighted it, myself. S he tooktwo papers from her pocket.Thats about Victors her son death. Thats their names, so that you can write to their homes. spot them the German mothers how it happened, and tell them it was I whodid it, Victoire Simon, that they call the Savage. Dont forget. In order to ease her grief, she wanted other mothers to suffer as much as she was suffering. She knew she would be shot for her actions she was probably counting on it. She could good have lied. She could have told the German Officer just about any excuse, but she didnt. What did she have to live for? She had no purpose for living without her husband and son. Her society, by placing limited and ridged identity roles on its women, robbed her of the ability to discover an identity within herself separate from family. Therefore, she did the only thing she could dotake revenge on the closest target and be sure she did not survive the experience.Maupassant, in five short pages, presents a compelling parameter for the avoidance of limiting women with restrictive identity roles. Disastrous consequences are all too likely to result from their removal. Consequences that go beyond the death of four soldiers and their murder, the narrators friend Serval had his chateau burned down by the Prussians due to Victoires actions. If her identity had been broaderif she knew herself outside of societal-imposed roles, she then may have had something to cling toa purpose in life rather than a kamikaze plan of revenge.