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The Girl said, "I liked to be with Clara..."(1). Clara said about Amelia, "She understands me, she thinks we are all important." (2) Tragically, in the end, we learn that most everyone liked to be with Clara in this way. She had just never realized it.
Before her illness took over, Clara was a woman who hopes and dreams just like the best of them. She dreamed of a future she didn't think she could create for herself. She wanted "a bright future and peace."(3) She didn't want to be thought of as only a prostitute, but wanted money and a promise that:
She will get married and sing in the choir and play bridge on Sundays with the best people. Or she might get a typewriter business in a swanky hotel and wear black dresses with white collars and cuffs and see that everyone comes to work on time. Or a tea shop is a good thing and some people rent a whole house and rent out rooms to the best people and sleep until ten. (8)
Clara dreams of a better life but has done nothing to create that life for herself. She is a woman who is a victim of her society's oppression and her own helplessness, both of which have always immobilized her. She had great plans for a future and for the things she would do, but action...
Instead, she did the only things she knew how and in the process created the very same things until her death. More than anything else, it was herself that did the most damage.
The Girl is the opposite of Clara; she doesn't dream -- she does, she strives, she becomes. She represented everything that women were fighting to become. The Girl must rely on herself just to get back to the place she considers home and the people she considers family. (96) She doesn't sit around waiting for someone to save her, in spite of everything that she goes through.
This story, then, is the story of women loving and caring for each other because they are each represented in each other. The friendship is a reflection of one another. Clara is a weak, dreamer who plays the victim; she represents everything the Girl cannot and will not be. The Girl, however, is a strong individual who makes the most of her choices and take action to make things better for not only herself but for future generations of women. This is a story about the same woman, about all women, and about important changes in history.
Bibliography
Le Sueur, Meridel. The Girl. 2nd ed. 1990. West End Press, 1999.
Yonndio thirties" Tillie Olsen. Introduction Linda ray Pratt. Full citation heading- author, title, place publication, publisher, date, number pages. 1- The reviewer gives a clear concise summary content book Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio from the thirties. Bison, 2004. Yonnondio from the thirties details the struggles of a Colorado-based mining family during the first half of the 20th century. Jim Holbrook is an alcoholic who abuses his wife Anna. They have many children,
Duncombe, Stephen. 2005. The Bobbed Haired Bandit. New York: New York University Press. Stephen Duncombe, an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communications at the Gallatin School of New York University, wrote a true story of a dark-haired woman in Brooklyn in January 1924. He, teaching politics of media and history wrote The Bobbed Haired Bandit to show snippets of 1924 life from the perspective of the small,