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Choose one of the stories to apply feminist criticism to the reading. Identify the protagonist and antagonist and describe their relationship as it relates to the theme. How does the relationship to the foil, if there is one, reflect the theme? Identify whether the protagonist is round or flat, dynamic or static. Support your response with examples from the text.
 * Chopin’s “Story of and Hour” and Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”**

Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” is about a woman, Louis Mallard, who finds out that her husband has died in a train crash. She becomes very sad but realizes that she is free, so in turn she becomes happy. She hasn’t ever been free before, she can do what she wishes now. Later in the story she finds out that her husband, john Mallard, is actually alive and he come to see her and she dies from shock. The theme that I came up for this story is, when a person loses freedom, it kills apart of them. So in a way this means to me that once you lose something so important to you, like freedom, you have no reason to live anymore. The protagonist in the story is Mrs. Mallard and the Antagonist for this story is society’s image of woman/patriarchy. I believe that Louis is a round character because it shows many different sides of her. From when she is heartbroken from her husband’s death to being happy that she is finally free and can do what she would wish to do. I also think that Mrs. Mallard is a dynamic character because she goes from being a married wife, who must do society’s depiction of a wife’s job like: dishes, laundry, and cooking, to being free to getting all of that freedom taken away by her death. Louis Mallard connects to my theme because she gains her freedom by her husband’s death, and then when she finds out that he is actually dead, she loses her freedom by dying from the shock of her husband being alive.

Stephen Crane’s “Mystery of Heroism” is about a foot soldier named Fred Collins in the Civil War. In the story, the author talks about the mood, how it makes the reader feel. There is also imagery, what is described for the reader to see, in the story. “Mystery of Heroism” is also in first person, and it shows examples of his ID, what he wants, his superego, which works in contradiction to the id, and his ego, which balances out the two. I will be describing these in this essay. In the story there are a lot of example of mood and imagery. One good example for imagery is //“There was and instant’s picture of a horse in a great convulsive leap of a death wound and a rider leaning back with a crooked arm and spread fingers before is face. On the ground was the crimson terror of an exploding shell, with fibers of flame that seemed like lances.”// An inference that others and I made about that was that the horse had gotten shot and the rider was getting launched off the back of it and trying to cover his face. A good example of mood is being excited of a sense of terror because at first Fred Collins is excited to see the well. So he decides to walk over to it to get some water and a sense of terror strikes him when he gets there and he actually realizes that he is getting shot at and he could die. In this story there are many different examples of Fred’s Id, Ego, and Super Ego. Examples of those are when Fred wants to go get drink of water (ID), when he splashes the water on the fallen soldiers face (ego), and when he gives the fallen soldiers half the bucket of water. In my own personal belief, I think that in Stephen Crane’s “Mystery of Heroism”, has some of the best example that you will find of psychoanalytic criticism in any story we have read so far.
 * Crane’s “Mystery of Heroism”**

The story //April Showers// is about a girl name Theodora and how she has to take care of her siblings and her mom while her dad works. She secretly reads and writes. she hopes to get her story published in a local magazine called //Home Circle.// She hopes to get paid for her story April showers and possibly discovered, then she will be able to give back to her family. Her id wants to write and her superego wants to take care of her family. Her ego needs to balance out those two by getting discovered as this young talented author and she can get her younger siblings into better schools and her mother better help. The dialect in this story tells me that she has a very educated background with sentences like “hasn’t mother’s tray gone up yet?” Mark Twain’s //The invalid’s story// is about a man (the narrator) and how he is suppose to accompany his friends dead body on a train until the body makes It to Wisconsin. He is stuck in the storage car with the dead body and the conductor Thompson. Thompson has a very deep southern dialect like “do you reckon we started the Gen’rul any?” The Narrator’s id is that he wants to get out of the storage car and get rid of the smell, his superego is to stay with the rotting corpse, and his ego tells him to try and cover up the smell by using carbolic acid. That tells me that he stays true to his word when his friend’s family asked him to stay and look after the body of his dead friend
 * Wharton’s “April Showers” and Twain’s “The Invalid’s Story”**