"The Horse Dealer's Daughter"

Lawrence draws a picture of a slightly dysfunctional, hardly communicative, and emotionally disconnected family in the surviving adult Pervin children. The focus is on 27-year-old Mabel, who seems to be a combination of an object of scrutiny and an object of rather offhand contempt on the part of her brothers. They want to know what she is going to do, now that their family farm has been sold to pay the debts of their recently deceased--and financially improvident--father. She, the narrator explains, "did not share the same life as her brothers," yet it is they who have "a strange air of ineffectuality" (Lawrence 1).

The trouble is, the ineffectual three brothers--eldest age 35--have many more options than Mabel, whose sister died years ago. Joe, the eldest, has managed to get himself engaged to the daughter of an estate manager and will get a job, though he re

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he drudge of the household. Not only do they not particularly have much interest in her future, but they are also prone to unsolicited abuse. Cushman quotes their designation of her as "the sulkiest bitch that ever trod." She is likened to Sleeping Beauty because she endures "the experience of death in order to be truly brought to life . . . not from a magical kiss from the handsome prince but from a ritual immersion in the waters of destruction, followed by a passionate commitment made by a man who does not understand what he is doing" (Cushman 32). Another characteristic that Mabel shares with Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty--a point that Cushman has in hand but does not make--is that she does not appear to be in a position to change her passivity, or more exactly that her passivity is transfigured into self-directed action almost by accident. Certainly the image of her comportment of a condemned person on the gallows is a clue to the fact that she thinks of suicide as the only answer to her predicament. A case can be made that suicide involves an active, deliberate decision and willful action; however, it can equally be argued that suicide's permanence offers a way out of a problem that prevents the suicide from having to enga
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2740
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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