Goodisons Absolute Essay example -- essays research papers

Goodisons AbsoluteIn For My Mother May I Inherit Half Her Strength, Goodison publicizes the private issue of her p atomic number 18nts less-than-perfect marriage, and, in turn, unfolds a powerful dialectic on female self-sacrifice and subjectivity. She wonders at the prolonged strength of her mother- a woman who, regardless of being the victim of an unfaithful marriage, neither confronts nor flees her fate. And at the core of Goodisons poem is her own conflicted decision, as the female product of this union, to adjust her mothers attitude as unwavering strength, worthy of idolise, or as passivity, masked by nonchalance. The title of this work illustrates this ambiguity does the clause whitethorn I inherit half her strength, translate into may I be permitted - by the same mysterious influence that affected my mother - to await strong just like her or may I never allow myself to be quite as tolerant as she was. In the scratch stanza, Goodison suggests that the absolute, my mother loved my father, had governed her perspective of her parents marriage for twenty-nine years. Its indisputability may have functioned as a motivation for her fathers on-going extra-marital affair(s). But flush more explicitly, this absolute implied that despite the pain inflicted by her father, whom all women loved, Goodisons mothers love remained unshakably loyal, and that that was somehow all that unfeignedly mattered. At least, up until Goodison wrote this poem. In this my thirtieth year/ the year to toss out absolutes signals Goodisons revolt against this belief that had relentlessly threatened to break her mothers straight-backed, fronted dignity and that absolved the indifference of her fathers always smile. The lack of control of Goodisons writing in the first stanza points to something deeper about her kindred to this absolute. Since absolutes are characteristically irrefutable and deemed factual, I had expected that Goodisons writing would have illustrated the finiteness of this absolute by sealing it with a full stop. However, here, in the most transparently opinionated stanza of her entire poem, there is no punctuation whatsoever each distinct thought simply spills into the next, and even farther into the pursuit stanza where her topic diverges. It is difficult to say whether or not Goodisons omission was deliberate noneth... ..., on her wedding day she wept and at its setting. She endured better and worse and at last, she fell downto the realization that she did not have to be brave, just this once. Her tears functioned to honor the sacrifices of her body twenty years permanently fat, of her sewing machine, the symbol of her livelihood, to pay her daughters Senior Cambridge fees, but also to purge the pain she bore with the eyes of a queen. Nevertheless, mingled with Goodisons mothers sorrows, are tears of love for the husband that betrayed her. For My Mother makes a complete revolution, in that it begins with the acknowledgement and criticis m of Goodisons mothers love for her mother and ends with the reverence for this kind of love that, a seemingly astonished Goodison, cannot comprehend. Even after giving justifications of why her parents marriage was far from ideal, the absolute that she so wanted to discard in the first place looms over her unaffected and, of course, undisputed. In an alpha and omega fashion, this absolute in Goodisons work proves its place amongst other absolutes as an unfathomable force that refuses to be contested and most assuredly, will not be discarded.