Allegorical impact

After reading Freeman’s short story, the revolt of mother, I felt that the story is not just simply about the new barn but it represents more hidden messages in a certain perspective and draws another story from outside of the novel. The reason is that the narrator excessively focused on an object and its surrounding at many times which provided me additional extended relations with the building.

Hence I came to feel this phenomenon hold a kind of allegorical effect: the “turn of thought” Right away, I tried to analyze the barn as tropes. First, I think Mrs. Penn’s preoccupancy to the barn stands as a metaphor for women’s effort to get back equality over men in patriarchal background. Mrs. Penn wants her husband to build a new house but Mr. Penn turns his back constantly to her wife and rigorously ignores her opinion as he had done for long, long time. This conventional stubborn attitude, I think, may be applied to many women in past days, because it reflects common pain (or anger) and inner responds, though Mrs. Penn is not the one directly related to or represents others. “I’m going to talk real plain to you; I never have sence I married you, but I’m going to now” (Freeman 1349). This dialogue, I thought it provides not just Mr. Penn’s anger but also other women’s emotion (who victimized by the other gender), because it’s so appealing and constructing “common ground”. I would say an image of a woman’s pain and effort to take equality helped me to identify broader images.

However, I think whether accepting metaphor or not depend on the context and personal understanding that it may differ person to person. And also it depends on the specific view point- How the one sees the barn in the novel. Repeatedly, the barn was mentioned, I think it could be regarded as another trope, metonymy. Just like in Moby Dick Ahab associates the whale as his entire problem, Mrs. Penn in the revolt of mother tends to react excessively to an object as if it made her obey to her husband. The barn itself is not the only one crucial factor which made Mrs. Penn serve to her huseband without gaining any response. The barn was an only part of the entire problem. In the revolt of the mother, I tried to think about tropes in the novel. Finding different kinds of tropes at the same time, I found it’s hard to define as one trope because it may differ by the view point of the reader and the context.