From Landscape for a Good Woman

From “Landscape for a Good Woman” by Carolyn Kay Steedman

“The house was full of her terrible tiredness and her terrible resentment; and I knew it was all my fault” (720).

Word count: 313

In this excerpt Carolyn describes a lot of the hardships that her and her family had to deal with during this time. They seemed to have been struggling with money a lot which I found she always was blaming on her father for that as well as her mother’s unhappiness. The whole story encapsulates the guilt she feels for being a burden on her mother’s life and not allowing her to live the fairy tales that she had always wanted to do. Knowing this as a child I feel as if this would put a lot of pressure and make someone feel guilty for being in that person’s life. The quote I chose from the text describes how she was feeling about this situation. Her mother would tell her daughters of her wishes of a full skirt, a cottage in the country, and a prince who never came. All things she would have been able to do if she never had children. I could sense the pressure that Carolyn and her sister might have been feeling that maybe if they could do and be better daughters then their mother would finally be happy. Carolyn more than her sister seemed to have felt this more, but she was also very proud of everything that she had been able to do. In one section she was describing all the things at young ages that she was able to do on her own and she took pride in it. The struggles that she went through with her family forced her to have to grow up a little faster than most and made her feel like she had to exceed in everything she did.