Independency is a Virtue

Feleisha Antillon
Mr. Gowans
Language Arts 12
October 15, 2012

Independency is a Virtue

Independency is a much needed quality in todays society. Without independence you will have struggles that you won’t be able to overcome on your own. You will always need someone else to depend on. In the case of “Woman Hollering Creek” Cleofilas is forced to depend on her husband and becomes accustomed to not being independent and then depends on her friends to help her get out of the situation she was in. In the story “Train Time” Eneas’s grandparents depend on him to help them as they grow old and weak. Because of their dependence on him Eneas feels that he needs to be there all the time and not go to school. But in the story “Clothes Mita is very independent because even after her husband dies she still decides to stay in America.

When Cleofilas’s husband wasn’t home when it was time for bed, she couldn’t get herself to sleep. She would just lay awake thinking about what he was up to and why he wasn’t home. “But a parents love for a child, a child’s for its parents, was another thing entirely” “This is what Cleofilas thought evenings when Juan Pedro did not come home, and she lay on her side of the bed listening to the hollow roar…” (Cisneros Paragraph 4). Without the comfort of her husband next to her, she wasn’t able to fall asleep...not alone. Cleofilas was not strong-willed enough to sleep alone. She didn’t have the strength to be alone. She always needed someone. Before her marriage she was always with her mother or father. She wouldn’t just go to the movies on her own if she didn’t have a cousin or an amiga to go with her.
“The first time she had been so surprised she didn’t cry out nor try to defend herself. She had always said she would strike back if a man, were to touch her” (Cisneros Paragraph 18). As a woman I tell myself, every time domestic violence comes up in conversation that I would fight back or leave the man that abused me. I’m sure most women say that, but when it actually happens they’re too scared to do anything about it because of what could happen because of their independence. Statistics prove that more women are too scared and don’t leave the man rather than fight back and leave. Men are stronger and more aggressive. Even though it is hard to leave, staying in a domestic relationship shows weakness. For you to have the strength to leave a relationship like that you need independence.

In the story “Train Time” a small boy by the name of Eneas is a very independent boy, but his grandparents are far from. “He knew about Eneas. Most of the boys and girls were mere names....But little Eneas her knew” (McNickle Paragraph 12). They grew older and weaker day by day and needed more and more help from Eneas. It was not their fault that they were old, they cannot help that, but they relied on their grandchild for just about everything. “There was wood all about them. Lamartine was a woodcutter besides, yet there was no wood in the house...The Major had but to look at the bed where Lamartine lay, twisted and shrunken by rheumatism....He tried to wave a hand as Major entered” (McNickle Paragraph 14). Grandpa and Grandma had no strength to fend for themselves, they were much too old. With no help from Eneas they wouldn’t survive, and Eneas knew that. He would have to care for them as parents would their young children. He would have to step up and cut the wood to warm the house. “ Clearly she wasn’t, not for wood-chopping, She sat close by the fire, trying with a good-natured grin to lift her ponderous body from a low seated rocking chair...she could scarcely have come within striking distance of a stick of wood. Two blows, if she had struck them, might have put a stop to her laboring heart” (McNickle paragraph 16). When I get sick I get weak and lose my independence because I don’t have the strength to get up and do anything for myself, and it makes me want to do everything and anything I usually don’t even do. I hate not being able to help myself, I can’t even imagine getting so old where I can even barely move. Without independence I feel like I have nothing of my own to have pride in.

In the story “Clothes” a young woman named Mita is set up for an arranged marriage, at first she is very dependent on her parents, she doesn’t want to leave her home. “..I’d be going halfway around the world to live with a man I hadn’t met. Would I ever see my parents again? Don’t send me so far away, I wanted to cry...” (Divakaruni 18). But towards the end when her husband passes away and she becomes a widow she has to become independent. She had no other family or anybody else that she really knew in America that she could depend on. “She took an edge of the sheet and rubbed the red marriage mark off my forehead. She was crying. All of the women in the room were crying except me” (Divakaruni 18). Mita wasn’t healed from the death of her husband yet but she was starting to become stronger. “ Thats when I know I cannot go back. I don’t know yet how I’ll manage, here in this new, dangerous land. I only know I must. Because all over India, at this very moment, widows in white saris are bowing their veiled heads, serving tea to in-laws. Dove with cut off wings” (Divakaruni 33). Even without her husband with her in America she still decides to be independent and fend for herself. America is a completely different country than India, and she isn’t used to it, and still then she stays.

In conclusion, in today’s society, independency is a must. Without any independence you will be depending on everybody else to help you out and solve your problems. As in the stories, “Woman Hollering Creek”, and “Train Time”. But in the story “Clothes” Mita is a young independent woman that could now probably deal with pretty much anything that is thrown at her.