Guy de Maupassant’s “Old Mother Savage” Essay

We are e very(prenominal) taught that our identity lies in the consumptions we play throughout deportment, in other words, in our actions. William Shakespeare wrote, All the pieces a st suppurate / And tot on the wholey the hands and women merely players. / They have their exits and their entrances (As You Like It, II, vii). Whenever wad act outside of their parts whenever we miss our entrance, our identity is challenged. This end be seen everyday in all walks of heart and in all arenas. For example, a teen father who takes responsibility for his child is look upon with surprised awe while a teen return is look up with distain for get pregnant in the first place. Placing standards and expectations upon people can be a vastly safe affair, but what happens when those standards and expectations convey too rigidto all consuming?Rigid, all-consuming, roles have been required of women since time remembered. Even in the 21st century, the career char is still expect to maint ain a family. Gloria Steinhem puts it compactly I have yet to hear a man have for advice on how to combine marriage and a career. Men are expected to place high priorities on their careers. The implication is that a man volition receive less criticism for neglecting his family for his career, while a woman bequeath be criticized sharply for having a career without also being an nice married woman and bring forth. Many of these identity feminine roles have been so persistent that many women cannot break free in order to discovery the woman inside.When circumstances force them out of their traditional roles, they find themselves wondering, Who am I? What is my settle? Guy de Maupassant in his short story Old bugger off Savage (1885) depicts a classic example of this. His main character is a mother in German occupied France who is deprived of her identity roles i.e. wife and mother. Since she has nothing else to give her life purpose, she performs homicidal and a bit suicidal . In this story, Maupassant is arguing that women who have uncompromising and limited identity roles can become violent to themselves and others.Maupassant paints a vivid picture of how nineteenth century countrywomen of France presented themselves to the world at large. The narrators friend, Serval, describes her as not at all timidtall and gaunt, n both given to joking nor to being joked withthe men folk come in for a tiny fun at the inn, but the women are always very staid (p. 161). Victoire Simon, Old arrive Savage, is a kind, yet reclusive woman. She had in one case offered the Maupassant wine when he passed by her cottage fifteen days earlier tired and thirsty an limpid kindness (p. 160), yet Serval, Maupassants friend who tells the story of Old mother Savage, implies that a staid attitude is normal for the women of the area.Maupassant presents his readers with a woman who has been taught very specific actions for conduct. She dresses so that her tightly boundgrey hair is never seen in public. She was taught tariff and never learned how to stretch her mouth in laughter. By the time Maupassants readers meet Victoire, her identity is irrevocably tied to playing the duties of wife and mother. Just like all the other wives of the region, she is nothing without the duties of either wife and/or mother.Victoire has her identity challenged thrice. The first challenge occurres many years before when the father, an old poacher, had been shot by gendarmes police (p. 160). This provides a serious shoot a line to her wife identity but she buries the lose because after all fractional her identity is still intactshe is still a mother. The role of mother is more prevalent than that of wife since, she cannot control the actions and their consequences of her economise. He, to some extent, failed in his role of husband and father by getting caught at poaching and subsequently shot for the offense. Victoire, on the other hand, is still around to perform all th e motherly duties of keeping a home, cooking meals, and mending clothes, which she does religiously.The second challenge to her identity comes when war is declared and her son, now thirty-three, goes to fight in the Franco- Prussian War. Victoire is alone. She knows her duty but has no one to perform it for save for herself. Her life consists of going to the village once a week, to buy herself bread and a little meat so get back home at once (p. 161). She does besides what is necessary to keep herself alive until she can resume her duty as mother. In her mind there is nothing else for herno gossiping with the village ladies no sewing a new garment for herself no cups of tea with a neighbor. Her world ceases to function without her duty to her son.The death fortuity to her identity began with the arrival of the Prussians. She is required to billet four of the occupying German soldiers, since she was know to be well off (p. 161). These young men, about the same age as her son w ould clean up the kitchen, scrub the flagstones, chop wood, bare potatoes, wash the house-linendo, in fact, all the housework, as four good sons aptitude do for their mother (p. 161). She would cook and mend for them, as a good mother would do. She still had a purposeto be a mother even if it was to surrogate sons. For a month these soldiers are sons not enemies then she receives word that her son has been killed in the war.Suddenly, her world is shattered without her son she has anomic her last shred of purpose. The gendarmes had killed the father, the Prussians had killed the sonand granting flooded her heart (p. 162). With her husband buried for years, her son dead she has no identity and consequently no purpose in life. Within moments, she plans a special form of strike backnot only will others suffer as she has, not only will someone die for to avenge her son, but she will be sure to die in consequence of her actions.Suddenly, the four German sons become four German soldi ersthe enemy. Simple folk dont go in for the luxuries of patriotic hatredthe poor and lowlypay the heaviest wrongtheir masses are killed off wholesale (p. 162). Ones like these German soldiers billeting in her home murdered her boy. It is quite possible that she would have assumed a German mother was caring for her son like she was caring for the German men. She is, after all, a simple folk, who would not have ofttimes knowledge of the intricacies of war beyond the billeting of the German soldiers. Therefore, not only did German soldiers kill her son, but also a German mother failed in her duty toward her son. Through a carefully executed plan conceived in the brief afternoon of discovering the fate of her son, Victoire kills the soldiers. She burns her cottage to the ground with the soldiers trap inside. When the German Officer asks her how the fire started, she said, I lighted it, myself. She tooktwo papers from her pocket.Thats about Victors her son death. Thats their names, s o that you can write to their homes. Tell them the German mothers how it happened, and tell them it was I who did it, Victoire Simon, that they call the Savage. wearyt forget. In order to ease her grief, she wanted other mothers to suffer as much as she was suffering. She knew she would be shot for her actions she was probably enumerate on it. She could easily have lied. She could have told the German Officer unspoilt about any excuse, but she didnt. What did she have to live for? She had no purpose for living without her husband and son. Her society, by placing limited and ridged identity roles on its women, robbed her of the ability to discover an identity within herself separate from family. Therefore, she did the only thing she could dotake revenge on the closest target and be sure she did not survive the experience.Maupassant, in five short pages, presents a compelling argument for the avoidance of limiting women with restrictive identity roles. bleak consequences are a ll too likely to result from their removal. Consequences that go beyond the death of four soldiers and their murder, the narrators friend Serval had his chateau burned-out down by the Prussians due to Victoires actions. If her identity had been broaderif she knew herself outside of societal-imposed roles, she then may have had something to cling toa purpose in life rather than a kamikaze plan of revenge.