Freeman/Chesnutt 7/26/09

I found Freeman's "A New England Nun" to be a good story but I also thought it was anti-climatic. It just seemed like the author spent so much time describing the scene and setting, yet when the action actually happens (when Louisa is overhearing Joe and Lily) there seems like there was no emphasis tied to it. It seemed almost ordinary or nonchalant like the reader was expecting to read this. I thought the way it ended was nice though because they both came to terms that they really didn't love each other anymore, at least not enough to marry each other. This result is hinted at all throughout the story:"But for Louisa the wind had never more than murmured; now it had gone down, and everything was still." This excerpt shows simply how love can lose its touch. How people can love each other so much at one point, but later on that same love has died down. It's almost like Freeman is displaying how we take love for granted. I found Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth" to be more race-incorporated. The way he describes people as "blacker" or "whiter" than others really stood out to me. We have not encountered this perspective of race by an author since we've been in this class. A lot of authors don't wish to step into that gray area, yet Chesnutt does. "'I have no race prejudice,' he [Mr. Ryder] would say, 'but we people of mixed blood are ground between the upper and the neither millstone. Our fate lies between absorption by the white race and extinction in the black.'"