A comparison of Old Mrs Chundle Essay Example for Free

A comparison of disused Mrs Chundle EssayOld Mrs Chundle is a short flooring set in a village in s come forthhern England. It was scripted by Thomas Hardy between 1880 and 1890. It is a story of a kind popular at that date, a gripping story which is amusing merely also has a extension we can infer with. It is set against the background of country people to whom religion and the clergymen who represented religion were very important. Clergymen were treated with spectacular respect and people attended church services regularly, with the church activities organism a main boil d have got of their lives. This was especi altogethery the case in rural communities. A rebuke of Charity is a short story set in a very different place, a small town in the States in 1949. It concerns the activities of a Camp crowd out female child, which is a kind of Girl Guide, and the sort of group which middle class girls of that sequence would join. These girls would take the aims and activitie s of the Campfire Girls seriously, and the story is about Marian, who is visiting the time-honored in order to acquire points. She needs points to induce a badge.Both stories have a common thread which makes them compar up to(p), although they be so different attitudes to and manipulation of the elderly and to charity, in the sense of caring for the elderly. Both concern the interactions between a do- gooder ( Hardys curate) and Weltys Marian) and senescent ladies (Mrs Chundle and the onetime(a) ladies in the Home) In Old Mrs Chundle we meet the curate, new to the parish, who asks to create a good vox populi, certainly to his superiors. He is a refined young man who sketches he thought he would make a pocket-size water colour sketch.He does non speak in the dialect of the locals which shows how he is genially preceding(prenominal) them and to a greater extent educated than them. He uses patronising phrases such as my good woman. He is not sufficient to on a lower floo rstand what makes a person like Mrs Chundle tick, as he does not have any visualize. The rector, who is from the same(p) social background as the curate, has l atrial auriclened a few things from experience, and warns the curate you should have left the ageing woman alone. The curate cannot understand why anyone would lie about going to church. He is not able to cope when things become difficult or messy and he gives up.When the smell of Mrs Chundles oniony breath blasts into his face from the ear trumpet, such a unpleasant incident as could be expected from an elderly person, is outside of the curates rarefied world. He is disheartened and discouraged easily when faced with a setback. He immediately plans to back out of easeing Mrs Chundle, preferably without telling her. This shows the curate as a rather cowardly person. It would have been amend for him to explain to Mrs Chundle that his idea had not worked, and that he would try to think of something else.He merely wants to help her in a superficial way in order to promote himself as doing the theorise as he thinks it should be done. He cannot cope. He avoids going to see Mrs Chundle after the pipe is removed so as not to have to discuss it with her, and by the time he does go, she is dead. He then feels guilty at having let her down and that she thought so highly of him she put him in her Will, and kneels in prayer. However this is only for some minutes, then he rose, brushed the knees of his trousers and walked on.In other words, he brushed Mrs Chundle away. The persona of him encounter dust off his trousers is a symbol of brushing away the old lady. However, the death of Mrs Chundle upset him his eye were wet and Hardy tells us that the curate was a meek young man. The curate stood still thinking, and possibly he was considering how badly he had handled the situation. Hardy leaves us to wonder whether the curate really does not misgiving about what has happened, or whether during his reflecti ons he has considered discontinue ways of dealing with people in the future.Mrs Chundle is envisioned as an independent and capable old lady she grows and cooks her own food, and runs a comfortable home. She respects the clergy I dont want to eat with my betters. She has never travelled. No one seems to have helped her overcome her deafness and she is pleased by the curates efforts, adequate to put him in he Will. Yet she does have neighbours who bearing about her. The gulf between the social class of Mrs Chundle and the curate is emphasised by the fact that he is never named and she is. Marian, in A Visit of Charity is by contrast a young teenager.She is going to visit some old ladies whom she does not know in a Home, for the purpose of earning Campfire Girl points. She does not really want to do this as she is frightened of what she might find. She only takes a plant to earn an extra point. Her main interest is to stick away as quickly as possible- any old lady will do. She probably feels under pressure from the girls in her group to acquire these points, so as to be the same as all the other Campfire Girls. The nurse at the home is neutral and cold. She is not very responsive to Marion as she has seen Campfire Girls forwards and knows why they have come.She represents the institution she is dress in white (a cold colour) her hair is like a sea wave (the sea is cold and you can drown in it). The phraseology used in the 2 stories helps to set the guessworks and enable the reader to picture the situations and understand the personas. In A Visit of Charity, the scene is set at the beginning as a very cold day. The American term Campfire Girl shows us that the story is set in America and the description of Marions clothes gives us an idea that the time is late 1940s to 1950s.The atmosphere in the story is cold. The Home is on the outskirts of the town, isolated rather than in the cosy centre. The city is said, ironically, to have beautified the Home with down(p) prickly shrubs. The author uses the ideas of hot and cold, light and dark to paint a rather grim forboding picture of the Home. The character of the nurse is given formal language, which symbolizes the low temperature of the Home. She speaks curtly and strangely formallyAquainted. Instead of do you know or have you met.She refers to the plant by its Latin name multiflora cineraria instead of as a elegant plant. She says Visitor to the old ladies, as if this was a command instead of an introduction. The nurses speech is short sharp and sparse which is unfriendly. Her mode of speaking adds to our image of the treatment of the old ladies being a time wasting duty or unpleasant job rather than them being treated as people who need care. The two old ladies have a conversation rather in which they repeat what each other say Did not Did so. Pretty flowers they are not pretty.By use of this kind of repetition, there is emphasis on the pointless(prenominal)ness of the c onversation, and the pattern of the words, pretty and not pretty draws the readers attention to this. One of the old ladies refers to the plant as smellweed and the adjective stink could refer to the ladies or to the Home. During the visit, in the old ladies direction, Marion has difficulty speaking Marion breathed. She also forgot her own name. Yet a sharp contrast is presented when she leaves the Home to go back into her own world, because she shouts a command to the bus device driver wait for me.In the Hardy story, the language often reflects the different age in which the story was indite and uses words or constructions which strike us as old fashioned for example, had not been a workweek passed on his way hither. The curate had a cambric handkerchief. The language used in the speech of Mrs Chundle is strange to us but if read aloud, the patterns reflect her west country dialect. The words given to the curate and to the rector tame only formal language ,similar to the sto ry itself. The language is quite stilted, compared with that in A Visit of Charity, which is to a greater extent similar to todays language.Hardy conveys the speedyth of Mrs Chundle in her dialect, and in the detail of her home a wood fire sounds cosy. Her foods are warm boiled bacon onion stew and they are homely. The rector is put across as a warmer, gentler character than the curate. The rector has been in his job for thirteen years which conveys an older to a greater extent experience man. He chuckles which softens him compared to the curate. Old Mrs Chundle consists of formal old fashioned English, and speech dialect. A Visit of Charity consists of less formal English, because it is American and was written later.The speech is not in dialect. There is more variety of language in Old Mrs Chundle. The old ladies in A Visit of Charity are portrayed as insane and physically repulsive like a sheep bleating. The Home is horrible. It smells like the interior of a clockThe old ladys hands were claws and one of them screamed. The whole place made Marian feel sick. Eventually Marian escape through the heavy door. The whole experience made her scared of old people, since these old ladies were presented as being so unpleasant and frightening.The grimness of the Home is conveyed by the imagery of the heavy door through which Marion escapes (as if from a prison). The picture is completed by the prickly plant outside of the heavy door. If the Home were warm and have and a kindly place, the door would have been described as being made of a warm type of wood and there would have been pretty or attractive plants and flowers as a welcome sign. The imagery of a kind of prison frontage, coupled with the day being cold gives us an impression of the attitudes of the Home.Whilst Mrs Chundle is portrayed as an eccentric deaf old lady, she is shown as real and warm, with a home. She has neighbours and is part of a community. The curate tried to bring her into the church. Howev er, the old ladies in A Visit of Charity are portrayed as mad and disgusting, made more so by their horrible uncaring surroundings and impersonal carers. The two stories show how care of the elderly had changed in the years between when they were written from being reckon within a community to being degraded in a Home, and only visited for the visitors motives.At least(prenominal) the curate, although he does not entirely have Mrs Chundles welfare as his main concern, does do something to help her, but nothing is done for the old ladies in the Home. A further contrast between the two stories is shown in the way we are introduced to the elderly people. In Mrs Chundle, our character is referred to by name frequently and she has a charming way of speaking in the west country dialect dialects often depict warm, simple types of people. In A Visit of Charity the nurse tells Marion there are two in each room and Marion wonders of what are there two.The nurse is actually referring to elde rly people but shows by this expression no respect for them. She also does not greet them by name she rudely announces visitor not yet explaining who the visitor is. This shows how the old ladies in the Home are regarded with contempt and as of low importance, certainly not as proper human beings. The thoughts of Marion likening some of her experiences in the Home to sheep and bleating enhances the impression conveyed to us of the care or other wise of the elderly ladies.One old lady does refer to her room equalise as old Addie but it is not clear whether that really is her name or just claptrap on the part of the old lady. These two stories illustrate the giving of charity in different ways. In the Old Mrs Chundle, the curate tries to help the old lady mostly because it is his job, but she is shown as being in a community that cares. Although the efforts of the curate were short lived and perhaps not from purely selfless motives, the neighbours cared for her and she lived in he r own home and was happy in her own way.The curate was not really cruel to her and she appreciated him more than he deserved. However, in A Visit of Charity no caring character appears and no character gives anything to the old ladies the nurse is doing a pain job and the girl is gaining points for herself. The old ladies get nothing from these two people. It is probably rare for anybody to totally give of themselves for nothing in return, but in these two stories, the character who gains most is clearly Mrs Chundle.The stories illustrate the fact that the best care and concern comes not from paid workers ( curates or nurses) but from the people in the community (in the Hardy story the neighbours, but they could be family). Care of the elderly in the late nineteenth century rural England and immediately post war America is not really comparable. However, there has been for many years a decline in care in communities and the help of neighbours family or religious organisation and an increase in care from social workers medical workers and paid homes.This is a trend in societies in the western world, where the elderly are increasingly thought of a nuisances (the presidential term does not want to increase the Old Age Pensions as it thinks the money can be better spent, and hospitals do not want to treat old people as some doctors find it more cost effective if the old person dies) rather than as assets to be respected for their knowledge and experience. The contrasts in attitudes to and care of the elderly in the two stories studied reflect these trends.