Blog 2

“The Angel in the House”

“The Angel in the House” by Virginia Woolf was honestly a very confusing story about a women writer. This woman writer talks about the difference between men and women and the way they do things in life. She talks about how easy writing as a job is and shares what she did with the first amount of money she made. She then begins talking about “the angel in the house,” telling about how bad this angel is and how she wants to kill her. It sounds like she was talking about herself almost, like she was talking about a split personality. She says if she didn’t kill this angel it would have plucked the heart out of her writing, so she had to kill her. She says this angel tells her that for a woman to succeed as man would, she must tell lies, this angel of the house keeps coming back even after the woman thought she had killed her. She keeps going back and forth on what a woman is and what’s the difference between success of a woman and man. Towards the end of the story she says that men condemn freedom in women.

“A Homemade Education”

“A Homemade Education” is written by Malcolm X and talks about his self-teaching in prison. He says he commanded attention when he used his words on the streets but when it came to writing in simple English, he wasn’t sure of himself. He talks about learning from reading in prison and even studying dictionaries. He began copying down every single thing that was in a dictionary and then going over the notes. After he started developing writing speed, he began getting the notes down faster and faster until he decided that he was just going to copy the every word in the dictionary. When lights out came, he would still read by what light he had until the guards came by and he had to jump back into bed.

“If on a Winters Night a Traveler…”

Italo Calvino writes this story. He begins the story explaining how one goes about reading, the position you sit, how you have the light, etc. He then goes on talking about how you bought the book, where you got it, and goes on to say nothing about the actual story he wrote.