现代大学英语精读6第二版参考用书.docx

1、现代大学英语精读6第二版参考用书Unit 8Housewifely ArtsMegan Mayhew BergmanAdditional Background InformationWhat is this story about? One answer is simply that it is about love. Because of the protagonists strong maternal love for her son, Ike, she worries about genetic weaknesses she might have passed on to him“can

2、cer genes, hay fever, high blood pressure, perhaps a fear of math”, plus being undersized for his age making him an easy target for bullies. Being a single parent, she knows that she is all her son has. She takes care to shelter him from bad examples and possible harm. The desire to be a good mother

3、, to help her child grow up happy, healthy, and productive is so intense that she is sometimes haunted by nightmares. The experience of parenting her child gradually makes the protagonist more aware of her relationship with her mother: Will you love me forever? I think to myself. Will you love me wh

4、en Im old? If I go crazy? Will you be embarrassed by me? Avoid my calls? Wash dishes when you talk to me on the phone, roll your eyes, lay the receiver down next to the cat?These were exactly the things she did to her mother. Loving her son, she finally realizes how much her parents also loved her.

5、Her fathers love was easier to understand. He tried his best to give her opportunities in life, but when she failed in the year at a private college, which he had funded for her with considerable difficulty, he did not judge or reproach her. She loved her father, but she regarded her mother as cold

6、and harsh and fought constantly with her, reacting like her former self, the rebellious teenager, being neither mature nor compassionate in looking after her mother in old age, understanding her, forgiving her weaknesses, and loving her.But now that her mother is dead, she begins increasingly to mis

7、s her, and the decision to drive nine hours with her son for the sake of hearing her mothers voice again through the imitations of Carnie, the African parrot, shows how much she needs this connection. “I realize how badly I need a piece of my mother. A scrap, a sound, a smellsomething.” She knows sh

8、e has not been a good daughter, and the parrot her mother loved and which she hated so much, always seemed to come between them. Now, however, Carnie has become her only avenue to the kind of memory she craves. But the bird does not give her that satisfaction, remaining completely silent. Perhaps it

9、 could not forgive her unkind treatment of it in the past.Nonetheless, the journey proves successful. In the tradition of the American “road trip”, another way of thinking about this story, the protagonist does not merely make an actual journey with her son in a car, during which various things happ

10、en along the way, she also makes a personal, emotional journey in which she achieves a measure of enlightenment. It is a typical feature of “road trip” journeys that they teach the characters things about themselves that they did not previously know. Driving toward home, they stop at the house in wh

11、ich the protagonist grew up- “a deserted, plain house for plain folks” I lead him to the back of the house, down the hallway which still feels more familiar to me than any I knowI remove the valances Mom made in the early eighties, dried bugs falling from the folds of the fabric into the sink below.

12、 These are the things with which she made a home. Her contributions to our sense of place were humble and put forth with great intent, crafts which took weeks of stitching and unstitching, measuring, cutting, gathering. I realize how much in the home was done by hand and sweat. My father had laid th

13、e carpeting and linoleum. Mom had painted the same dinner chairs twice, sewed all the window treatmentsI scan the kitchen and picture Mom paying bills, her perfect script, the way she always listed her occupation with pride: homemakerRecalling how her parents had created a home that she describes to

14、 Ike by saying, “This was a beautiful house”, she understands that her parents were not demonstrative people, not people who talked about love, but people who had shown it to her in all their actions and these things they had made. And here, also, she finds the clear recollections of her mother that

15、 she had been seeking: “ Now I can hear my mother everywherein the kitchen, in my bedroom, on the front porch” This visit also helps the protagonist to make a major decision around which one part of the plot is constructed: should she and Ike move to Connecticut, a state to which her firm has offere

16、d to transfer her? Ike is reluctant. “What if we live here forever? He asked. People used to do that, I said. Lived in one house their entire life. My mother, for instance”In revisiting the house of her childhood, she has grasped the profound sense of home that growing up in this single place has given her. She concludes: “Together, we can make a solid grilled cheese, prune shrubs, clean house. Together, maybe were the housewife this house n