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Walking Across Egypt: A Young Elder - Online Essays

Walking Across Egypt: A Young Elder

Mattie Rigsbee is the main character in Clyde Edgerton’s southern style novel, Walking Across Egypt. Mattie is a seventy-eight year old widow with two middle-aged children. Living alone in a small house, she makes sure that everything is taken care of. She cooks, cleans, mows the lawn, and takes up numerous responsibilities with the church. She is a very caring person with many friends and a family that loves her dearly. At the time this novel takes place, Mattie is at a turning point in her life. Confusion disturbed her, because the things that people are telling her are not the words that she is ready or willing to hear. Although begins to display some signs of aging and her ...

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toilet seat with mouthwash rather than with alcohol. And again displays it as she falls through the bottomless rocking chair. Later she displays physical inability when she asks her son Robert about helping with some yard work, which she had always taken care of before.
“I’m too old to keep a dog,” (20) she says to the dogcatcher as he is leaving with a brown fice that showed up on her doorstep. “Besides, I’m slowing down,” she says to her son during lunch.
The stereotypes of the elderly are influencing Mattie’s life. She is telling herself not to do things because of her age whether or not she is physically able to do them, simply because people associate age with inability and dependence upon others. Her family and friends are expecting and encouraging this dependence.
Elaine and Robert, Mattie’s two unmarried children, along with other family and friends, are encouraging her to be what they expect a seventy-eight year old woman to be. They talk about how she needs to get ...

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 10/20/2008 12:39:52 AM
Category: Book Reports
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 944
Pages: 4

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