In the personal essay, The Princess and The Pea, the author Vivian Gornick addressees her life as an unrealistic fairy tale. She desires more than what she already has and all of these circumstances leads her to delusions. Overall, she demonstrates selfishness in her everyday life as well as towards others. Her confusion with happiness and love is another condition that affects Gornick. The message of this essay is to point that the speaker of the story did not asset with a person that will meet her same identical characteristics on the way she expressed herself to others.
Gornick’s anxiety on obtaining more than what she already possessed assembled her to confront with obstacles that cruelly made her despair herself from delusions. For example, in the essay the speaker quotes, “Either way, my friends and I saw ourselves as variations of one or the other. The seriousness of our concerns lay in our preoccupation with these two fictional women. Their destinies were prototype of what we imagine our own to be. ” Basically, this example demonstrates how the speaker daydreams herself as being Dorothea Brooke and Isabel Archer, two unrealistic women.
Dorothea exposed herself with pride devotion to standards. As well as Isabel, she transmitted herself with emotional ambitions. As you can analyze the characteristics of these two women, Isabel had a more fitting temperamental connection with Gornick. Moreover, Gornick’s selfishness makes her loose the loving partner that comforts her. This unwanted love makes her feel lonely once again. Just like she cites in the story, “Now I stood in the shower stricken, spots of grief dancing in the air before my eyes, the old loneliness seeping back in. Who is he? I thought. He is not the right man.
I thought. If only I had the right one. A year later we were divorced. ” In addition to, the speaker would only care for herself. Without having notice that her husband loved her and proved his love to her by satisfying her with all her desires. After manipulating him for many years and not found the perfect characteristic that will prove him an ideal man, she just abolish him like someone would get rid of garbage. Thus, life is not a matter of choices in this world and no one is perfect. Gornick’s way of loving was not quiet affecting Gerald and making him satisfy with his relationship.
Her confusion with happiness and love led her to mistake Gerald’s way of loving. Gornick states on her essay, “I knew, of course that a significant life included real work- work done out of the world –but now I seem to imagine that an Ideal Partner was necessary in order to do the work. With the right man at my side, I posited, I could do it all”. When you love someone you make them happy and when you receive love you are happy as well. The only specific reason why Gornick stayed after Gerald was to find the man that would helped her in all the work that she must carry out through the cycle of her life.
To conclude, Gornick’s way of daydreaming things caused her to retain her individuality from having an epiphany on her life. Being self indulgence and not approaching on the opportunity that life was offering her made her loose the loving partner that was just adjustable to her. Gornick’s disorientation on happiness and love tracked her on misinterpret Gerald’s love and she took advantage of this by treating Gerald as a puppet. These sentimental feelings made the speaker dainty and unsure on the right men for her that would fit her categorizing ambitions.
