“Linoleum Roses” by Sandra Cisneros is a short story about a girl who runs off and gets married at a young age. Sally decides to get married before the eighth grade to escape life at home, but her “escape” is not any better than the life she was living before. Sometimes young people can be ignorant to the world around them, and being young they don’t fully understand they’re consequences that their decisions have.
Sally only substantiates what could happen when people make irrational decisions at a young age. This short story discusses a young girl who takes a chance at freedom only to realize that her decisions may have led her from one prison to another. “Sally says she’s in love, but I think sally did it to escape. ” Sally chose to get married at a young age thinking she would be able to escape from life at home. Sally leaves her life at home for a chance at a new life. Her decision was not thought out carefully because she ends up being in an abusive relationship.
Sometimes her husband gets angry and once he broke the door. ” Sally becomes trapped in an abusive relationship in her own home with a loveless husband. She “escaped” to get away from home and her family, but she only went from one prison to another. Her husband represents a father figure.
Although she lives in her own house, she is still unable to do the things she wants to. She gets told what she can and cannot do. “She sits at home because she is afraid to go outside without his permission. He tells her that she can’t talk on the phone, look out the window and he doesn’t like any of her friends so no one visits her. “She is happy…. ” Sally claims to be happy but just, as her birth father would have had authority over her to tell her what she could and could not do, her father is simply replaced with her husband she so quickly ran off to marry.
Whether you’re an adult, a young adult, or a child, some decisions you don’t analyze can make out to be an unfortunate out come. Sally got married like we know she would, young and not ready but married but just the same. ” Because Sally decided so suddenly and at a young age to get married, she didn’t get to know her husband well enough to now that he was a man she probably didn’t want to marry. At Sally’s age it’s clear her parents didn’t have much control over her and therefore she made the decision to get married. When we have no significant authority looking over us, we have the will to do what it is you want when we want, but in Sally’s case she simply went from one caged home to another.
Sally thinks that it is ok for her to be treated the way she is. She’s so over powered by her some-what independence that she doesn’t fully comprehend what is going on. Sally deals with her emotions by portraying the things in her home to objects that symbolize what life would have been like. “She likes looking at the walls, at how neatly their corners meet, the linoleum roses on the floor, the ceiling smooth as wedding cake. ” Sally can no longer experience what she would have if she had thought out her marriage carefully.
She won’t receive flowers from her husband because he is loveless and she has limitations on certain things like going outside and looking out the window. She didn’t have a traditional wedding cake, and it is every girl’s dream to be in a white puffy wedding dress and have an elegant cake. Sally only knew she wanted to escape, and if that meant marrying a marshmallow salesman in another country where it is legal to get married, then she knew that’s what she had to do. I believe that being in an abusive relationship is unhealthy.
Sometime as young adults are growing up they tend to think they know it all. Trying to escape their life at home at an early age, so that they can feel like they have independence and responsibilities, such as adult do. Sally decided to get married so that she can have the sense of independence and not be coddled by her father. Things don’t always happen the way we expect them to, and sometimes our decisions have an outcome we weren’t expecting. I believe patience is the key in any situation.
Although Sally says that she likes being married, it’s clear that her life is more constrained than she could have imagined. She claims to be happy, but Sally has used the objects in her home to represent something positive out of her marriage. She has created a world within her own home to seek escape from her “prison. ” She has merely left one controlling man, her father, for another, her husband. Things aren’t always what they seem and being young your not experienced enough to make difficult and irrational decisions on your own.
