‘And Women Must Weep’

(Henry Handel Richardson 1931)

1. Punctuation / Sentence Structure

2. Imagery
3. Semantic Field of Eyes

- ‘seem to be coming…’ à Ellipsis shows the palpable embarrassment of the narrator

for her through the punctuation (add this to the () embarrassment point)
- Narrator is becoming more intensely focalized as the story progressive
- ‘white shirts’ à imagery of this shows that men are idolized as pure and society
gives them the expectation to be perfect
- As opposed to our protagonist Dolly, what is happening to the men is not the same
• Dolly moves from pink to red (loses innocence)
• Men are portrayed as more innocent and untainted (white)
- Subversion of gender roles à men showing their true emotions is shown as
powerful while women don’t and are forced to oppress their emotions
• Men are easily frightened / fickle
• Women are more stoic
- Title: satirical and ironic
• Men barely work but women are the ones who work hard to plaster fake smiles
and dress up
• Women work more than men in the story, and they are also weeping
- ‘Eyes
- fixed on them; but theirs always got away’ à optic semantic field
• Even in sight, men had more agency and control
• Adaptation due to the patriarchy
- ‘Flitted past’ à men are like bees choosing a flower to pollinize moving from one to
the other
- Sentence pacing varies between short and long
- As her emotions gets worse, so does her dress à crumpling (emotional state is
reflected in physical state)
- ‘Hot hands’ à tactile and visual imagery
• Aspirant ‘h’ alliteration
• Tired and upset
• Face got hot à spread to the rest of her body to her hand
- External reflected by emotions à her individuality breaks out here out of the façade
- Dress à symbol of her ideologically being held back by society
- While in the middle of society’s hub this causes her distress (dissonance)
- Shame is like some kind of disease
- Repetition of ‘it wasn’t fair’
- Use of exclamation
- ‘You and your’ à reader is being directly addressed because the narrator has to
clearly criticize the issues she is talking about
- ‘Dug deeper’ à dental harsh alliteration (foreshadows disruptive reaction)
- ‘Head hard’ à aspirant alliteration
 - Rejection has made her angry
- Leap year dance à symbolic of how rarely women have a chance
- Wished to be old to escape
- Black implies she is a widow
- Dolly wants to be alone
- ‘Counted days behind her’ à suicidal (contrast between start feeling and end
feelings
- Feelings and society is choking her
- ‘Heavy as lead’ à weight of her feelings
- Poisoned by her feelings (lead)
- She was pretty at the start but is now unkept
- ‘Dreadfully curious’ repetition
- Verbsàripped, crushed, and tore (semantic field of violence)
- ‘She didn’t takeà the blame is assigned fully to her
- ‘shame’à repetition
- ‘it wasn’t my fault, wasn’t my fault’à all repetitions are linked in this story in a
certain way due to their being one main idea
- ‘dancing’, ‘laughing’, and ‘talking’ (positive semantic field)
- ‘could crie no more’à suffocated in society
SYMBOLS
- Ballàinstitutional patriarchy
- Dressà women’s rights
- Aunty Chaà force of the patriarchy
- Mirroràartificiality (facade)