Blog Entry #4

In the story "The Tenth of January", the author Elizabeth Phelps tells us a story of a young woman named Aseneth--Sene for short. Sene works in a factory with several other women and is much different from the other girls due to her physical disabilities. "her neck and shoulders were closely muffled... she wore a faded scarlet hood which heightened the pallor of what must at best have been a pallid face. It was a sickly face, shaded...it [her mouth] would have been a womanly, pleasant mouth, had it not been crossed by a white scar, which attracted more of one’s attention than either the womanliness or pleasantness". Many of the girls in the factory know that Sene is not like them and therefore do not treat her with the same respect as they treat other coworkers and people in their town. "Del shook back her curls; 'who do you suppose would ever marry you?'" Not only do the girls treat Sene with disrespect, but so do the younger children in her town and many of the older people don't pay attention to her because of her deformities. "She remembered stealing out at last, after many days, to the grocery round the corner for a pound of coffee. 'Humpback! humpback!' cried the children,—the very children who could leap and laugh." Elizabeth Phelps makes a point about society and how they treat people based on their differences. We can pair this contextual evidence along with the gloomy, dark setting of the story, seeing Sene struggle for the love and attention from her secret love, and think about the tragic ending of her death to see that Phelps has created a strong theme of discrimination and social injustice during this story, which unsurprisingly matches up with this time in society.