The Experience

4 Pages 981 Words

“The Experience”

By: Jill Tweedie

“Some day my prince will come…” The epigraph of this essay shows a girl’s childlike dreams, and an involved fantasy. Ironically as the essay progresses the reader is shown that the epigraph is but a bitter irony to a woman who found no refuge in love.
In the opening paragraphs Tweedie made reference to the intentions she had by writing “The Experience”. She enlightens the reader to the fact that she is a white, now happily married, heterosexual female, born in one of the most fortunate parts of the globe, America. I would assume fortunate not only for the freedom America offers, but the fact that she had more of a chance to grow as a woman compared to women of other nationalities, which is still a prevalent fact today. Tweedie’s objectives were to show others her mistakes in love so they can learn from them.
The essay uses several allusions to properly portray the happenings in Tweedie’s life. On page 1258 Tweedie is giving insight into the life she led during her first marriage to a man old enough to be her father. In his eyes she was an innocent girl, respectable yet irresponsible, but when her husband was away at work she began to give way to a new side of herself she was just coming to know. In an allusion to Alice in Wonderland Tweedie wrote, “I came across a cake labeled ‘eat me’ and I ate and I grew. Each day, before 5 p.m., I nibbled the other side of Alice’s cake and, in the nick of time, shrank to being a little woman again. I was always afraid I would not make it down in time and my husband would come home and fall back in horror at the monster who had taken over his home, and pushed me out into the big wide world.” What the allusion portrayed was the fact the innocent child had secretly found a way out of the constraints her husband put on her, and threw herself into the arms of other men, which led to multiple affairs.
As time passes by, with Twee...