Shiloh” by Bobbie Ann Mason represents a change over the course of a young woman’s life. Bobbie Ann Mason uses Norma Jean to help clarify that relationships can fail and that roles do change in today’s relationships. Mason uses the character Norma Jean to give her audience an idea how times have changed as well as people. Norma Jean, who was forced to marry at a young age, sees a new path as the modern days draw near. Norma Jean is a woman who has very low confidence, very dependent on her mother, her husband, and is motivated to change her life. As time passes, she begins to change from being dependent on everyone to a woman who is very independent and gains confidence in herself. Norma Jean has many traumatic events in her life. At the age of eighteen, she was pregnant and was forced to marry Leroy, the baby’s father, because of “southern traditions”. When the baby, Randy, was four months and three days, Randy died of sudden infant death s!
             yndrome, as Mable thinks Randy died of neglect. As they took Randy to the emergency room, the doctor told them, “It just happens sometimes” (Mason 48). Here she was married to a man that she made a mistake with and lost the baby that brought them together. What would happen to them now? Would they stay together or would they go their own ways? On top of dealing with her husband, and the death of her child, Norma Jean’s mother is very controlling over her life. Norma Jean is often felt intimidated by her mother. When her mother visits, “she inspects the closets and then the plants, informing Norma Jean when a plant is droopy or yellow” (Mason 48). When Norma Jean was thirty-four, her mother caught her smoking. Mabel does not like the fact that her daughter is smoking and she brings up a story about a dog that chewed the baby’s legs and is on trail for neglect. Later that night when Mabel leaves, Norma Jean tells Leroy “...