Inexperience vs. Experience - What part did Love play in It?
When one stumbles into a new experience, and he passes through it with or without flying colors, his "Inexperience" is essentially changed to some form of "Experience," whether good or bad. When love is involved in this experience, the learned lesson is remembered forever, for the love that is used as a means of communication is attempted in the real world, and is able to change that person's inexperience for life. No matter the result, one channels his love as a sort of teaching, for himself and others to use as an example; to change their green and callous inexperience to a battlehardy and somewhat matured real experience. In David Updike's short story "Summer," and Flannery O'Conner's short story "Good Country People," this idea of a conflict of experience vs. inexperience is woven within the fabric of each story. In their respective stories, Homer overcomes his inexperience when he meets his first love in the form of a beautiful girl, Sandra, at his best friend's lake house, and Hulga is "graced" by the presence of her first experience of love before it takes a turn for the worst. No matter what the outcome is, each protagonist undergoes a new and exciting feeling that will change the rest of their lives. They grow and ma
Although they now harbor juxtaposed feelings towards love, both Homer and Hulga have learned much from their heartrendering position. However, she is not upset when she discovers the first kiss is an unpleasant experience: The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenaline in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain. The whole aura of Bible selling seemed to contrast her beliefs held in mind, yet she felt the beginnings of a strange attraction towards this affectionate man. Her inexperience before the "revelation" is the same as her inexperience after it, if not worse. The salesman can now smell her stupidity, and retorts with his own "philosophical" response: "'you ain't so smart. He will never be the same from this experience, and since Homer's love has been returned for sure, and he can go home knowing he will never be the same again. Earlier in the story she seemed to regard love as some that was a fallacy, yet now, as somewhat of a relationship begins to develop, a feeling starts to churn in her body as she becomes both excited and thoughtful about her meeting with the affectionate Bible salesman. Even her mother feels sorry for her many times: "She thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times" (O'Conner 805). In essence, Homer's inexperience in the pages of love has now been torn out, and a new page about experience will be written in the future chapters of his book of life. He would watch her, hear the distant door slam, the shower running in the far corner of the house" (Updike 48). She refuses to conform to ideals, and is portrayed as acting like a rude, ugly, and bloated child inside and out of the story. But to Homer's surprise Sandra's foot remained, and he felt, in the faint sensation of exerted pressure, the passive emanation of its warmth, a distant signal of acquiescence (Updike 51). She spends her days reading from books of science and philosophy, which makes her mother very upset: "These words had been underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs. Yet she seems to be indifferent to this one-sided "courtship": "On the tennis court she was strangely indifferent to his heroics. Hopewell is absolutely elated to think that someone on this earth, a good country person, could have the exact same circumstance as her own daughter, who is a bird that refuses to use its wings because it does not want to venture out into the real world.
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Country People,
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Acceptance Essays
