Discussion Questions 10/7

1. “By the 1940’s Millay’s poetry had fallen out of favor with the modernist innovators and New Critics, who disparaged her work as simplistic and sentimental. The feminist critic Suzanne Clark has analyzed the gendered reasons why Millay’s ‘sentimental modernism’ offended these writers and critics, even though such practitioners of ‘aesthetic modernism’ as James Joyce could also be faulted for sentimentality, but were not.”
   After having read Millay’s poem, do you agree that her writing was simplistic and sentimental? Or do you believe that the critic ism stemmed from her being a woman? Why or why not?
   
2. “If you are a woman you have worn plenty; but you little thought what passed in the heads of these girls as their busy fingers glazed the wire, or prepared the spools for covering them, or secured the tapes which held them in their places.”
   What is the significance of being  called a woman or a girl? Is one recognized as better than the other? Are they in different social classes? Why?
   
3. Franny Fern describes the conditions of the working girls in New York as miserable and cheerless. Do you think Fern is a realist or a pessimist? What evidence do you have in the text that supports this claim?
   
4. In both literary works the man plays an important role in the main character or narrator’s lives. What are some similarities of the man’s role in “Fatal Interview” and “The Working Girls of New York”. What about differences?