It's chapter 11 of The Bronze Bow and Daniel's grandfather has passed away. His friend Simon approaches him and asks him to run his shop while he's away following Jesus. Simon's generous offer presents Daniel with a couple of problems. First of all, his fiercely independent spirit instinctively rebels against the idea of being tied down to a specific place for long. Secondly, with his grandfather now having passed away, he must take care of his sister Leah, someone he regards as being rather weak and feeble.
With great reluctance, Daniel agrees to accept Simon's offer. Once he and Leah have moved into Simon's house, he divides up the chores according to traditional gender-based lines. Daniel is very much a young man of his time; he has a deeply chauvinistic notion of what women and girls can or can't do. His attitudes lead him to underestimate Leah; to him, she's just this weak little thing who's almost scared of her own shadow.
Yet Leah proves Daniel wrong, and in a number of different ways. First of all, she surprises him by showing herself to be a highly-skilled weaver of cloth. Not just any old cloth, either; rich, finely-woven cloth that's in great demand by a wealthy widow who's been buying it from Leah for years.
If that shock weren't enough, Daniel is astounded by his sister once more as she shows him her remarkable baking skills. Whereas the hapless Daniel flounders with the dough, Leah knows what to do straight away. And as with the cloth, the end-product is pretty good. She bakes a mean loaf, does Leah.
She also knows how to tend a vegetable garden. Once again, poor Daniel is completely out of his depth, pulling up perfectly good vegetables as well as weeds. Fortunately, his little sister's on hand to help him out. With no small degree of shame and embarrassment, Daniel realizes just how much he's underestimated his sister, how completely ignorant he's been of all her many talents. Recognizing Leah's true worth forces him to confront his prejudices and accept that there are many things that girls can do just as well as boys, and in some cases even better.
Friday, September 21, 2018
What three things is Daniel amazed to discover that Leah knows how to do?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
Hello! This expression is already a sum of two numbers, sin(32) and sin(54). Probably you want or express it as a product, or as an expressi...
-
Macbeth is reflecting on the Weird Sisters' prophecy and its astonishing accuracy. The witches were totally correct in predicting that M...
No comments:
Post a Comment