Tyler Szabo's Event Reflection 1

            Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”, Jill McDonough’s “Accident, Mass Ave.”, Fraces E. W. Harper’s “Learning to Read”, and Fr. Peter-Hans Kovenbach’s “The Service of Faith and Promotion of Justice in Jesuit Higher Education” can be used to view Ariel Dorfman’s Death of a Maiden in a different light and vise versa.  The way the people dealt with the issues within the poems can highlight pieces of the play and show common issues throughout history.  Death of a Maiden described a woman whom was raped and tortured by a doctor under the dictatorship and her attempt to cope with this tragic event.  When a doctor comes to the house after helping her husband she believes it was the man who raped her and she puts him on “trial”.  During this she tricks him by giving him false information, which he corrects, thus she believes this as proof and kills him.  In the end this does not cure her paranoia and trauma.  Though this is my interpretation, the play is written in a way that the doctor may not be guilty and may not die.  The issue in the “Mending Wall” involves a man who challenges the belief that walls make better neighbors.  This relates to the play in that instead of being thankful to the doctor for assisting her husband, she becomes paranoid and eventually decides that he is the doctor of the past.  If she were to break down the walls that bind her, not just with the doctor but also with her husband, then she would be able to cope, to a degree, with her past and become much more healed than if she were to have killed him, as seen when his ghost haunts her at the end.  In “Accident, Mass Ave.” the two woman followed social norms in mentally striking each other and going at each other’s throats and realize in the end that no damage was done, thus they make amends.  This is indicative of the main character and her husband’s relationship, as they are always making quips at each other to win this invisible fight, yet in the end they realize their fighting was over nothing and promise to love each other despite their downfalls.  “Learning to Read” shows how determination and lack of caring about what other think can allow you to achieve great heights along with the fact that wisdom breaks chains.  If anything this is the opposite of what happened in the play as the wisdom of his guilt did nothing to break her from the chains of the past.  This can be; however, related to her husband who believes that he can heal the scars of the past dictatorship by finding out the truth of the past crimes of the government without taking revenge and it supposedly does help many people in the end.  Finally, “The Service of Faith and Promotion of Justice in Jesuit Higher Education” shows that out of something broken, like the Franciscan Church in modern Silicon Valley, something can bloom from it.  This can be related in a way that is not always thought about in the play, by this I mean the fact that through the husband the country in question was able to take a broken country and bind the people together through love and the truth in order to progress the country farther than it has ever been.