Mis’ Smith

Description

Albert Bigelow Paine is best known for his work together with famed American author Mark Twain and the four-volume biography he wrote about Twain’s life. Although he was born in Massachusetts, and received his education growing up in Iowa, Paine spent most of his time in Europe, and was given special recognition for his work in France.

Acclaimed novelist, biographer and poet, Paine was also on the Pulitzer Prize Committee, and managed to gain a great deal of recognition globally through a wide variety of genres. He wrote anything from children’s literature to verse and non-fiction. Some of his works, like Hollow Tree Nights and Days or The Tent Dwellers, are still well-known and recognized by critics in literary circles today.

Mis’ Smith is a relatively short poem written by Paine to speak about the general expectations and perceptions that society had about women in his time. It tells the life story of Mis’ Smith, a woman who lives out her entire life doing the things that women typically did, with very few changes to her monotone, stereotypical existence.

The author needs no more than 18 lines to get from Mis’ Smith’s dull life as a housewife to the ultimate reality of her eventual death, which she ends up embracing with the same sense of dread and boredom that she had trained herself to use throughout her entire life.

The poem makes a strong statement on behalf of women and their rights to fulfill their potential, instead of having to go through an existence like Mis’ Smith’s, that seems to show all paths leading to a grim dead-end.

The distinctive language and structure used by Paine in Mis’ Smith, as well as the poem’s other essential details such as rhyme and rhythm, all work together to convey a definite message and help draw attention to the limited perception of the world regarding themes such as the limited existence of women in the 19th century.
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