Reader's response Literature & Language Essay (Essay Sample)

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After reading “Rural Hours” by Susan Cooper, I was fascinated by the way she used natural setting to express her attitudes towards domestic morality. She expands her ideas of domestic reality to accommodate a rural community as well as the natural environment. Additionally, her vision of community, made me see a home as a place that cannot be separated from the worlds nature. Cooper shed light to a rural community where for labor to function properly there must be joint efforts. Besides, her sensitivity to the natural environment is quite evident, her domestic scenes are well placed in the context of the rural environment. What makes rural hours interesting and different from other texts are the unsaid “nothing removes the weeds” (Perrin 2013). Furthermore, coopers rural hours give a message on changing the environment in an organized manner without disregarding a sense of the community established by the forefathers. However, her environmental message forces me as a reader to collect other information on my own because some of the content appears so distanced in the journal. My opinion is that her indirect writing method is based on the social aspect of her writing.
The author’s reluctance to evaluate the settlement process right away, reflects on her anxiety of influence. What impresses me is her imaginative and spiritual ability to combine religion and environmental conservation. Besides, the presence of her father and grandfather in the settlement of Cooperstown area overshadows the text. Thereafter, she translates her grandfather’s influence into her writing when she praised the “advanced state of civilization in this decade” (Perrin 2013). Lastly, her warnings take on a prophetic quality, throughout she keeps referring to reduced wildlife, loss of plants and wasting of lands. She adds the voices of the reader by including them in the narrative voice “we”, cautioning them of the weed by using the term “just curse”. In the end, her conclusion was that a man has power not over nature, but also the covenant demands that man should take care of it.