Passage From the Text.
"He grabbed hold of me-that dreadful face of his was right on mine-and he began clawing the clothes off my back." (4)
"He gave a great start, put one arm around me and turned his face full towards me-I suppose for just a second he had forgotten how awful one side of it was. his expression, his eyes-well, you're all married women, you know how he looked, the way and able-bodied man thirty-six or -seven, who'd been married and begotten children, would look - for a minute anyhow, if a full-blooded girl of sixteen, who ought to have known better, flung herself at him without any warning, her hair tumbling down, her dress half unbuttoned and hugged him with all her might." (8)
"This time she told it almost dreamily, swaying to and fro in her rocking chair, her eyes fixed on the long slope of snow outside her window." "I might have come out of the cornfield halfway engaged to marry him. Why not? I was old enough, as people thought then. That would have been nature. That was probably what he thought of, in that first instant." (10,11)
"He gave a great start, put one arm around me and turned his face full towards me-I suppose for just a second he had forgotten how awful one side of it was. his expression, his eyes-well, you're all married women, you know how he looked, the way and able-bodied man thirty-six or -seven, who'd been married and begotten children, would look - for a minute anyhow, if a full-blooded girl of sixteen, who ought to have known better, flung herself at him without any warning, her hair tumbling down, her dress half unbuttoned and hugged him with all her might." (8)
"This time she told it almost dreamily, swaying to and fro in her rocking chair, her eyes fixed on the long slope of snow outside her window." "I might have come out of the cornfield halfway engaged to marry him. Why not? I was old enough, as people thought then. That would have been nature. That was probably what he thought of, in that first instant." (10,11)
Response to the Text.
8) An interesting thought that I had after completing "Sex Education" is that maybe none of the versions of Aunt Minnie's story are true. Obviously after reading through the story one is able to see that not every version of the story is completely true after seeing the differences in the way that the memory is told over the three times that Aunt Minnie tells it. My initial thoughts were that the third version of the story must be true because Aunt Minnie seems to take more and more of the blame for her actions as she gets older, and also because she doesn't seem to have a reason to stretch the details of the story now that she is 80 years old. In the first version of the tale, I believe that Aunt Minnie has stretched the truth in order to fit her purpose of scaring her young female audience with the dangers of men. This version almost seems like a more modern boy who cried wolf, but since this is the first version of the story, the narrator takes the story as truth. The second telling of the story has Aunt Minnie changing her purpose from scaring young girls to reinforcing the importance of sex education and awareness. In this version of the story Minnie portrays herself as almost completely ignorant with phrases like, " who ought to have known better,". This young version of Minnie has forgotten the situation that Cousin Malcolm is in; he is single with two daughters that he is raising by himself with a face that is half disintegrated. Here Minnie stretches the truth of her innocence in order to make her point to the other women about the importance of educating their children about sex. After further reviewing the final version of the story I thing that it is also a fantasized version of the real story that fails to tell the whole truth. Before Aunt Minnie even begins telling her story, the narrator describes Minnie as having a dreamy look while staring off into space. Minnie is also around 80 years old at this point in the story, and her husband has passed away. The combination of these two factors leads me to believe that Minnie is overly fantasizing about the appearance and actions of Cousin Malcolm. these factors are why Minnie describes how beautiful Malcolm was and how she could have easily married him without any objection.