We all love stories because they deliver information and ideas, and get us motivated and entertained; especially through family story, we are able to view the perspectives of our ancestors and learn and broaden our cultural perspectives. Steve Zeitlin, Amy Kotkin, and Holly Baker in “Family Stories” describe family stories as a “ ‘family engineered canal’ through which culture flows from one generation to the next” (19). One short story that exemplifies this cultural shift is Dorothy Canfield’s book, “Sex Education.” In “Sex Education”, Aunt Minnie retells her story to her niece, the narrator, about the time she almost gets raped in the cornfields. Each time though she tells the story, the motivation for the story changes as do her sexual feelings in the story due to the culture shift. Through the plot, characterization, and cultural allusions, Canfield in …show more content…
After the second time she tells the story, it has been about fifty years since the incident. This time though, while talking with a sewing circle of new mothers, Aunt Minnie says, “and anyhow, you don’t tell’em the truth about sex (I was astonished to hear her use the actual word, taboo to women of her generation)” (788). Canfield highlights hear the growth of Aunt Minnie since the first time the narrator has seen her. Aunt Minnie is now rather comfortable and resolute talking about the dangers than before when she was sort of frightened and embarrassed the first time she tells the story. Another cultural change that leads to Aunt Minnie’s change in views about sexuality is the different styles of parental teaching about the dangers of sex. When she was a child, parents frightened the kids about the cornfields, but however never taught the kids what to do if they got lost: “That was the way they brought young people up in those days, scaring them out of their wits about the awfulness of getting lost, but not telling them a thing about how not to get