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Examples Of Parallelism In The Two Cafeterias

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Throughout history, men and women have been treated differently. This can be seen in the written lines of time, from the age of the Greeks where women stayed at home and cared for the house while the men tended to the fields or fought in the wars, to the times of the first pioneers to land on the great shores of America where women were to conceive children with the men who were in America trading goods with Europe. Virgina Woolf adds to this model with her excerpt "The Two Cafeterias" in which she includes information that analyzes the life of women versus that of men in a society based on their daily meals. She exploits the tools parallelism, selection of detail, as well as her voice to help show and describe the discrepancies between men …show more content…

"No need to hurry" "No need to sparkle" "No need to be anybody but oneself" is just one example parallelism from the excerpt of the men's dinner. In this example, she uses the words "No need" to emphasize that the men have "no need" to go through their meal quickly. This is in comparison to the women's dinner where "Everybody scraped their chairs back," "the swing-doors swung violently," "soon the hall was emptied." This use of parallelism is to emphasize the desolate nature of the women's cafeteria. Woolf includes these pieces of parallelism to show the stark differences in the mood inside the cafeteria room …show more content…

Unlike most authors her voice, by way of her words, really helps to give us an understanding that without wouldn't be possible. The women's meals are made from food retrieved from the "muddy market," where the cooks buy the "sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge," that seemed "Sufficient." Meanwhile, the men were eating "many and various partridges, that "came with all their retinue of sauces and salads," and a taste which was "sharp and the sweet." Woolf clearly uses her voice in both of the given instances as ways to help show how the women's meal as less formal and more casual, while the men's meal is full of delicacies that make the meal have a formal and reserved feel that the women's

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