Irony In Minerva Jones

In the poem “Minerva Jones,” written by Edgar Lee Masters, the main character, Minerva Jones, suffered many hardships throughout her life. Based on the poem, I learned that Jones was the town’s poetess, was overweight, had a cockeye, and walked with a limp. In addition to this, she was raped and died when getting an illegal abortion. In the poem, she shares two important relationships with “Butch” Weldy and Dr. Meyers. The actions that Weldy took would later have a domino effect on Jones’ life. Weldy was her rapist and impregnated Jones. Because of this, Dr. Meyers was later responsible for aborting the fetus, and ultimately Jones’ death. In a small-town, women were expected to settle down, have a family, and obey their husbands. Events as described in the poem were a taboo during the early 1900s. For instance, abortion was illegal in this poem. When the story got out that Jones had gotten an abortion, it caused a whole scandal in the town, which would in turn affect many people. Furthermore, small-town American culture did not experience such

Church,” written by Edgar Lee Masters, the speaker was an attorney for a big-city insurance company who controlled whether a person was guilty or not. He would use this to his advantage quite often. Because he had all this control in the justice system, he became very successful as an attorney and was even praised after death. In the poem, he refers to Butch Weldy as “the crippled,” considering he was in a horrific accident at the factory he worked at. However, Weldy did not see any type of compensation for this accident, for this was the way Church would make his fortune. The lawyer died a bad man, knowing that his corruption would affect people’s lives for the worst. But this didn’t matter to him, he only cared for his financial stability. The horrible decisions made by Church would ultimately lead him to suffer in his grave. His morals changed once it was too late to fix the problems he had