Stereotypes In Phyllis Mcginley's View From A Suburban Window

Diction and Content Overturn Stereotype Through its diction and structure combined with its content, “View From A Suburban Window” claims that the normality of life as a suburban mother isn’t miserable as it is thought to be. McGinley uses diction and structure combined with content to overturn the idea of a stereotypical stay at home mother. McGinley uses diction to overturn the stereotypes of the stay-at-home mother. Phyllis McGinley writes that she “consider[s]” her life. That word means that she contemplates, surveys, scrutinizes, her life. In the same line, McGinley says that her light is spent. By using the word “spent,” she means that her life is expended, consumed, used up by “papering shelves or saving for the rent/Or prodding grapefruit…/Or

She describes how she could have been in “some tall town.” The word tall means high, lofty, and decent, meaning the place she could have been in could be great (“Tall”). She speaks of how she could have been living “unfettered.” This implies that her life could have been unrestrained by

It seems to begin as an Italian sonnet, but then seems to shift into an English sonnet structure. However, the rhyme scheme reveals that it does not fit especially well into either structure. A normal Italian sonnet has the rhyme scheme of an octave rhyming abbaabba followed by a sestet rhyming cdecde or cdcdcd. An English sonnet normally rhymes abab cdcd efef gg with three quatrains and a couplet. McGinley’s sonnet rhymes abab cdcd efgefg. It seems to begin with two quatrains as an English sonnet does, but the content of those eight lines form a cohesive octave. “View From A Suburban Window” then goes on as if to form a third octave rhyming efef, but instead it forms a sestet with a rhyme scheme of efgefg, the same as an Italian sonnet’s cdecde, but with different letters. However, these six lines’s content does not form a cohesive sestet. Instead, the content forms a quatrain and a couplet as if it was an English sonnet even though it doesn’t rhyme as