Summary Of The Dinner Party By Mona Gardner

The Dinner Party by Mona Gardner was very interesting. You don’t have to scour for a long time to find out the message behind it. This story is about how women don’t always have to be the ones who are in distress. For example, in this story they talk about how a woman should only scream when she finds herself in any danger, that she shouldn't take action. According to the colonel the man is the one who should always take control in situations like these and the woman should just sit behind and watch. When I first saw the tittle of this short story, I didn’t realize how important it was. In colonial times woman were treated as lower than men, like we were just there to clean up their mess, but we aren’t. Woman have a purpose and it’s a lot more than men gave us credit for back then.In this generation of people we are so lucky not to have sexism as often as it was back then. Now, women of all races can show themselves for who they really are and get credit for the things they do.

Mona Gardner also used the foreign American who knew very little about their culture to teach us something. The American didn’t know much about this culture yet he knew that milk in a bowl means that their is a snake joining the party. Unlike Mrs. Wynnes, the American’s first impulse is to jump back and warn the others, but every decent man knows this will just alert the snake and cause it to attack. Instead he decides to play a game and told everyone not to move. This witty move conveniently worked. The cobra was caught and everything returned to normal. My favorite part was the fact that in the end he started to wonder how the hostess knew to put the milk there. She faintly answered by saying that it started to crawl across her foot. I know for a fact that if anybody else were to have been in her position they would have jumped scarily which would have only made the cobra