The Drover's Wife

A passage from the Britain, Empire, and a Wider World that stuck out the most to me was "The Drover's Wife" by Henry Lawson. I loved how this short story really portrayed an independent woman and the hardships she has to endure but overcoming what she knew she was capable of achieving. The story also gave me this anticipation that something bad was going to happen to this strong woman but nothing like that happened at all which gave it a bittersweet ending. I like that the story had a conflict inside a conflict. The external conflict was definitely the Drover's wife ability to catch and kill this snake while internally, she faced the difficulty of staying strong for being left alone by her husband to raise her children. We as the readers see the main conflict while we are told stories of her heroic act. The Drover's wife thought about how she overcame a fire and a flood all by herself which gives us a foreshadow that she can easily defeat this snake. The little stories that we are told by the narrator through the Drover's wife point of view are the internal conflicts that she faced and the snake was about to be one of them. I say the ending was bittersweet because while she defeated the snake, she cried to the fact that she is really alone and she had to stay strong for her children. It was very sad to read the last part because her oldest son came to realization of how complicated his mother's life was and how throughout the story he kept wanted to be the man and kill the snake but she wouldn't let him. He already realized in the very beginning of the story of the hardships his mother went through.
I love this story a lot because it definitely portrayed how a strong independent woman is. It reminds me very much of my own Mother and Grandmother. Even if a man was present in their lives, I always felt that they were very strong and did all the duties a man is supposed to do. Now a day women are more and more independent and they depend less on a man and I see that this story was for women like the Drover's wife.