subject: The Age Of Lead [print this page] It is said that hindsight is twenty/twenty, that we tend to can only see clearly when looking at the past and seeing the mistakes we have a tendency to could have made. In relationships this can be especially true and we tend to frequently do not see what went wrong until the link is over.
In her short story titled The Age of Lead, Margaret Atwood reviews this concept that solely looking back will we tend to understand our faults. Jane is the protagonist of the story. She may be a woman who relives the link she had with Vincent. Vincent died when he was 42 years old from a mysterious disease that nobody knows about. Jane begins to consider Vincent while watching a television program concerning a man uncovered after several decades frozen in ice and he or she begins to reminisce regarding Vincent. They were lovers in life and Jane wonders about their relationship along and what it meant.
When Vincent was still alive, Janes perspective on their life and relationship together was ideal. Jane Vincent dreamed of a excellent life of freedom where they'd be free to do what they wanted. They craved a life with nothing to hold them down and nothing was protected from them, where they were fully free from judgment, critique and social obligations. They compared their ideal life to a commercial for tampons that they might see. Within the tampon advertisement, the tampons were marketed as "no belts, no pins, no pads, no chafing" which is how they wished their life together to be. But after the death of Vincent, Jane realizes in trying back that this idea of perfect freedom is just an illusion.
Jane now knows that the dreams she shared with Vincent may never be real. She is aware of this because she realizes that there are "consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done. This suggests that she may never very be free because there can continually be one thing to carry her down, a consequence for her actions while she wasn't aware that she had even done anything. This can be seen through the dead body of Vincent. Vincent suffered and died from a mysterious disease that nobody could figure out. During a means, he paid the consequence for one thing he did not apprehend of and there wasn't something he might do regarding it. In contrast to when you smoke and you get lung cancer, you recognize you should not are smoking. Vincent did not apprehend what he did wrong to be sick and he died tragically at a comparatively young age.
When Jane thinks of Vincent, dead, and realizes that his death could be a reflection of her false ideals about freedom. This can be symbolic for the wishes and dreams Jane had with Vincent that were buried with him when he died. If his body is uncovered, it will be rotten and decomposed, and it's as if she is uncovering those lost dreams and this is why she is pondering the life and relationship she had with Vincent.
