Rural and Urban Life

This story focuses closely on the differences between rural and urban life, presenting these ways of life with a somber specificity so as to highlight how one’s surroundings can define a person’s life in general. This story was first published in 1904, and so it examines the facts of rural American life in that time and the preceding decades. Much of the American frontier was still relatively unsettled at that time, and thus rural life could be defined by the absence of even the most basic domestic amenities. When Clark exposits upon Georgiana and Howard’s relocation to Nebraska to farm and homestead, Clark states, “They built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions” (103) this line and the following descriptions emphasize the brutal hardship of frontier life, which is the...