A Critique of Paradise Lost (Domestic Division) by TERRY MARTIN HEKKER Essay

A Critique of Paradise Lost (Domestic Division) by TERRY MARTIN HEKKER - Essay Example But in its efforts to tie in the author’s experience with the greater debate on women’s choices regarding family and career, the article offers nothing really new except probably with the shocking revelation that even women into their 60s, almost forever married by today’s standards could still be dumped by their husbands. Furthermore, some of the arguments pertaining to the debate tend to be contradictory or ambivalent. Hekker succeeds in making a significant emotional pitch for presenting herself as a cautionary tale of a woman who though, already in her four decades of marriage and well into her senior years could still be discarded by her husband with all the emotional and financial hardships of dealing with the aftermath. The article mostly centers on her case alone, and in a passing reference, to those of her two friends who were also divorced by their husbands and which she remarkably noted that among them, â€Å"they’d been married for 110 years†. What makes the article even more poignant is that the author wryly compared herself and her friends to â€Å"outdated kitchen appliances†: â€Å"Like them†, she wrote, â€Å"we were serviceable, low maintenance, front loading, self-cleaning and (relatively) frost free. Also like them we had warranties that had run out. Our husbands sought sleeker models with features we lacked who could execute tasks wed either never le arned or couldnt perform without laughing.† It is indeed quite shocking and repulsive to note that there are men, for example the author’s ex-husband who could treat a marriage of forty long years like it was nothing – although the husband’s reasons for leaving the marriage are not revealed to the readers, the sympathy goes to the author who watched herself struggled financially while her husband gallivanted with his new wife in Mexico. However the article’s main strength which is its emotional appeal of how men could abandon women also