Author Comparison

Subject and section Professor’s Name Date Cross-Cultural Dialogues: Contrasting Trethewey’s and Maupassant’s Exploration of Human Nature While the gap is over a century and boundaries are wide apart, both Natasha Trethewey and Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant have deep insights into human nature and social structures through their writings. Trethewey, an American poet and former U.S. Poet Laureate born in 1966, develops tension between racial identity and social mores reflected in the emotional poem "White Lies." On the other hand, Maupassant, an esteemed 19th-century French writer, mocks social climb and vice of hypocrisy in his famous short story "The Necklace. " Natasha Trethewey's biography provides her as a child of the American South, a mixed-race descendant during the time of the Civil Rights Movement, which strongly influenced her thematic emphasis (Kuiper). In "White Lies," she demonstrates internal tensions and ambiguities related to racial identity, which is seen in the following lines, "I could easily tell the white folks / that we lived in a nice part of town / not in the pink and green / shotgun section along the tracks" (Trethewey lines 7-11). Her writing blends melodic beauty and cutting realism, choosing imagery that is often dense and easy to misinterpret. Her writing often requires diving deeper to uncover all its nuance and emotional intensity. The elitist Maupassant, born in 1850, found his forte in the incisive and strictly limited genre of short stories (Turnell and Dumesnil). “The Necklace” represents his genius of using dramatic irony and social criticism as prominently as we find in the former's downfall due to her attempts to get rich beyond her abilities. The author eloquently expressed this: "She suffered from the poorness o...