After long debate and much revision I have decided the heart of the story “The Leaving” is change. The story mainly revolves around Elizabeth, a mother desperate for change in her life and her daughter Sylvie. When Elizabeth is described in the beginning of the story she is downtrodden but strong. She lacks the necessary confidence to make the change until the day she and Sylvie make the long walk from their farm house into town, starting the fire under the pig so to speak.

Elizabeth’s husband, Lester, was a big obstacle for change of any type. Lester and Elizabeth both were raised in the traditional household of the day where the woman stayed in the home and cooked, cleaned and raised the children and the man went out and worked. He was very set in those ways. He beat her; both physically and mentally he tore any respect she could stand to gain from her children away from her. Treating Elizabeth as nothing more than a possession or a dog rather than a wife and equal partner. Instead of her name he referred to her as ‘woman’ and he was never kind to her from what the story showed. He used beating and this mental abuse as a control method because despite his massive size when it came to his wife he knew that given an opening he wouldn’t be able to control his fiery headed wife and would lose his power over her. He was insecure about this and his authority in his own home and was not a good role model to his and Elizabeth’s four sons; Jem, Daniel, Ira and Bernard. Nearing the end of the story we realize that all 5 males in the house had been raised as “little men” from when they were very young. They had not been taught to care for themselves as women would have learned from their mothers. Elizabeth had not taken the time to teach her sons how to do their own laundry or how to clean andcook for themselves, instead taking it upon herself to it for them and not ever letting them learn how to do it. (“How would Pa and my brothers cook their dinner? How would they make their beds? Who would they complain to after a hard day? Who would fetch the eggs, the mail, the water, the wood, the groceries? Who would wash their cuts? It was unconceivable to me that they could survive long without us”) and thus they walked all over Elizabeth and Sylvie, the youngest child.
In the story it says that Elizabeth left school in grade five perhaps because her family was so poor that either they could no longer afford to send her or that she had to go out and work to help provide for her family. She was stuck in a circle of poverty. Born poor, raised poor, married poor to a poor man, lived poor and stayed poor. And despite this poverty and at her early age having the chances to go out and make something of herself that didn’t require an education Elizabeth stayed with Lester. After all she knew she had no other real options for a husband especially at the ripe age of 45 and after having 5 children. Leaving him would guarantee that she would probably never find another man that would take