Review of "A Simple Matter of Hunger" and Plotting

     

    In "A Simple Matter of Hunger" by Sharon Oard Warner, the main character Eleanor is faced with a new version of motherhood while fostering a baby girl afflicted with the AIDS virus. Reflecting on the inner conflicts that Eleanor faces requires a bit of knowledge regarding the rhetorical context outside the narrative itself. In the story the AIDS virus appears to be feared by the nurses and other mothers in the hospital despite the fact that it is known not to be transmittable to them in the sense they think it is. This information can place it in the 90s perhaps when the virus is still culturally feared, but outside the group it had been afflicting primarily which was queer individuals. Drugs had been developed to prevent it as much as possible, but Jancey's biological mother was in the hospital, seemingly in bad condition, so the current HIV and AIDS drugs that maintain longevity have not yet been developed. 

    Eleanor still wants to mother Jancey as a normal child, she tries to nurse her even if she does not know much about nursing a foster child. She has not told her son Joel about Jancey's condition, so it seems she hopes that it will not be a problem long enough for her to have that talk with him. The real conflict here is that she seems to want the normalcy of her first experience mothering a child, but is perhaps unprepared for the challenges that the virus will have on raising Jancey. Eleanor must cope with this entirely new situation, with only the changing information given to her by a far from all-knowing medical circle and the experience of her previous child alone. She might feel a little alone in this, since it is shown that her husband Paul does not attend the hospital visits often, and is hardly the one to get up with the baby when she cries at night. Still Eleanor feels she must be as good a mother as possible, to Jancey, Joel, and Paul. Perhaps the call to Jancey's biological grandmother makes her feel a little despondent, since she gets a peek into another mother's feelings while caring for a daughter with the virus. 

My Plot

    I like conflicts that challenge the character to something outside their comfort zone, so I could borrow from that concept. My protagonist, Judith Arwood, is a stoic empiricist who depends on the comfort of observable information to place her faith, so maybe she could struggle when being surrounded by the people of her hometown who are heavily faithful. I also like the idea of her foil in Molly Lee Blackwell also having come out of christian upbringing and placing her faith into something to keep from that lost feeling. Judith's backstory of having become lost in the woods once in her life could be reflected in her spiritual journey. Being lost is what caused her to lose her faith, so maybe feeling lost after the passing of her mother has her question her current dedications. Pulling from the death of her mother as well, she could have trouble dealing with the fact that her mother changed so much without her, as her involvement in the town's new spiritual awakening feels too out of character for her mother.