Analytical Response to Barbara Kingsolver’s “Stone Soup”...

Farris Qunibi WRC 1013 Riske October 4, 2008 Analytical Response to Barbara Kingsolver’s â€Å"Stone Soup† Barbara Kingsolver’s â€Å"Stone Soup† is a personal response to society’s view of the â€Å"broken† family. Kingsolver believes that society has for too long criticized divorce, remarriage, single parenthood, gay parents, and blended families, and that alternative families deserve equal standing in our society. In response to reading Kingsolver’s essay, this paper will serve to show which parts of â€Å"Stone Soup† are supported by outside evidence and which are not. â€Å"Stone Soup† is a personal reaction by Barbara Kingsolver that expresses the author’s feelings in response to society’s negative view and it’s holding of contempt of divorced,†¦show more content†¦For example, Kingsolver defends the notion that families of nontraditional arrangements do not need to be examined, ridiculed or treated differently with pity or tolera nce as traditionally married families when she says, â€Å"Arguing about whether nontraditional families deserve pity or tolerance is a little like the medieval debate about left-handedness as a mark of the devil† (Kingsolver 16). By this statement, the author clearly expresses her belief that nontraditional families are just as successful in their roles as traditional or married families, though evidence gathered has rejected Kingsolver’s argument. In an article by Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian, the authors present the benefits of marriage as opposed to divorced or single parenthood families. Naomi Gerstel writes that, â€Å"advocates [of marriage] such as David Popenoe and Linda Waite assert that marriage is good for one’s pocketbook, health, happiness, sex life, and kids. Both men and women who are married tend to have higher incomes, more wealth, better health, and more property than those who are not.† The article goes on to describe the negati ve impacts of divorce and nontraditional families by introducing National Census statistics of relationships between married parents and their children compared with