In George Egerton’s short story “Virgin Soil”, the reader witnesses Flo’s first encounter with her mother since she was married off five years ago. This interaction between mother and daughter consists of the daughter, Flo, bearing her emotions and current resolution of leaving her husband to her mother. “The Storm” by Kate Chopin tells of an affair between two ‘friends’ named Calixta and Alcee who share intimate feelings for one anther but then happily part and continue on as normal with their own families. Broadly speaking, these two stories are quite different. Nonetheless, the combined narratives offer a more complete coloring of what desire and sexual freedom means to the New Woman and how this freedom is achieved. By analyzing the progression…show more content… She possessed “a young girl’s dreams of the beautiful, wonderful world that lay outside”. She had positive expectations for what the world could offer her, what she could become. Returning to her childhood home, she looks back at her youth with “bitter disillusion”. Before she had the chance to take advantage of her “fresh youth” and figure out her own identity and desires, the neglect of her mother took away this freedom. Flo’s mother chose her own comfort over her daughter’s wellbeing and, in the process, “’killed the sweetness in [her], the pure thoughts of womanhood” and made her “’hate [her]self and hate [her…show more content… Rather than for the benefit of her daughter, the marriage between Philip and Flo ended up as an economic trade of a young girl with “fawn-like eyes” for “a home, for clothes, for food’”. While the mother only saw “first-class carriage[s]” and “a signet ring on [his] little finger”, Flo faced the terrible reality of a man with “strong white teeth” and “fearfully big and bright” eyes who was nothing more than “’ an animal with strong passions’” who was allowed freedom to do whatever he pleased by the “’laws of society’”. In the end, “’food and clothes are poor equivalents for what [Flo] have had to suffer’”. Though for a moment the mother appears to feel some sort of guilt, as she had made a “strenuous effort to say something”, to warn her daughter of her life to come before Flo originally left with Philip, this is shadowed by the inquiry of how much the mother actually cared about Flo. Even though the mother seems more than aware of what she is sending her daughter blindly in to, she remarks how she dreamed of hearing of “Flo’s new frocks” and about her “town life”. Instead of worrying about not seeing her daughter for many years, she accepts “he presents her son-in-law has sent her from time to time” as an alternative. There is no mention of wanting to know about Flo’s wellbeing,