A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "Anxiety"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "Anxiety," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535818568

Book preview

09

Anxiety

Grace Paley

1985

Introduction

Grace Paley's short story Anxiety was originally published in her third collection of short stories, Later the Same Day, in 1985. More recently, Anxiety was included in a compilation of her short stories, Grace Paley: The Collected Stories, published in 1994. Paley's short stories depict the lives and experiences of men and women living in New York City. Initially Paley's work captured the experiences of Russian- and Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants and the language of the community in which she was raised. Her later work was more feminist in tone and reflected Paley's commitment to the equal rights movement. As she became more feminist, Paley focused more on depicting the conflicts and trials of ordinary women trying to survive in a world designed for men's successes. The stories in Later the Same Day begin to move away from feminism and focus more clearly on Paley's antiwar interests, her pacifism, and her concerns for the future of the world. Anxiety fits well into Paley's later literary tradition of protest literature. The story's protagonist is a woman who worries so much about the possible destruction of the world that she accosts people walking on the street to warn them that the danger they face is so severe that they cannot ignore it even long enough to enjoy a moment of happiness. Paley's work, then, reflects the social shift from the 1950s ideal of women supporting a man's world to the women's movement of the 1970s, and finally to the image of women as voices of caution and warning about the dangers that the world faces.

Author Biography

Grace Paley was born Grace Goodside on December 11, 1922, in New York City. Her father, Zenya Gutseit (later changed to Isaac Goodside), was a Russian Jew who immigrated to the United States in 1905 in the wave of Eastern European and Russian Jews who came to the United States at the turn of the century to escape the ethnic violence that plagued the Jews of that region. Paley's father attended medical school and became a doctor, while her mother, Manya (later changed to Mary), worked as a photography retoucher and managed her husband's medical practice on the first floor of the family home in the Bronx. Paley grew up in the same building that housed her father's medical office. She was part of an extended family of aunts and grandmothers, consisting of multiple generations, all under the same roof. She was also raised in the family tradition of socialists and anarchists, many of whom had died in Russia for their beliefs. Those who survived and came to the United States brought their willingness to protest. Paley was the youngest of three children, all of