Reflective Tag: Rather than revising my previous essay, I basically had to completely scrap my first draft and start from scratch due to my shortcomings in my close reading/literary analyses in said first draft. For this draft, I chose to focus on one particular scene of interest in Chopin’s “The Maid of St. Philippe.” That scene was the choice Marianne was presented by her three suitors towards the end of the story. I found this scene very interesting because it had both a historical relevance and was an important plot event to the development of the story. It developed Marianne as an independent (or free) woman in a time where women were not expected to be that, while also playing off the freedom aspect of the old American frontier before it was overrun by expansion (by portraying the focal point of her new “free” life as living with a Native American tribe). Still, the assignment was quite difficult and required much digging and reading/rereading/re-rereading within the text to develop the importance of the scene I focused on, but it was another valuable learning experience in developing my understanding of American literature, especially women’s literature.