The Women Upstairs

Rose Brewer
Professor Shone Kirkpatrick
English 101 TR
27 April 2014

    There is nothing like a Woman’s Scorned!
At the end of Claire Messud’s novel The woman Upstairs, about the protagonist Nora Eldridge, is angry, angry enough, she tells us, to finally start living her life. A teacher that teaches third grade at Appleton Elementary that his no children, no husband and is over forty fucking years old! Nora is unhappy with the decisions that she’s made in her past life and devalues her current life. She wants more in life because didn’t get to follow her dream of being an artist. She never was going be happy by living in regret. When meeting a new student enrolls in her class name Reza Shahid, along with his sophisticated and elegant parents, which suppressed her dreams at the moment. She falls in love with them and strikes up a friendship with Serena that is the Italian mother, that’s an artist. Nora wants to be remembered, thanks to Serena she will be. Not in the way she wanted to be remembered. She was betrayed, it was revenge on Serena’s part for the affair with her husband. Serena record a video of Nora masturbating and put the video into her art project that premiered in front of multitude of people. She says, “I’ve learned from my mistakes. I’ve been liberated by my failings: I’ve been a fool, but now I’m a wise fool”…(301) She did had it coming to her from the start. Maybe now she will think twice about making the same mistake again.
Claire Messud is a top American novelist that loves to write literature and fiction. She is a creative writer. Her first debut novel is The World Was Steady in 1995, which was nominated for the Pen/Faulkner Award. Then came the Last Life, The Hunters and The Emperor’s Children in 2004 that became the best seller at New York Times. The Women Upstairs was her sixth novel that was published on April 30, 2013. According to The New York Times book review Liesl Schillinger writings, “Exhilarating.... Ingenious…....