“When I was a girl,” the reporter said,
“I was never allowed to be competitive. I used to play with dolls.” The photographer backed off and began to study Beth through his camera.
She remembered the doll Mr. Ganz had given her.
“Chess isn’t always competitive,’” she said.
“But you play to win.”
Beth wanted to say something about how beautiful chess was sometimes, but she looked at Miss Balke’s sharp, inquiring face and couldn’t find the words for it.
This conversation, clearly show the limited space for women. Women cannot be competitive, should play a doll. Beth cannot agree with that, that’s really a contradiction toward her views. Beth really wants to tell other women that they can do anything they like, even if it’s unusual for women just like the patriarchy system said. Beth makes an analogy that chess is beautiful because she enjoys doing that.
The last quote that will be analyzed is the result of the interview. Beth doesn’t satisfy by the result because it doesn’t show the story about her enthusiasm about chess, it just fill with how a GIRL like her can do chess tournament, it just about her looks and her gender, Mrs. Wheatley read the magazine for her,
She began reading aloud: “With some people chess is a pastime, with others it is a compulsion, even an addiction. And every now and then a person comes along for whom it is a birthright. Now and then a small boy appears and dazzles us with his precocity at what may be the world’s most difficult game. But what if that boy were a girl—a young, unsmiling girl with brown eyes, brown hair, and a dark-blue dress? It has never happened before, but it happened recently. In Lexington, Kentucky, and in Cincinnati.”
And this is Beth’s reaction,
Beth had bought her own copy.
