PAPER Topics

Start of Term Paper
Mattie Rigsbee is the main character in Clyde Edgerton’s southern style novel, Walking Across Egypt. Mattie is a seventy-eight year old widow with two middle-aged children. Living alone in a small house, she makes sure that everything is tak ....

Middle of Term Paper
... in which direction to turn. As Mattie grows older, she notices that she is beginning to display some signs that people in her state of North Carolina associate with the elderly. These signs are influencing her decisions about what she thinks she can and cannot do. She displays typical, elderly forgetfulness as she washes the toilet seat with mouthwash rather than with alcohol. And again displays it as she falls through the bottomless rocking chair. Later she displays physical inability when she asks her son Robert about helping with some yard work, which she had always taken care of before. “I’m too old to keep a dog,” (20) she sa ...