Gender stereotypes implying that men did not have to show emotions towards their family led to Robert’s misunderstanding of his main mistake, which lies at the heart of his tragedy of loneliness – his emotional dryness and inattention. Different genders of the related people – father and daughters – do not allow them to understand each other well, and therefore gender is an important obstacle in relationships. The plot of the story could be pretty prosaic, like any family relationship, but a non-standard setting allows for a deep empathy with the main characters.
For Robert, this is not a happy ending, but at least he gains some semblance of hope for a better tomorrow. However, already on the verge of his suffering and worries, he realizes that he is wrong and refuses to commit suicide. Too proud to change or apologize for his not-so-good parenting, he expects his daughters to take the first step. Robert decides to take such a crazy step, as he suffers from loneliness.
However, Robert does not change his decision to follow the tornado to the very end and let it kill himself until he imagines how his daughters will identify his body. After learning his decision, the daughters leave many messages on his answering machine, as they are worried about him. He begins to grow a tornado in a barn, after which the hurricane breaks free, and Robert hopes that he will connect with an actual natural tornado. One day Robert goes to the fair and decides to resume his old hobby since no one can stop him. Estelle left Robert, and his daughters also did not communicate with him, as he hurt them with his inattention when they were children. One day, his wife Estelle forbade him to indulge his passion after the farmed tornado broke free and injured Suzy, Wurman’s daughter. Tornadoes have always been Wurman’s main passion, and he was so captured by them that he had no free time for his wife and daughters (Russell 89). In this story, against the fantastic background setting of magical living elements, the reader gets acquainted with the life story of Robert Wurman, a 73-year-old retired Nebraska tornado farmer. This paper explores how two stories from the Orange World collection present male and female relationships by viewing them from the perspective of the altered reality and how the stories reveal the conflicts people face with the opposite gender. The element of the fantastic, unearthly, allows one to abstract from the clichés and routine of everyday life and see partly banal experiences in a new light. Male and female relationships and feelings are presented more sharply due to integrating the altered reality background setting (Soler 316). The stories by Karen Russell from the Orange World collection are fascinating due to the unusual background setting, twisted plots, and deep, emotional characters.
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