"Dreams Of A Life"

Blog 2

Option #3

“Dreams Of A Life”

     Carol Morley found out that a woman died in her apartment and wasn’t found until three years later. It was “on 25 January 2006, officials from a north London housing association…made a grim discovery. Lying on the sofa was the skeleton of a 38 – year- old woman who had been dead for almost three year” (Morley par 1). This article reminded me of the short story, “Death in the Woods”, by Sherwood Anderson. The old woman in the town “was one of the nameless ones that hardly anyone [knew]” (Anderson 164).  No one knows why the old woman in Anderson’s short story died and like the London woman, Joyce Carol Vincent, “who she was and the circumstances of her death were a mystery” (Morley par 7). 

 http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/09/joyce-vincent-death-mystery-documentary

     It is sad how no one in these women’s lives cared about them enough to notice them gone. The old woman in “Death in the Woods” was never offered help when she would go into town. Three years went by and no one wondered what happened to Joyce. Morley “didn’t want her to be forgotten. [She] decided [she] must make a film about her” (Morley par 6). Morley searched for so long to find someone that could tell her something about Joyce, but not many people replied. There were a few people in Joyce’s past that were willing to speak to Morley. They all told her that Joyce was a popular, funny, happy, beautiful, intelligent woman that many people loved, but no one stayed in touch with her and wondered what happened to her for three years. 

     It is amazing that even the “happy” people can be forgotten and neglected like the old woman in Sherwood Anderson’s short story. Even though many of Joyce’s friends didn’t keep in touch with her for years, she was still thought of as an amazing person to be around. She had friends and a past that not many people know. Morley wanted Joyce to be remembered. Her film, “Dream of a Life, captured what [she] was trying to do – dream up Joyce’s life and ambitions through the information [she] gathered and the people who knew her” (Morley par 29). No one really knew how these women lived or died, but both the narrator in “Death in the Woods” and Morley took the effort in discovering the “truth”. 

 Anderson, Sherwood. “Death in the Wood.” American Gothic Tales. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: The Penguin Group. 163-174. Print.

Morley, Carol.  Joyce Carol Vincent: How could this young woman lie dead and undiscovered for  almost three years?. Retrieved September 17, 2013 from http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/09/joyce-vincent-death-mystery-documentary. Web.