Beginning of Essay
Mattie Rigsbee is the main character in Clyde Edgerton's southern style novel, . 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 taken care of. She cooks, cleans, mows the law ....

Middle of Essay
.... 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 says to the dogcatcher as he is leaving with a brown fice that showed up on her doorstep. "Besides, I'm slowing down," she says to her son during lunch. The stereotypes of the elderly are influencing Mattie's life. ....