Mule Killers

Write an essay in which you analyse and interpret Mule Killers. To put your interpretation of Mule Killers into perspective, your essay must include a discussion of at least two of the other items listed below. One of these must be a text.

Texts

1. From Mule Killers, an American short story by Lydia Peelle, published in Laura Furman (ed.), The O’Henry Prize Stories 2006, Anchor Books, 2006. First published in Epoch, 2004.
2. From Progress, a short story by Jim Heynen, published in The One-Room Schoolhouse, Vintage Books, 1994.
3. The Ecchoing Green, a poem by William Blake published in Songs of Innocence, 1789.
4. From To His Lost Lover, a poem by Simon Armitage, published in Book of Matches, Bloodaxe Books, 1993.

Pictures

1. Cart Drawn by Oxen on the Heath at Sunset. The train passes by, an oil painting by Hans Smidth, 1906, published in Ny Dansk Kunsthistorie, vol. 4, P. Fogtdal, 1993.
2. Stone City, Iowa, a painting by Grant Wood, 1930, published in James M. Dennis, Grant Wood. A Study in American Art and Culture, The Viking Press, 1975.

Title

The expression “mule killers” refers to a number of things in the short story. On the one hand, the “mule killers” are the trucks which take the mules away from farms and bring them “to the slaughterhouses” (l. 3). On the other hand, the “mule killers” are the tractors that replace the mules because of agricultural modernization and the farmers’ need to keep their farms competitive: “In the spring of that year, in the afternoon of one rain-brightened day, my father’s father goes to Nashville and buys two International Harvester tractors for 18 hundred dollars, cash” (ll. 4-6).