Why does Ophelia go mad? Does Hamlet have any responsibility for this madness and her death? The following passages from William Shakespeare's Hamlet, explain why Ophelia has gone mad. According to Laertes, "There's nothing more than matter," therefore he believes that even though his sister was mad, she was saying more than just blurting out random thoughts. Intermingled within her thoughts that seem to mean nothing, she expresses her grief as well as dropping subtle hints that Hamlet is the reason why she has gone insane.
Punishment in The Scarlet Letter In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, physical punsihment is nothing compared to how the mind can cause punishment. In the Scarlet Letter, Hester Phynne is isolated by the members of Purtian society and left with her child Pearl, a constent reminder of her sin. Dimmesdale’s choice to not feese up to his sin leaves him with mental punishment that makes him sicker and weaker. Chillingsworth does not receive pain, but he does inflict pain to those around him. The main characters of The Scarlet Letter are left to tourment by themselves, the worst punishment of them all.
Electra fights with her mother, Clytemnestra, and her mother’s lover, Aegisthus, because she feels betrayed by them as they killed her father. When Electra and Orestes are finally reunited, they plot against their fathers killers, and finally kill them. The play has several themes, such as vengeance and deception which are extenuated by the heightened realism style of the play. In Electra’s introductory speech, I would emphasises her agony of her father’s death, as this is the main reason the character is vengeful. To fit with the heightened realism of the play, I would exaggerate the mental pain that the character is going through by associating some lines with physical pain, such as ‘But my mother, and her bed mate Aegisthus, Split open his head with a murderous axe’.
Hughes uses his poem, The Minotaur, to try to manipulate the audience to see a different view of their marriage, and to make people feel sympathetic towards him. Hughes portrays his wife Sylvia Plath as violent, irrational, and out of control. This is shown in the way he shows her, in lines such as “The mahogany table-top you smashed”. The onomatopoeia of “smashed” further emphasises her violent personality. Later in the poem, Hughes accuses his wife of abandoning her family.
Throughout the novel, the Scarlet letter bequeaths new meanings. The scarlet letter starts off as a way to symbolize adultery, then it turns to symbolize angel during Dimmesdale’s vigil, and finally it symbolizes able as Hester develops into a strong woman because of her sin. The original meaning of the scarlet letter is adultery. Hester Prynne had an affair with Reverend Dimmesdale, and her punishment because of her sin is to wear a scarlet letter “A”. Along with the meaning of adultery, the scarlet symbolizes shame.
Women were still viewed as being inferior to men and did not have a voice to air their concerns or displeasure. In the beginning of the story, the main character hints to this oppression as she comments “perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster” when describing John’s occupation as a physician (Gilman 82). Her husband John is expanding her level of depression by keeping her from the outside. Confining her to one room within a house that was viewed as being “a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate” is symbolic (Gilman 82). It shows that she is trapped within a small portion of a large house, similar to being trapped to adventure the outside world thus forced in to a land of fantasy not reality.
It represents imprisonment and this is made clear when the she says, “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out”. (245) The imprisonment is created from the yellow wallpaper because the Jane repeatedly asks to remove it but isn’t allowed and she is confined to the room she despises due to the stubbornness seen from her husband. You can see Jane slowly descend into her madness with her hallucinations- “The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell." (248) “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!
Miller takes the “woman scorned” approach to his character of Abigail. Abigail’s assertiveness is observed early when she tells her uncle “the rumour of witchcraft is all about; I think you'd best go down and deny it yourself,". This remark, within the confines of a deeply hierarchical and patriarchal society, shows her to have knowledge of social situations and also that she does not conform to the Puritan society, which has already been evidenced by her affair with John Proctor. She is spiteful which helps to build the classic “woman scorned” role which Miller moulds her into: “Oh, I marvel how such
With an unequal marriage and a woman which let her self-expression ruin her, was the short story "The Yellowwallpaper," a great story to talk about the theme of gender. The theme of gender also has to do with how far the story dates back which is in the 1800's, this focusing on how much pain this woman is in with no place to run. Gilman narrates the story to let the reader have a better look at what this woman is feeling and how she reacts to her surroundings. She actually turns to her husband whom which is a doctor and her companion and he dismisses the notion of her mental illness. He sort of traps her in a controlled space by taking her to a secluded house with no human contact besides her sister, Jennie, and himself who both look at her illness in the same way.
This is what creates isolation, lonely feelings to in the end due to her suicide. Madame Ratignolle’s childbirth sparks Edna’s suicide, which is an Ironic moment. Edna observed “with an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways id Nature, the scene of torture.” During this Edna tries to recall her own childhood but fails to do so. Than once Edna swims out far into the sea at the island, she is going to swim out far enough of no return, possibly. “To her