This leaves the reader feeling conflicting emotions for the character, probably similar to how Medusa herself feels in the poem. Form and Structure The poem is written in free verse and as it progresses, the importance of the living things Medusa turns to stone increases, going from a bee to a dragon and then to her husband himself. The poem is divided into stanzas of mainly equal length, apart from the final line: ‘Look at me now’. This gives the poem a dramatic ending, leaving the reader unsure whether to feel threatened by or feel sorry for Medusa. Language • The poem is packed full of rhyme (including half rhymes, internal rhymes and in stanzas 3, 4, 5 and 6 some end rhyme).
William Shakespeare is a renounced poet and playwright; he is most famous for his creative linguistic devices and his ability to incorporate many significant and relevant themes into his writing. Romeo and Juliet, being one of Shakespeare’s most credited plays, utilizes the themes of love, hatred, conflict and anger. Shakespeare successfully portrays all these themes through strong emotions. Similarly Robert Browning conveys strong feeling such as hatred, betrayal and love which becomes overt. Browning’s poem ‘The Laboratory’ is about a scorned woman’s desired to kill her lover’s mistress, and any other woman he may have had an affair with.
She chose to put this particular poem right in the centre of the collection because it is the most taboo poem and shows just how much men can influence women in relationships or even just for sex. A good example of this is ‘I went mad for the sex’ from ‘The Devils Wife’ shows she is with him for the sex and she’d do anything to keep getting it. The poems in the first half of the collection the women always escape from the betrayal of men take control. ‘Delilah’ and ‘Mrs Quasimodo’ are good examples of this as in ‘Delilah’ she cuts off his hair, ‘Then with deliberate, passionate hands, I cut every lock of his hair’ shows she took control of the situation and did it as a duty because his hair is what makes him strong, and without it he has nothing. Also ‘I fastened a chain to the door’ is ironic as she is trying to escape from being controlled by him yet she is ‘chaining’ herself inside the door so she cannot escape.
She said, “I fear the elegance must struggle like the rest ( line 3)” and “ I have said no to everything, in order to get at myself(line 6). ” Her self consciousness is very strong that shows she can desist any sexual implications and have a persistent spirit to refuse what she doesn’t like. As a perfect lady, “elegance” seems to have been an immortal personality on female. But we are hardly to apply elegance into Mrs. Alfred Uruguay. Second, from the third paragraph, there’s a paradox, “capable imagination” describes the most important concept of this poem.
The narrator’s obsession with the wallpaper that surrounds her bedroom begins merely as intrigue and climaxes to a point where reality and what she imagines within the wallpaper becomes blurred. This climax represents her journey from rationality to insanity as the wallpaper becomes more twisted and alive around her. This wallpaper ultimately represents the oppression of her mind that is being caused by her post partum depression, as well as her husband’s ineffective healing methods. At first she finds the wallpaper being “one of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (Gilman 988). This could be a representation of the beginning of her depression which was initially just an annoyance to her which she does not fully understand.
Furthermore, when we see into her dream, we see that she has dreams of being something more than she is, she wishes for grandeur, but she also wishes for the Vicar, and here is where we see the crux of the poem. As soon as her sexual desires for the Vicar become apparent in the poem, we see her dream begin to morph into something more sinister. The very obvious, almost crude sexual metaphor of the 'lowered horn' causes Miss Gee to repress her feelings in fear, represented by 'that back-pedal brake'. This idea of repression then repeatedly appears throughout the rest of the poem, through the use of
His voice is very heartfelt as it comes, not from his mouth but from his throat. However even this one connection ... In “Caged Bird” there is a contrast between freedom and Imprisonment, the “free bird” and the “caged bird”, this symbolism can be applied to many forms of social injustices. The free bird has desire, wants more and can search for more, whereas the caged bird has dreams and all it can do is imagine and sing. The tone of the poem shifts between the caged bird and the free bird stanzas, you can sense anger and bitterness in her picture of the caged bird, also the way she present this contrast, between free and caged bird is
In their day and age these characters would be judged by many factors including social and cultural backgrounds, crimes committed and personal traits. Both of these writers seem to conjure their audience into a state where it compels them to relate to certain characters. Lady Macbeth certainly loses or suppresses her feelings of cowardice. Throughout her appalling invocation to the spirits of evil to “unsex her”, proving her ambition to attain her goal. In Jacobean times women were seen as inferior and even in the Victoria era, thus she required external forces to crush her conscience to allow her to fulfil her ambition.
Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frightening characters, who throughout the play constantly battles between her desperation for masculinity, and also with her natural instincts of femininity. She continually suppresses her instincts towards compassion, motherhood and fragility, the factors of femininity in which she loathes, and instead she turns her ambitions in favour of ruthlessness, and the single-minded pursuit of power. Throughout the play, Lady Macbeth refers to motherhood, and menstruation several times, ‘make thick my blood, stop up th’access and passage to remorse…’ begging spirits to get rid of her menstruation and so block up her blood flow, and so she hopes all empathy and sense of caring will be abolished in order to carry out the dreadful deeds she and Macbeth will partake in. She is desperate to show no weakness, and goes as far as to beg to evil spirits to take from her all natural womanly instincts. She is frightened that she will not be able to carry out the murder if her husband so fails.
Helene Cioux: The Laugh of the Medusa The Laugh of the Medusa is about how women shouldn’t be afraid to express themselves through literature. The article is written from a feminist’s point of view. According to the article, women are afraid to write in a world that is controlled by men. I chose a paragraph from the article to summarize: “Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs.