The theme of isolation plays a very big part in this story. Susan Hill uses several things in the novel to make a sense of isolation. These include places like El Marsh House itself, and Monk’s Piece. However, she also uses characters to make Arthur seem isolated, people like Mr Jerome, and Mr Bentley. As well as isolation in those senses, Arthur Kipps is also very emotionally isolated from his family’s happiness at the start of the novel, and is separated from other men by his traumatic experiences.
Through this metaphor Harwood insinuates that all of the woman’s passion has been lost through her obligation to household chores such as scouring out crusted milk. Another notable inclusion in the poem is two children that the woman has no control over as she is too busy chasing lost dreams. Her performances are not even worth listening to according to Rubinstein, presumably one of the children. In fact her performances are so mundane that they would rather “caper round a sprung mousetrap” than listen to her perform. As she wraps the dead mouse in a paper we are notified of the words “Tasty dishes from stale bread”, symbolic of her vain attempts to resurrect something that is already lost.
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!
Loneliness for some is a dull beginning of a bright future, and for others, it is unfortunate and eternal. In The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, Quoyle is a character who suffers through a boundless amount of loneliness that exists in many forms. He becomes lonely as he is involved in a one-way relationship and also exhibits the feeling of isolation when he is singled out by society. Similarly, the life experiences of a narrator in an anonymous writer’s poem, Bow Down Your Head and Cry, closely resemble the isolation and hardships that Quoyle is forced to suffer through. The narrator experiences loneliness and great difficulties coping with the separation of his loved one and additionally felt isolated as he was alienated from society.
This neglect is surprisingly similar to Victor’s educational abandonment. Both Walton and Victor had dreams of being something greater, but society’s judgmental rejection forced them into an abyss of loneliness. In his year as a poet, “he lived in a Paradise of [his] own creation” (gradesaver). but that paradise quickly turned into an unpleasant trip to isolation. He became a captain to a ship set course to the Arctic.
Ethan is influenced by his grim surroundings and becomes a bitter, melancholy man. A lot of his sad nature has to do with his surroundings, as the barren and empty characteristics of Starkfield have forced Ethan to become bitter and pitiful. At the beginning of the story the narrator clearly states Starkfield’s influence on Ethan’s appearance: “He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.” (Wharton 13) A character’s attributes depend on the location he grows up on. His face looks as gloomy as the night, cheerless and bleak.
In Mercutio’s description, Queen Mab and her wagon symbolize the dreams of sleepers. Thus, he is stressing that a dream is just as capable of being broken as these materials. Finally, Queen Mab’s wagoner is depicted as, “a small grey-coated gnat, / Not half so big as a round little worm” (1.4.64-65). Lazy maids were said to have worms breeding in their fingers. The worms were so little that that couldn’t be seen, which means that Queen Mab’s coachman is tinier than a worm that is invisible to the human eye.
this very discontent feeling would further add to the very isolation the Glaspell is trying to portray. How is anyone to feel connected when they much live with a foul personality? “He was a hard man” (Glaspell 181); “Like a raw wind that gets to the bone” (Glaspell 181). He gave his wife a dispirited sense of being. She probably felt smothered by his bleak nature and with the fact that the farmhouse was too isolated for anyone to want to visit, Mrs. Wright was left alone.
The greatest problem the two face is loneliness. The pair may not have much, but they have each other. Even though they have each other, do they really have each other? Several characters in the novel experience loneliness through isolation as outcasts. Lennie, Crooks, and Curley’s Wife have all been branded as outcasts for the same reason; they are all different.
Circe had invited Odyseeus’s crew into her home, she filled their bowls with a wonderful stew but “Once they’d drained the bowls she filled, suddenly she struck with her wand, drove them into her pigsties, all of them bristling into swine” (Homer 237, 261-263). This shows that Circe was more worried about playing scrabble with men and turning them into animals than respecting the code of hospitality. Even when she offers hospitality in the end, she still has the motive of playing scrabble with Odysseus, and just wants that from him. Calypso is the next to be inhospitable when she keeps Odysseus against his will in her home, even when he wants to go home. This is evidenced by the fact that he was “weeping there as always, wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish, gazing out over the barren sea through blinding tears”