The room she stays in has yellow wallpaper that will later contribute to her psychological downfall along with the oppression felt from her environment. In both pieces of literature, the authors use a technique of gradually progressing the characters deterioration of their mental capacity. Through dramatic irony and other literary devices, the reader is permitted to see the depth of the characters illness. The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, stays in a bedroom that was an old nursery which has an unattractive yellow wallpaper on the walls. To the narrator, the wallpaper is a nuisance and the pattern makes no sense to her.
'Perfume' tells a story in which the protagonist’s precarious position between olfactory prowess and lack of body odour motivates a string of despicable murders. One possible interpretation could be that the protagonist’s ‘ontological crisis’ comes about because of his absent mother, therefore, his lack of morals and resulting actions against women are a direct result of this earlier treatment. The amoral actions we see later in Grenouille’s characterisation could be a direct response to the events depicted in the opening chapter. Suskind chooses the structure of the opening chapter deliberately, to open the story in a way that both foreshadows and emphasizes the murderous actions of the protagonist and possibly hint that such actions are a direct result of the protagonists treatment at the very beginning of his life. Indeed the circumstances of Grenouille’s birth might prompt a feminist interpretation to look at what happens when a child is abandoned and raised without a mother.
Madison Carroll Ms. Diana AP English Literature 1 November 2012 Assignment #3 Despairing Companionship “Modern Love,” a poetic sequence by George Meredith, describes a skeptical view regarding of modern love. Meredith’s devastating tone, complex similes and metaphors, and dark imagery convey a sad and regretful outlook on modern relationships. “Modern Love” is riddled with a tone of regret and heartache, making this modern love more like the opposite of love. The speaker says, “she wept with waking eyes” and her “strange low sobs” were “strangled mute.” The words describing this woman are full of grief, full of “vain regret.” Her husband is painfully aware of his wife’s sadness, through her reaction to “his hand’s light quiver by her head” and her sobs that were “dreadfully venomous to him.” The speaker’s worried tone shows that the husband wishes for his wife to be happy, but his actions of loving care and cautiousness do nothing to quell her tears. This view of modern love is hopeless, full of despair for both the man and his distraught wife.
“Damn the village! I confess to God, and God has seen my name on this! It is enough!” This emotional statement proclaimed by proctor to Danforth demonstrated to the town that John Proctor was only interested in leaving the world with his name free of any wrong doing. Unlike Abigail he did not want the town to know of his mistakes. Throughout Proctors confession to witch craft Elizabeth has seemed to develop this aloof behavior towards her husband.
This gives readers a sharpened awareness of the complexity of family relationships in King Lear and their impact on the portrayal of Goneril and Ginny. Ginny is the reserved quiet daughter who, up until the very end of the novel, bends to her father's tyranny. As a result of her father's incestuous ways, and his constant verbal degradation and abuse of her and her sisters, Ginny takes on a passive attitude. It is only when awful incidents of her past are brought to light that she finally takes a stand. In this way we do not receive a very “likeable” picture of Ginny throughout A Thousand Acres.
Tragedy is used to vehicle the reader’s moral justifications, sympathy and ambiguities. This is caused by the character’s experiences, as they largely aggravate human discomfort and “question traditions and expectations when they seem too immutable.” (Azar Nafisi). The greatest of human discomforts is the conflict of moral pluralism, which evokes ethical ambiguities and sympathy for those who have transgressed. In the novel, Notes on a Scandal, the character Bathsheba Hart takes on an explicit and exploitive affair with one of her students, a boy at the tender age of thirteen. Q3 (122).
Mental illness is a concept that has been manipulated by religious, cultural, social and even scientific aspects and for centuries, the representation of women linked to the struggles and symptoms of mental illness has led to a proposition that women are weak and unstable. As a result of the ‘women’s movement’ of the 1960s, feminist literary criticism is stronger now than ever before. This movement was a retaliation to the idea of a ‘perfect woman’; a woman lacking goals and aspirations who was primarily focused on housework and her husband, that was being promulgated across the globe by literature, thus confronting and annihilating this backwards concept. It can be argued that Sylvia Plath was a feminist writer and this is prominent in ‘The Bell Jar’ as it is a novel that reflects the gender roles in the 1950’s and addresses the feminist issues of power, the search of identity and double standards. As the protagonist was growing up, remaining a virgin until after marriage was a rule that was constantly pushed into Esther’s mind, leaving her convinced that the same rule applied to men.
While I was reading Absolam, Absolam! I was reminded once again of Faulkner’s particular writing style of stream of consciousness. The book itself is laid out very confusing having multiple narrators depicting incidents of the past, a recurrent theme of Faulkner’s identifying man’s connection to his past. The first narrator of Absolam, Absolam is Rosa, the sister in law of Thomas Sutpen. She describes Sutpen with so much hatred that he almost takes form of a monster, which is incapable of feelings.
When she introduces her siblings and immediately says that she is inferior to them. Bronte then says “Eliza, John and Georgiana Reed where clustered around there mamma” the “cl” sound has a very harsh acoustic texture. The sound is created at the back of the throat and creates the effect of disgust. “Clustered” also shows that John, Eliza, Georgiana and there mother are all very close, physically but also close as a family. As she doesn’t include her self in the group it shows Jane is outcast and rejected from the family.
The Victorian Era was characterised by very rigid perceptions of gender and class. Brönte’s Jane Eyre challenges these rules. It is, therefore, no surprise that the novel was met with sharp criticism. Most critics of the novel were, in particular, concerned with the apparent insult that it posed to the accepted image of femininity of the time. One review states that the novel proves to be filled with “ruthless rigour [which] must command our admiration, but [is] almost startling in one of the softer sex” (The Christian Remembrancer).