Suburban Sonnet by Gwen Harwood Suburban Sonnet is a bleak poem, highlighting the personal limitations that accompany maternal responsibilities and the role of a housewife. It is clear even from the title that Gwen Harwood intends to tell the reader tales of vain attempts by things of beauty such as sonnets to overcome the bleak and depressing reality of something as dull as suburban life. One of many important features of the poem, though only expressed in few words, is the powerlessness of anonymity. From the outset it becomes clear to the reader that the failed pianist has no name. As she is anonymous the reader is alerted that this woman is no one important and therefore should not be paid particular attention.
Katherine uses a wide variety of different characters to develop the idea of the loneliness that comes with old age. The main character is Miss Brill herself. She is an elderly lady who is socially isolated due to her old age and impoverishment. We realise her loneliness by the way she treats her fur scarf. This is Miss Brills only companion, the only thing she has to love and she treats it like it’s a living being, calling it her “Little rouge” and petting it as someone would a cat.
A repressed women with a desire to be free and happy. The relation between when the woman in the wallpaper and the narrator when the woman is behind bars symbolizes the narrator and how she is trapped in this tiny room with a husband who controls her every word and actions. He undermines her in almost every way. For example the narrator says on page 590 “I am afraid, but i don't care- there is something strange about that house-I can feel it, I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what i felt was a drought, and shut the window.” This shows how john undermines her fears as just a simple shiver from the window being open when she is trying to explain how she doesn't like the place because shes
Diego Rivera attended art school and had a passion for painting with vibrant colors and details. Frida Kahlo's paints well, not quickly but patiently and her paintings represent a message of pain in them. Frida is not sick, but a woman that was broken, but alive. Frida at the young age of eighteen was in a bus accident and was left bed ridden. On September 17, 1925 when Frida and her boyfriend were on a bus, and it was struck broadside by a trolley car, Frida was left with multiple injuries.
Also the readers can see that how she describes her dream house proves that she is poor “but stairs inside like the houses on T.V.” (4). Esperanza is ashamed of the fact that she lives in that house due to her poverty. Esperanza describes her house with “the paint peeling, wooden bars papa had nailed on the windows so we wouldn't fall out” (5). The nun was surprised that Esperanza lived there “you live there?” (5). The manner in which the nun said that made Esperanza feel like “nothing” (5).
Both Eudora Welty’s short story "A Visit of Charity” and Rebecca Brown’s short story “The Gift of Sweat” share a theme of the unfortunate human condition of illness, mortality, and rejection by the rest of society. In different ways both main characters must face the truth that our fear of the elderly and dying is caused by our blindness to our own mortality. "A Visit of Charity” and “The Gift of Sweat” both have secondary characters that are in a same situation. One is an old lady in a nursing home and the other, Rick who is going to die, both are ignored by society and even their families would not come to visit them. As Welty and Brown indicate in their short stories, both main characters, Mariana and Rick’s caregiver, share similar tasks, but Mariana benefits less because she failed to develop a sensitivity to someone in need.
This continues after multiple attempts to tell her husband that she is uncomfortable with the yellow wallpaper. Until her mental break comes her husband is not able to see the extent of the damage he has done by leaving her without emotional and mental stimulation (Gilman 588-600). While this case is different than the other story it is still about missed managed emotions. As a result of being locked away in a room she lost what makes people feel good about themselves their emotional connections with others. Having no one to connect with she is force to focus on her self to the point where she is unknowingly projecting herself as the women be hide the wallpaper as a metaphor for her being trapped by the walls of the summer house and her own
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!
However, the poem begins to show objection amongst the female character indicating “strange low sobs that shook their common bed”. The woman cries slowly as the man makes his light quivers because she is not afraid as she does not physically resent the action but, out of imminent binding to her relationship. She does not love her husband as he also knows of this fact he is hesitant. The simile in line 5 “And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,” is analogous to the helplessness of the situation. The words strangled and mute are words of evoking fear and seem to foreshadow an elegy because of the powerful darkness surrounding the mood of the poem.
The Valley of Ashes is the home for the poor and illustrates the ugliness of social decay. The narrator indicates Tom and Daisy were careless people, "they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." (170) This "careless" lifestyle comes to the cost of those who live in the Valley of Ashes. Myrtle Wilson had social ambition and it lead her to seek a life that was different from what she was given. Although her husband loves her, she could not appreciate his hard work and had an affair with Tom.