Brandon is a secretive man – bounded as such by the shame that haunts him – feeling volatile for the first time in his life. Or is it the first time? Shame’s obscurity is the thing that people are going to be most challenged by. Not that that’s wholly bad — people love to be given an incomplete picture and told to imagine the rest of it, especially when the film being watched is as fundamentally and artistically interesting as this film is, or the performance on-screen as endlessly fascinating as Fassbender’s Brandon. Shame is about sex addiction and tells the story of one man’s internal battle where virtuosity and goodness are at war with the despotic darkness which controls and always has controlled him.
The word “lust” is one that is associated with sexual experiences. On the other hand, the emotional experiences, changes and struggles the main character undergoes are something that is not expected from the title of the story. Through the story’s use of vocabulary and sentence structure, theme, and representation of the narrator’s life overall, the irony of the short story’s title becomes clear. The narrator is like a delicate rose, and with each boy she becomes physical with, she loses a petal. Her experiences have seriously damaged any sure thoughts toward men.
This is significant in that it shows the difference in Hassan and Amir. Hassan brave while Amir is weak and scared. In the memory, Hassan allows the fortuneteller to take his hand while Amir, in fear, does not, “the old man reach[ed] for my hand and I withdrew it.” These memories suggests about Amir feelings that he is in a state of panic and confusion where he does not know what to do. The memories might also suggest that the rape scene overwhelmed him with fear and represented a true moment where Amir became a coward. Most of all, however, the memories demonstrate Amir’s emotional dissociation during the rape.
Chillingworth constantly interrogates Hester . “And what of him?” “What choice had you?” “What evil have I done the man?” (Hawthorne 154). He depresses her and tries to make her feel guilty, sometimes for things she couldn’t control, like never truly loving him. He as well wouldn’t stop bothering her, he intended to travel along on the boat with them and threatened to reveal Dimmesdale’s secret. Yet, even worse than Chillingworth’s rude and evil nature was her suffering caused by Dimmesdale.
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.
By the narrator already assuming psychological judgment from the reader, the reader can also feel to question and doubt his sanity through just the first-person perspective. His madness is challenged when he admits the old man has done nothing to him and that he “loves the old man”, but yet is still going to murder him because of his eye. The reader also learns of the narrator’s psychological mindset right before he murders the old man. “But the beating grew louder, louder! I
Since Lady Macbeth set him up to this by insulting his manhood, Macbeth took a turn for the worst when he started experiencing fear and guilt. You’d think he’d put an end to all of this negativity by this point, yet it actually drags out and he continues with doing malicious, unlawful acts. Eventually this leads to more trouble for Macbeth; He begins to struggle with hallucinations and sleeplessness, causing him to become extremely paranoid. He began to lose his human qualities during this process of regaining his ‘so-called’ manhood, as his killing spree was pretty much a joke on his actual manliness. Macbeth’s decadence then led to his marriage to slowly fall apart.
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. They have made for women an anti-narcissism! A narcissism which loves itself only to be loved for what women haven’t got! They have constructed the infamous logic of anti-love.” I think this paragraph is stating that men have made women despise and doubt themselves when it comes to expressing their knowledge in any form, particularly in literature. And what is a greater crime than making women hate themselves for reasons that they cannot change?
There may seem to be many motivations for villains throughout the times but as we study these scoundrels we find that generally they are motivated by pure jealousy, or a need of superiority. They utilize manipulation, both physically and mentally in order to achieve their goals and show a lack of remorse. Stephan King’s “Misery”, provides us with a very graphical depiction in Annie Wilkes a sadistic, mentally unstable retired nurse, who has a desire for power and control. Annie goes to tortuous extremes on her captive Paul Sheldon to realize this. Iago from Shakespeare’s play Othello is also a power hungry villain who enjoys having people under his control, he is driven by extreme jealousy and the motivation, revenge.
It’s almost as if they are obsessed with him, because the narrator and her sister watch his every move and create perceptions of the man. The sisters are scared of the man but they don’t even know him. Judgments made of people can be very dangerous. With all this fear, the girls let it control their lives and interpret perceptions and judgement made of the man. They become obsessed, maybe even sexually attracted but they have a deep fear of this man.