When Lancelot is going to see the Lady of Shallot, she knows she is stepping into dangerous waters, but still goes along with it. Her image of herself turns so bad, that the basically kills herself and unhappy and lonely woman. After she is dead, Lancelot sees her and only says that “She has a lovely face,” demonstrating that he only cared about her looks and not really her inner beauty. The Lady of Shallot is a round character because she changes throughout the short story. At the beginning, she believes in herself and who she is as a person, but she is lonely.
Her dark tone speaking of death lead her literary mentor Thomas Higginson to “ advise her not to publish her work because of her violation of contemporary literary convention” (Dickinson 1). Her poem in a way makes it seem like she wants to die. It is a very depressing thing to read about feeling “a Funeral, in my Brain”
Since the poem depicts both grief as well as love, the words of the poem produce the tone. The author incorporates words such as “decays” when speaking of love (3). The author also represents the speaker’s love as a “plague” when relating it to their broken heart (6). The speaker in the poem seems to mourn their lost love and their broken heart. Their morose and depressed attitude becomes apparent when they say, “I brought a heart into the room, but from the room I carried none with me” (19-20).
Virginia Woolf was a person that went through tough times and suffered break downs within her own insanity which were probably caused by her family life. Her Mother Father and Sister all dying within a short space of time, she claimed to be haunted by voices often masculine which would explain her constant attack of the Victorian male culture and imperialistic traits. What Virginia Woolf does so well is convey everyday reality into a form that is unreachable by so many authors. To The Lighthouse is a text in which in all honesty nothing much happens, but the way in which she describes this nothingness is genius and often somewhat offensive to some subcultures. For example her portrayal of Mr Ramsay who relies on his intellectual ability and Edwardian views.
Mrs. Mallard’s was mentally abused by her husband as briefly quoted by Chopin, “There would be no powerful will bending her in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow creature.” (Chopin, 1894).The character of Mrs. Mallard in “The Story of an Hour” reveals that she is suffering from a heart problem. She also went through some problems in her childhood. When one loses the hope to live life with freedom, then also loses the desire to live. Stressful situations can leave temporary or long lasting effects on people and may cause them to lose their life. Any sudden stress, rage, grief, excitement can lead to a sudden cardiac death (Lecomte, 1996).
Whilst poems like Ariel begin with release, and Daddy ends with hopefulness, wholly their content is rather dejected and joyless. This mood of unhappiness is expressed through lines like; “Suicidal, at one with the drive”-Ariel, “I’ve gone nowhere since but going’s been tame deviation”-Whiteness I remember and “I have always been scared of you”-Daddy. These quotation, are just excerpts from each poem wherein the entire tone is one of mostly gloom. In this way, the reader forms an emotional connection with Plath. A connection built on sympathy for the obvious seriousness of her unhappiness.
He presents the tension of love vs. infatuation and love vs. insanity. In “A Woman Killed with Kindness”, a married woman tries to deal with the fact that she has performed a state of infidelity. Even though she has realized what she has done, her outside lover will not accept her choice of continuing to pursue her marriage. So, it is as if she is torn between love and lust. Because of such an act, the woman draws up a tension of love vs. infatuation.
I would like to begin with an excerpt from a quote by Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” Stanislaw Baranczak’s poem “She cried that night, but not for him to hear” emulates the emotional paradox of love and war, both in a relationship and within the self. The assessment of depression and sadness in our loved ones consists of a methodical and analytical approach in addressing their emotions, regularly resulting in the indifference and dissociation of one person to another. This lack of empathetic reasoning creates distance, especially between lovers, and leaves a couple in a state of physical closeness, but with an inability to comfort or understand those dearest to us. The male persona experiences an intentional ignorance towards the female, and although he loves her, he does not move to comfort her, instead convincing himself that it was not her that woke him. The half-waking state we are often left in when being roused is epitomised by the regular rhyming scheme of the poem.
Mariana is a poem about a woman awaiting the return of her renegade lover. Mariana laments repeatedly, “My life is dreary …he cometh not… I am aweary, aweary; I would that I were dead”. Tennyson’s Mariana is illustrated as being weak and powerless to the depression that is overtaking her, making her wish to no longer live all due to her male lover’s relinquishment. Tennyson compares Mariana’s tears with the “dews at even” and presents her as lying below “The shadow of the poplar” wallowing in misery. Ultimately, the character Mariana is an embodiment of
The poem illustrates a woman who was once so full of potential, evident in “Someone she loved once passes by – too late”, implying she has changed over time and the fact that it is now too late to revert back to her former self or to get back what she once had. The poem shows a woman whose identity has been lost due to her three children. Consequently she is lonely and she has lost interest in herself. The figurative expression “They have eaten me alive” shows only a truth she knows and a truth she is unable to share suggesting that her life and identity have been destroyed by her selfless giving to her children. She believes they are using her for their own survival and in doing so, she is slowly dying inside.