Success is life giving you a chance at something great, and you take that chance and work for it. Failure is something one would avoid but it just happens. These failures can affect peoples’ lives more than one would think. In the novel Crow Lake by Mary Lawson, Kate’s family plays a major role in her success and failures in life. Her family was given choices to make throughout the novel, and the choices made by them led to her success and failure.
It was not depression that made Veronika decide to die. She is attractive and enjoys life, but she sees the endless years of monotony stretching before her. She was twenty-four, she had enjoyed life, but her youth was now passing her by. What more had life to offer her? On a more philosophical level, she did not like the ways of the world, she felt powerless to do anything about it.
It is just to what level do we show it or even let it get in the way of how we live. In this story Mathilde’s dream world she is happy and idle. When she returns back to Earth she is driven by the greed for more than what she possesses. She knows that she is not rich, and can’t stand to be around her wealthy friends, so she socially removes herself from the real world. This causes her to resent her life even more.
The education system in Jane Eyre helps establish the idea of feminist criticism in the Victorian Era. In the 19thcentury, there was little to no opportunity for women to have jobs. Women were even equipped to feel distressed when it came to involving themselves in certain parts of society. Men had all the high paying jobs, leaving women to work as housewives or a governess. Even though in today's society having a job of educating young children is renowned and eminent, being a governess in the 19thcentury was considered lowly and was viewed as an underpaid servant asked to tutor children.
Mrs Linde has had to work hard and was not afforded love and children which she longed to have. She took care of her mother and brother as her own but still desired more. Once her circumstances had changed she set out to acquire that which she had lost. When Mrs Linde is introduced in Act I, we can immediately see she is a woman who has been through a harder time and worked hard to have a meekly accommodating life. She is more insightful of her surrounding than Nora Helmer.
Mathilde obsesses over things that most other women never notice or care about. Fantasies of wealth and social status plague her thoughts and suck her into a delusional black hole until she is forced to downgrade her simple lifestyle to a poverty stricken status. Mathilde and her husband live a simple lifestyle. They have a modest apartment with accessories that fit their surroundings. Her marriage was an arranged marriage and the young man was a clerk working for the Minister of Education.
Although it may not be a common experience, the story is still effective to the reader. “The Chrysanthemums,” is a perfect example of a short story that exhibits this quality of being a “just representation of general nature.” The main character Elisa Allen struggles with herself to become something more than her current life. During the time period of when this story was written, marriage limited a women’s potential far more than in today’s society. When a traveling salesman came to her home, she asked about his life and responded by saying, “It must be very nice. I wish women could do such things.” (Steinbeck 231) Elisa wants excitement and adventure in her life; she wants to feel important in the world.
Looks can be deceiving and I believe this statement plays a great role in this story. The main character, Mathilde, encounters a situation where she feels as though she belongs in a higher class based off her beautiful looks. She is neither wealthy nor comes from a family of wealth but feels as though she deserves as much because of her appearance. Unsatisfied with her lifestyle, Mathilde noticeably expresses her dilemma by complaining to her husband, Monsieur Loisel that she doesn’t want to attend the special event because she has nothing of higher class to wear. Mathilde then borrowed her rich friend Madame Forestier’s necklace, and at that moment, I could already foreshadow something bad to happen.
Nora loved her children, it was clearly shown when she played hide and seek with them merrily, and that is why she left them. She did not want to poison them as she said in the play, because she is a liar and hypocrite. She did not want the children to be mistakenly led by her. Moreover she wanted the children to be as free as she was when she left the house, and she knew that the nanny, Anne-Marie, would take care of them. Nora is the most admirable character in the whole play.
However, both images trigger very different emotions from Duffy. BYWM is a very possessive poem, in which Duffy seems to have wanted to be a part of her mother’s life before she was even born, shown in the line ‘Even then I wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello’. She appears to regret the fact that she could not have been around to experience her mother’s childhood with her and be friends with the daring girl that she admires. Duffy also acknowledges that she was a very possessive child, ‘The decade ahead of my loud possessive yell’, but doesn’t see this as a problem, instead believing it to be normal for a child to be controlling of their mother. In TGT, the school photo remind Duffy of how much she hated her teachers at secondary school and why it was that she felt this towards them.