The main conflict in “Blithe Spirit” is a conflict of love; the ghost of Elvira haunting the couple causes tension between them that brings up deeper problems of the couple. The climax occurs when Madam Arcati tries to get rid of Elvira, after Ruth has died, and instead brings Ruth’s ghost into the house as well. The entire play took place in the house of Charles and Ruth; the design elements were relevant
Craig Bandy AP English, 1b 01-11-13 Bartleby VS. A Sorrowful Woman Bartleby, the Scrivener, and A Sorrowful Woman reflect each other in a lot of ways. They have very similar themes and plots. The main theme from both stories is that untreated mental illness can lead to death, as we see at the end of both short stories. Both stories start with an epigraph. In a sorrowful woman is says “once upon a time there was a wife and mother one too many times” (Godwin 33).
The doll has been passed down from generation to generation in Josephine’s family, and seems to represent the tragedy of each woman’s demise. Josephine’s mother, Manman, is not introduced to readers in good health, but throughout the story the theme of depression is emphasized by the mother’s rapid decline in health and appearance. When Manman is first introduced to readers she is not in good shape. “Her skin barely clung to her bones, falling in layers, flaps, on her face and neck.” Despite her appearance, it seems that she is holding onto some hope. She tells Josephine that the guards “have not treated me badly.” She also describes to her daughter how the food Josephine brings her lasts for many months.
Her husband is gone from the house more often, to take care of the patients with serious conditions, leaving her with Jennie, his sister. She feels alone and her imagination makes up these apparitions in the wallpaper to keep her amused. She starts seeing a woman creeping in the wallpaper. The woman scares her and she wants to move into a different room to escape her phantom presence. Her imagining this woman is representing the narrator subconsciously realizing that she might me going crazy and that fact scares her and she wants to escape the empty room that leaves her to her
Lady Macbeth is constantly ridiculing Macbeth because he is too afraid to kill Duncan, and she even tells him that he might as well be a woman. This is ironic because in this quote, Lady Macbeth says “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (5.1.39), which lets the readers know that she feels guilty. This guilt is what would eventually drive her to madness. Mental madness all due to an attempt to gain and maintain power; power both over their own selves and a run for
Ismene’s inaction to react to the situation she is put through by her sister contributed to Antigone’s death. For example as Ismene and Antigone argue over whether or not to break the law to bury her brother Ismene admits, “Antigone, I am so afraid for you”. This shows how her fear of the
Perkins Gilman’s short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is the disheartening tale of a woman suffering from depression and how severely her condition is misunderstood by those around her. The setting of the story is in itself a character in the narrator’s story. The old mansion with the yellow wallpaper has many symbols used by the authors to explain the desperation of the narrator’s desperate loneliness. The ironic part of this tale is that her cure of “rest” only pushes the narrator further into her madness. The woman in this story is an ironic symbol of all women in her time, she is unheard and alone in her illness.
Through representation of symbols in their stories Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Margaret Atwood describe what madness feels like and how symbols can make the invisible visible. Symbols in literature serve as representation of something by association or resemblance. Symbols can further mean, in psychological terms, an object or image representing thoughts, feelings or impulses. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s main character is a young married female, circa the late 1800’s telling the story of her depressive state. The first description she gives of her environment “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house…” suggests a gothic-like setting seemingly dark, gloomy and old (73).
Both Dora and Jane are quiet young when they first encounter some kind of hysteria, or symptoms of hysteria. In Jane’s case her first encounter would we the incident at the Red Room (Bronte 12). The Red Room incident is perhaps most important in establishing the rigid structure of patriarchy because we see that the image that appears before her in the ghostly pale moonlight as she imagines is that of her dead uncle, Mr. Reed (Bronte 12). We see earlier in the story that Jane is being punished by Aunt, for “misbehaving” with her cousin John (Bronte 10). The idea that her aunt would lock her away in the Red Room, the place where her husband had lain before his death, shows us what kind of fear her aunt wants to invoke in the child.
There is a great movie that just appeared in theater called Side Effects starring Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum, Jude Law, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Vinessa Shaw. It is about a woman who falls into a clinical depression after her and her husband have to readjust to a new life in a new town after his release from prison and being involved in a car crash. The woman begins to see a psychiatrist who then prescribes her medication to help relieve her anxiety. The medication then causes a blur between fantasy and reality to the point she commits murder but has no recollection of it. She tries to fight it and blame it on her psychiatrist because he knew of the side effects of the medication, and had told her she was fine and had done nothing to regulate the medication.