The Awakening - The Birds, The Lovers And The Widow Essays

The Awakening - The Birds, The Lovers And The Widow In the novel, The Awakening there are several motifs or images that assist in developing Edna Pontellier in her awakening, the birds, the lovers and the woman and black all prove to be important parts in this. It is significant that The Awakening opens with two caged birds. Throughout the novel, Edna feels that marriage enslaves her to an identity she for which she is not suited. The parrot is an expensive bird valued for its beauty. The mockingbird is fairly common and plain, and it is valued for the music it provides. These two birds function as metaphors for the position of women in late Victorian society. Women are valued for their physical appearance and the entertainment they can provide for the men in their lives. Like parrots, they are not expected to voice opinions of their own, but to repeat the opinions that social convention defines as proper or respectable. The parrot shrieks Go away! Damnation! These are the first lines of The Awakening, and they signal the essentially tragic nature of the novel. The parrot speaks French, a little Spanish, and a language which nobody understood. Again, the parrot serves as a metaphor for Edna's predicament. As she becomes more defiant, she voices unconventional opinions about the sacred institutions of marriage, gender, and motherhood. Later in the novel, Mademoiselle uses wings as a metaphor for Edna's decision to defy social conventions. She warns Edna, 138 When she asks where Edna wants to soar, she means to ask Edna if she is sure that she can escape her gilded cage. If she fails, she will become one of the sad spectacles of the birds that fail. At the end of the novel, a bird with a broken wing sinks into the surf. The bird symbolizes Edna's failure to achieve the very goal that has driven her actions the entire time. In the end, Edna's freedom takes place in death. This is the choice that social convention allows her. Throughout the entire novel, the two young lovers are usually represented in conjunction with the woman in black. The two lovers are important symbols in The Awakening. Since the lovers always appear in conjunction with the woman in black, they foreshadow the eventual failure of Robert and Edna's love for one another. The contrast between the woman in black and the young lovers has a symbolic relationship to the love between Robert and Edna. The woman in black represents the logical conclusion to the conventional woman's life if her husband dies first. However, there is no old couple to represent Robert and Edna's contented futures. Therefore, the lovers and the woman in black foreshadow the failure of their love. Furthermore, there is no figure to symbolize the old age of the rebellious woman represented in Edna. The absence of this figure foreshadows Edna's suicide at the end of the novel. It implies that Edna must choose between conforming to social conventions or disappearing fro m the symbolic scene of the stages of a Victorian woman's life. English Essays

Speak No Evil essays

Speak No Evil essays Freedom of expression, and open access to media, are as fundamental to the survival of Progress as the sun and rain are to the survival of planet Earth. Yet censorship remains a traditional response of any group that finds itself offended at another's message or creative indulgence. The argument that because they serve the "public interest," media should willingly accept a moral arbiter to decide what will and what will not be disseminated is both uninformed and dangerous. The biggest problem is that nobody will have the opportunity to vote for the people charged with determining what information is left on the cutting room floor. Worse yet, certain lower life forms with an eye on world domination will always find ways to apply this primitive form of babysitting to their own sinister ends. Because the new communications paradigm calls only for media to get bigger-not better-access to media is more costly. As corporate interests pool their resources to control the most print and broadcast outlets allowable by law, certain news stories will surely be censored. Media is market-driven (that is, it needs an audience), and less "marketable" stories will always be ignored. For example, only cave dwellers and the cable-TV impaired could have possibly missed NASA's most recent PR coup, the landing of Voyager on Mars. Don't believe that CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, CNBC and all the rest were planning to feature this as a major story from the beginning. The Media spun the Mars story big time because People were interested in it, the same way we are always interested in exploration, at pushing boundaries. It's the same reason the book Undaunted Courage is on the Best Seller list, and why filmmaker Ken Burns (The Civil War, Baseball) is giving Lewis Back to NASA. The story you probab...

Euro-civlization Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Euro-civlization - Essay Example Thus Pope Boniface VIII was tried posthumously for apostasy, murder and sodomy. The Templars were tried as Devil-Invoking heretics. Anyone who could actually read so-called witchcraft texts was often suspected of being in league with the Devil merely because they were literate. Thus the elite were in some way condemned by the spread of a popular culture of fear regarding witchcraft. The "Caroline Code", the basic law code of the Holy Roman Empire (1532) imposed heavy penalties for witchcraft. As society became more literate (due mostly to the invention of the Printing Press in the 1440s), increasing numbers of books and tracts fuelled the witch fears. More people were becoming literate, books were cheaper to print and thus became available in greater numbers and were within reach of more of the population. Witchcraft was thus more likely to occur within the logic of the Witch Craze mindset. A sense of community, both within the wide context of countries and within local areas, was starting to break down because of the growth in a peculiar kind of paranoia. In 1630 the nuns of Loudun provided an interesting view of the Witch Craze and the extremes to which it could go. The nuns conspired to accuse Father Urbain Grandier of witchcraft by faking symptoms of possession and torment. They feigned convulsions, rolled and gibbered on the ground, and accused Grandier of indecencies. Grandier was convicted and burned at the stake. But after his death, and thus after the plot had succeeded, the symptoms of the nuns only grew worse, and they became more and more sexual in nature. This shows the degree of mania and insanity present in such witch trials. Community had often broken down into a series of groups that were always suspicious of others and afraid of being accused themselves. The breakdown of community reflected the wide rift that occurred during the period between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics often accused Protestants of witchcraft, such as when the Jesuits pursued them in Austria for a hundred years after 1560. Protestants in turn did the same, such as occurred during Henry VIII's reign in England in the 1500's. Thus "witch" was used convenient label that could be used as a tool against one's enemies, political, cultural or personal. 2) Language itself-as I have so often mentioned- is a primary source of information about its author's attitudes towards phenomenon described. Do a literary deconstruction of Las Casas' language by making two lists of metaphors- one for Spaniards, the other for Indians- as these appear in his text. It is the tension between theses two sets of images which creates the dynamism in this text. Pay special attention to gender as you do this. Who is masculine, who is feminine and what are the implications thereof Consider the following section from Los Casas' description of the Spanish treatment of the Indians in Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies (1542): Yet into this sheepfold, into this land of meek outcasts there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had been starved for many days. And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during tla! past forty years, down to the present time, for they are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied