The Song at the Scaffold, by Getrud von Le Fort, takes place in France during the French Revolution. It is the story of Blanche de la Force and her journey to understanding the meaning behind her unusual fear and discovering her vocation in life, and ultimately a story of bravery and heroism. After a traumatic birth, young Blanche is forever scarred, and her external expression of this ordeal is an irrational fear at nearly anything. She grows up timid and afraid, unable to muster any sort of courage, although she often attempts to overcome her fear. Later, she joins a Carmelite Convent, and it is here her journey truly begins. It is also at the Convent that she meets Sister Marie of the Incarnation, the novice mistress. Although Sister Marie is protective of Blanche, even she eventually becomes impatient and annoyed at Blanche’s feebleness and often perplexing fear. Sister …show more content…
Blanche is fearful until the end, even to the point of running away from the convent because she did not want to be caught. But when the last two voices singing the Veni Creator are stopped, Blanche takes up the song and sings the last verse. Her face was “absolutely fearless”(75), Her voice was clear, she sang “without a tremor, exulting like a bird!”(75). Her fear had been overcome at last, and she was ready to die for Our Lord by sacrificing her own life. Sister Marie, craving martyrdom from the start, was filled with anguish when she heard. She broke into tears, declaring that she had wanted to be the last one to sing, as it is for whoever is last that dying is the hardest of all. It is at this moment she realizes that she is called to martyrdom too, but in a different way. Abbé Kiener tells her “Sacrifice your voice also, my daughter. Yield up your voice to the very last one.”(73). Both Blanche and Sister Marie were called to martyrdom, sacrificing life and
“If thou feelst it will relieve thy suffering, speak out the name of thy fellow sinner. Be not silent because thou wouldst protect him.” (Hawthorne 21). This was said by Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, one of the main characters of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel, The Scarlet Letter. He says this to his secret lover, Hester, as she stands on the scaffold in front of the entire Puritan community that the story takes place in. She is standing there with her three-month old child, Pearl, as a part of her punishment for her sin of committing adultery. The purpose of the scaffold in this novel is to represent the shame and torture that Hester and Dimmesdale each handle alone and to show how hypocritical and judgmental the Puritans were.
In the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne three major events occur on the town scaffold. The scaffold serves as a place of public humiliation and shame. Hawthorne places three events that occur on the scaffold that play a major role. The first appearance of the scaffold is when Hester serves her time of public humiliation. The second appearance of the scaffold scene is throughout the middle of the novel when Hester, Pearl, and Dimmesdale arrive together on the scaffold. Hawthorne then brings the three back together once again in the third scaffold scene to end the tragic story of the Scarlet Letter. The three scaffold scenes play major roles throughout Hester and Dimmesdale’s life.
The first scaffold scene takes place at the very beginning of the story. In this particular scene, Hester has moments before walked from the prison door carrying her baby and donning the scarlet letter, which stands for adultery. She must make this procession in front of the entire town. After the march, Hester is forced to stand alone on the scaffold until an hour past noon.
In the short story “Being There”, by Jerzy Kosinski, there are multiple examples of satire that are displayed throughout both the book and the movie. A few of them are: media, death, politics, and racism. The satire of the media was very similar in the book and the movie. Media played a big role in society and still does to this day.
The first thing I noticed about Kate Chopin’s “The Storm,” is that it is utterly dripping with sexual imagery and symbolism. Our heroine, if you will, seems to be a woman with normally restrained passions and a well-defined sense of propriety, who finds herself in a situation that tears down her restraint and reveals the vixen within. I wonder if it was intentional that the name Calixta makes me think of Calypso – the nymph from Greek mythology. If half of the sexual symbolism I found in this story was intentional, Chopin was a genius. I was quite taken with the sexual imagery of the colors mentioned: white, and red. There is also mention a place called Assumption, while there’s nothing written on it in the bible, I believe it’s the popular opinion of those of Christian faiths, that Mary (Jesus’ mother) going to heaven was called “The Assumption.” Again, I cannot accept that as merely a happy coincidence, I believe its mention in the story was intentional. Finally, we have the storm, so central to the theme of the story that it was named for it. In this work, as well as others by Chopin, there is a recurring theme of infidelity, or women behaving in ways that society generally doesn’t accept, women behaving badly, if you will, I cannot help but wonder if Kate Chopin used her writing to express desires that she would not otherwise have expressed.
After Alan’s death, she was plagued by the death of her relatives. Stella moved away and did not have to deal with the agony Blanche faced each day. Blanche was the one who stuck out with her family at Belle Reve, where she had to watch as each of her remaining family members passed away. “I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths are a shame!
This section represents a tranquil interval. It is a summer evening in the country and he hears two shepherds piping. The tranquil moment of the quiet summer evening alone with the pastoral duet fills his heart with an unfamiliar calm. Suddenly she appears and her appearance causes an emotional response of sorrowful loneliness. The 4th movement: March to the Scaffold.
- “For not having enough dedication to here duties as religious woman and dedicating too much time to ‘profane literature’”. But the implicit problem was that she did not fulfill the social role created for the women of that moment.
A theme in which plays an important part in the novel, The Awakening, is that choices have inevitable consequences. This is connected with Realism because a big belief in Realism is; ethical choices are often the subject, character is more important than action and plot. In multiple cases in this novel, the reader sees the type of choices the characters make and the effects and outcomes that follow after them. Also in some ways, people change their personality and their change in character adds a part in their future. Leonce choice of how he views Edna and he treats her have an effect on him and consequences on and her. Edna is a big part of this novel being the main protagonist and all of her ethical choices that have an enormous consequence on her. Some of these choices are, wanting to be with Robert, to follow the path of Mademoiselle Reisz and becoming an artist, and ultimately deciding to take her life.
The drama is basically about a married couple -Stella and Stanley Kowalski- who are visited by Stella's older sister, Blanche. The drama shows the caustic feelings of these people putting Blance DuBois in the center. The drama tells the story of the pathetic mental and emotional demise of a determined, yet fragile, repressed and delicate Southern lady born to a once-wealthy family of Mississippi planters.3 No doubt that the character of Blanche is the most complex one in the drama. She is truly a tragic heroine.
As Stanley continues torturing Blanche and draws Stella and Mitch away from her, Blanche’s sanity slowly dwindles. Even though she lied throughout the play, her dishonesty becomes more noticeable and irrational due to Stanley's torment about her horrible past. After dealing with the deaths of her whole family, she loses Belle Reve, the estate on which her and her sister grew up. This is too much for Blanche to handle causing her moral vision to be blurred by “her desperate need to be with someone, with ancestors for models who indulged in “epic fornications” with impunity, [Blanche] moves through the world filling the void in her life with lust” (Kataria 2). She also loses a young husband who killed himself after she found out he was gay when she caught him with another man. After that traumatic experience she needed “a cosy nook to squirm herself into because ...
One of the first major themes of this book is the constant battle between fantasy and reality. Blanche explains to Mitch that she fibs because she refuses to accept the hand fate has dealt her. Lying to herself and to others allows her to make life appear as it should be rather than as it is. Stanley, a practical man firmly grounded in the physical world, disdains Blanche’s fabrications and does everything he can to unravel them. The relationship between Blanche and Stanley is a struggle between appearances and reality. It propels the play’s plot and creates an overarching tension. Ultimately, Blanche’s attempts to rejuvenate her life and to save Stella from a life with Stanley fail. One of the main ways the author dramatizes fantasy’s inability to overcome reality is through an explorati...
...es and thinks that her hopes will not be destroyed. Thirdly, Blanche thinks that strangers are the ones who will rescue her; instead they want her for sex. Fourthly, Blanche believes that the ones who love her are trying to imprison her and make her work like a maid imprisoned by them. Fifthly, Blanche’s superiority in social status was an obscure in her way of having a good social life. Last but not least, Blanche symbolizes the road she chose in life- desire and fantasy- which led her to her final downfall.
‘The Varsouviana rises audibly as Blanche enters the bedroom.’ implies Blanches tension rises with the music. The stage direction ‘[with faintly hysterical vivacity]’ suggests Blanches delirium and insanity. Her fantasy is encouraged by Stella and Eunice as they allow her to live in her dream-world rather than face society, as a way of being empathetic and expressing sympathy for
One cant imagine how it must feel to lose the ones they love and hold dear, but to stay afterwards and mourn the loss of the many is unbearable. Blanche has had a streak of horrible luck. Her husband killing himself after she exposed her knowledge about his homosexuality, her advances on young men that led to her exile and finally her alcoholism that drew her life to pieces contemplated this sorrow that we could not help but feel for Blanche throughout the drama. Blanche’s desire to escape from this situation is fulfilled when she is taken away to the insane asylum. There she will have peace when in the real world she only faces pain.