Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Love in victorian literature
The Dead summary essay
Love in victorian literature
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Love in victorian literature
The story “The Dead” by James Joyce is about the Christmas party, thrown by the Morkan sisters. But it is mostly about love, lost love and incapability to forget those who have been loved and lost. “He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy. For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul or hers” (145). The relationship between Gabriel and Gretta is just one of the conflicts in this story. His selfishness and focusing on himself makes Gabriel blindness as ignorance of Gretta’s past life. Aunts Kate and Julia Morkan threw a Christmas dance and dinner party. They invited a variety of relatives and friends. The housemaid Lily was anxiously greeting guests. Aunts could not anticipate for the arrival of their favorite nephew, Gabriel, and Gretta. As they arrive, Gabriel tries to talk with housemaid Lily about her love live, but she snaps in answering to his question. Later he joins his aunts and Gretta. Gretta and Gabriel discuss their decision to stay at a hotel after they leave the house. The arrival of drunk Freddy Malins disrupts the conversation. Gabriel takes care of Freddy, so he can join the party while other guests are chatting and dancing. The party continues with a piano performance by Mary Jane. After the performance they start to dance and Gabriel pairs up with Miss Ivors. Just before dinner, Julia sings a song for the guests. The dinner is ready and Gabriel sits at the head of the table to slice the goose. After nagging, everyone start eat, and Gabriel delivers his speech, in which he compliments Kate, Julia, and Mary Jane for their hospitality and talking about this as an Irish strength. Then, he insist... ... middle of paper ... ...Gabriel never asked her about her past loves. “ The smile passed away from Gabriel’s face. A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins”(149). After Gretta told Gabriel about Michael Furey, he looks surprised to find out that she was involved with a boy before meeting him. Whit his selfishness he could care about other people too and not focusing just on himself. Gabriel realizes that at the end of the story but it took the dead Michael Furey to teach him this lesson. The price of settling was reconciled to Gabriel in the end. Both Gretta and Gabriel paid a price of a life without great passions of a lover. Gretta knew the love, while Gabriel realized he had never know that feeling. Could “The Dead” title be a indication to Gretta’s love with someone that was dead instead of the living?
Christmas Eve dinner came about and it became evident that her family had just about taken mixed race to another level. She had a cousin, Rebecca, that was married with a child and their small family was white and Jewish (Senna 296). Danzy’s sister had three children that were half Pakistani and they lived in England (Senna 296). Her brother was married to a Chinese woman and they had a young daughter together (Senna 296.) Carla Latty, Anna’s orphaned daughter, was cohabitating with an Indian woman. Senna discovered that at this family dinner, some of them are blood related and are just meeting for the first time. She recognizes the history that they all share in some shape, form, or fashion. Yet, it is not a day of rainbows and lollipops. Danzy and her sister have hurt each other and there is tension. Her brother and his wife hide their infant in the bedroom upset that the other children present had infected their baby. Her cousin’s daughter has declared herself as a lesbian at the age of eleven. Despite all of the obstacles and hurdles her family has faced, Danzy considers the Christmas Eve dinner “a victory” (Senna 301). Danzy’s brother says that “Anybody who finds him offensive can get the […] out” about a gift given to his child (Senna 300). That was his way of approving the
“Eaters of the Dead” by Michael Crichton is a fiction but with historical background. Through this piece Crichton hopes to express the way of life for the Vikings in the year 922 AD while at the same time creating an entertaining story. Using a manuscript written by Ibn-Fadlan Crichton pieced together a book filled with adventure and excitement. Michael Crichton was born in Chicago, 1942 and always knew he had a talent for writing. He attended Brown University and has since published many books such as “Jurassic Park”, “The Rising Sun”, “Disclosure”, and many more. Several of his books have been made into movies, for example, “Jurassic Park”, “The Lost World”, “Sphere”,
The grandmother who is miserable and mean to everyone, throughout the play she played her part well. There was a time in the story where she took the candies and pretzel behind Jay 's back and him to pay for them even though he takes it. He was so upset, he wanted to leave Uncle Louie to be a gangster to help his father so he could be able to come back for them. Another humorous moment was when Aunt Bella, would constantly go to the movies, and she met an usher name Johnny there and within 10 days he asked her to marry him. She wanted to but scared her mom would say no, and saying yes to giving her five thousand dollars for Johnny to open a restaurant. This was hilarious, who in their right state of mind, meet a guy and say yes to marrying him after such short time meeting
In Night of the Living Dead, the zombies were eventually eliminated. Or were they? Theorists argue that the monster’s elusiveness is due to its physical, psychological and social characteristics that cross the lines of classification. Human’s innate fear of the unknown is due to their inability to make a distinction or draw a clear conclusion. This is explained further in Jeffrey Cohen’s second thesis in “Monster Theory” that claims that; “the monster never escapes” (Cohen, 14). The zombie as a monster can never be destroyed completely and if it is, it leaves a remnant the make people feel uncertain of its destruction. Base on Cohen’s theory, the zombie’s different interpretation allows it to emerge in other forms (a faster, smarter zombie?)
In his novel, Eaters of the Dead, author Michael Crichton shows how the Volga Northmen were able to defeat their foes, the wendol, by using their intellect instead of their weapons. This is seen in four aspects. The theme of the novel is that physical courage is not enough to preserve your culture and lifestyle: intelligence and superior knowledge are absolutely essential. Conflict between the wendol and the Northmen shows which group has the intelligence to eliminate the other. Symbolism of wisdom, knowledge, and the lack of such things are used by Crichton to illustrate this moral. The juxtaposition of characters emphasizes the cleverness of the Volga Northmen compared to the Venden Northmen.
The postwar England of the twenties and thirties was the setting of Evelyn Waugh’s first satirical novels, among which was the Vile Bodies. Waugh, an author mostly known for his highly satirical fiction, published his novel Vile Bodies in 1930 right in the middle of the time-period between the Great Wars. Because of the historical evens that occupied England at that time, much of British Literature of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s was concerned with the Modernist movement, which was occupied with the idea of individualism of the young generation. Through the use of prominent and yet highly satirical characters, Waugh strives to criticize his Modernist generation for its unsuccessful movement into Modernism, both on the individual and political/institutional level. He does so by defining his type-characters as ignorant, self-centered and hypocritical in their disastrous movement toward individualism.
As the living race forgets their deceased counterparts, the dead forget their old lives as well. In one such case, in Act III, Mrs. Gibbs, one such deceased main character, seems totally forgetful of the legacy in which she earned to see Paris in her living life. In the same sense, for the living, when ...
Love, Lust and Death are universal human experiences and perpetual literary themes. "The Loving Dead" blends them in a way that I have never seen before. Amelia Beamer's debut novel involves: Oakland California, twenty-something slackers, their angsts and relationships, and a zombie apocalypse. Its characters are realistically self-centered, its apocalypse realistically dealt with more through text messaging and comment threads than through the main stream media, and its ending is different than any horror/zombie/apocalypse story ending I've ever read or heard of. Frankly, I think that the last ten pages alone are worth the price of admission, but overall this is a fast and rewarding read.
I have done things that I am not proud of and some things that will never be mentioned in public again. In everything that I did wrong I tried to justify or make it seem to be less of a negative act. Tim O'Brien does not do this in his short story named "The Man I Killed." O'Brien instead gives the young Vietnamese man a history, a present, and a whole life. He does this by creating an elaborate story of teenage love, family conflict, and personal pride.
As the first poem in the book it sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. The questions posed about the nature of God become recurring themes in the following sections, especially One and Four. The symbolism includes the image of earthly possessions sprawled out like gangly dolls, a reference possibly meant to bring about a sense of nostalgia which this poem does quite well. The final lines cement the message that this is about loss and life, the idea that once something is lost, it can no longer belong to anyone anymore brings a sense...
Regarding the connection between the aunts and angels, the woman talks about them being her family, and at first you see them as guardians but straight afterwards they are portrayed as prison guards with harmful weapons. This irony plays a strong part in who is meant to play the good guys and who the bad.
The morbid marriage of love and death is not an original topic to postmodernist writing or to Scottish literature. Diverse forms of literature from Greek myth to Shakespearian tragedies have hosted stories of tragic love and romantic deaths, with varying nuances of darkness and romance. Nonetheless, this paper will attempt to establish a link between Ali Smith’s writing, postmodernist fiction and Scottish fantasy, while looking at the topic of love and death in conjunction with the concept of liminality. Liminality (from the Latin limen: limit) is an intermediate state, it refers to passage rituals and to existence between borders. Stories of love and death often suggest the abrupt interruption of the former because of the sudden occurrence of the latter. Sometimes, however, love and death share the same intermediate dimension between life and afterlife: the liminal stage. As this paper will stress, Smith’s writing deals with love and death in the context of liminality. Characters’ identities fluctuate and sometimes crumble altogether. Rational boundaries of time and space lose coherence. Stories develop in the uncanny limbo left after a death or some other form of disappearance. It is in this liminal dimension that love and death are sinisterly married in Smith’s work.
... were still able to have love and care for one another. The first sentence from the poem that says, “ No Madonna and Child could touch” assures this, as it explains that the love they had was stronger than Mary and Christ. This is to show that even though the mother and child were dying, their love for each other was very strong that even death could not pull them apart. Another line from the poem that reads “She held a ghost smile between her teeth” reveals that even though her son is dying, she is trying to stay strong and hold a weak, forced smile to symbolise that she still has love and care for her son. In the quotation, the phrase “ghost smile” is a clear example of having love within death. The idea of the refugees slowly decaying into their deaths yet having love and care for one another makes the presentation of death more beautiful yet heart wrenching.
In `The Sisters', as well as in `The Dead', the principal subject is death, a matter of concern to the young and the old. Death both frightens and fascinates us because of the mystery which surrounds it. In the first story, however, the death of Father Flynn appears more mysterious because of the religious ritual which accompanies it than because of anything intrinsic to death itself. Only the young boy intuits a deeper, symbolic meaning in the event. Yet the reader's attention is focused chiefly on the protocol of the mourning: two candles at the head of the corpse; the chalice `loosely retained' (a telling phrase?) in the dead man's hands; the strong scent of flowers - perhaps to conceal the odour of death; and the slightly comical portrait of the mourners kneeling by the coffin.
The dictionary.com definition of a museum is "a building or place where works of art, scientific specimens, or other objects of permanent value are kept and displayed." What better place to find an object of permanent value than a cemetery. I searched through four museums and could not find anything that peaked my interest into my study of humanities until at last it hit me, a cemetery I had passed countless times as a child that I had never truly thought of at all. At the corner of Cypresswood and I-45 I began to sift into a cemetery that I had no true interest in, or so I thought. The cemetery was home to about sixteen burial plots but one particularly interested me. The headstone read Friedrich August Wunsche, Geb July 20, 1837, Gest May 3, 1897. I decided on this tombstone because of its architecture and time period of the person it commemorated, it is the sole surviving piece for this man to be remembered by. A shrine of sorts to his life, this man lived in the union, probably fought for the confederacy and then died when the United States was once again united. I truly chose this particular headstone because it was different than the rest, most were designed into a more secular way, hearts engraved into them or just simple block headstones with initials carved into them. The cemetery ranged from very ornate with multiple parts and different scripts to the simplest headstones as previously described. The headstone was in a shape of an obelisk similar to that of Egyptians we have studied. An odd occurrence it seemed as the rest of the head stones seemed of the standard variety. I think that this headstone was quite well made as it has survived over one-hundred years with only minor flaws in the architecture. When you really t...