Power in Browning’s My Last Duchess and Cheever’s The Five-Forty-Eight
"That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall," begins Robert Browning’s "My Last Duchess" (594). The Duke of Ferrara, Italy makes a dramatic monologue to the count’s representative in poetic form. The count, being a friend of the Duke’s, has offered to provide the Duke’s next wife. The Duke informs the representative of all the habits he found annoying in his former Duchess as an instruction of the customs his next wife should and should not do; or she will find the same fate as his previous wife. He found these habits so annoying that he had her killed. The power that the Duke has starkly contrasts with the helplessness Miss Dent feels in John Cheever’s "The Five-Forty-Eight." Blake hires Miss Dent as his secretary, after she has been in the hospital for eight months. She is very grateful to Blake for giving her the position because she has had a difficult time finding a job due to her prolonged stay in the hospital. Miss Dent forms an affection for Blake, who uses her vulnerability to carry on a one-night stand with her. The next day he has her fired while she is at lunch and he then takes the afternoon off from work. Miss Dent tries to contact Blake every day for the next few weeks, but he avoids her until she finally confronts him in hostility. The presence or absence of power in Miss Dent’s or the Duke’s lives is the impacting factor in their personalities, "love lives," and the concluding results each of them gains.
Power, or the lack of it, forms the Duke’s and Miss Dent’s personalities. The Duke achieves his initial power from his materialistic strengths. A few of these are emphasized in lines 27-29 at which point he states "The bough of cherries some officious fool/ Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule/ She rode with round the terrace" (594). His home life includes an assemblage of servants and maids, whom he passingly refers to as "officious fool[s]." He has an enormous house that extends onto a terrace, where the Duchess rides her white mule, and then on into an array of gardens, from these orchards her cherries are picked. Not so fortunate is Miss Dent who lives in "a room that seem[s]...like a closet" (81).
Harte showed Duchess’s emotional side of her. Her “...pent-up feelings found vent in a few hysterical tears...” (Harte, 2) shows the Duchess as emotional, a drama queen, spontaneous and impulsive. This was before she changed, though. “The Duchess, previously a selfish and solitary character, does all she can to comfort and console the fearful Piney.” (Moss and Wilson, 4) Duchess's character reveals that people can switch their habits no matter what the circumstances
Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is a haunting poem that tells the story of a seemingly perfect wife who dies, and then is immortalized in a picture by her kind and loving husband. This seems to be the perfect family that a tragic accident has destroyed. Upon further investigation and dissection of the poem, we discover the imperfections and this perfect “dream family” is shown for what it really was, a relationship without trust.
Literary Analysis of Audre Lorde's Power. Audre Lorde uses her poetic prose to express her feelings of anger and fury over an unfortunate incident which occurred in New York City in the late 1970's. She shares her outrage and disgust at a racist society that can allow a child's death to be buried with no true justice found to help resolve the loss of an innocent child. Audre Lorde adopted an African name at the end of her life, Gamba Adisa, which means "Warrior-She Who Makes Her Meaning Known."
Beginning with Mrs. Hopewell, the title of the story comes from what she likes to call the poorer and less fortunate people that live off the land and work their whole lives just to hang on to some scrap of a life. This is how she views these people. She believes that they are good country people not a bad seed among them, that they are all eager to help out and bow in humility to the upper class. The gullible nature of Mrs. Hopewell betrays her true vision of a situation. She is one of those people who are all goody-goody to people who they view as less fortunate. She’s a person that commends or speaks for the people she knows nothing about. Altogether this is her true weakness that is taken advantage of by Manley Pointer. One of ...
Outsourcing is a complicated and a multifaceted subject that involves a “business[’s] purchase of parts or labor from another company rather than maintaining a sufficient enough number of its own employees to do the same work in the country where the company is already based” ("Outsourcing"). The first practice of outsourcing was in medieval times when “nation-states called in soldiers-for-hire to help their own military forces during ongoing conflicts” ("Outsourcing"). Many think of outsourcing as a one way trade of production facilities moving outside of a companies locale but in actuality it is a two way trade that also involves companies from other areas moving their factories to local areas where conditions are beneficial for the specific business. Outsourcing has evolved but the main idea has remained the same. The recent increase in outsourcing “was initiated by Wall Street pressures on corporations . . . . for increased profits . . . in the production of goods and services marketed in the U.S."(Roberts).
Opposed to widespread belief of outsourcing threatening the labor of United States economy it has been seen that businesses have been able to extract a multitude of benefits through the outsourcing which has in turn created a number of employment opportunities along with it. When the stock market plummeted; companies began to discharge distress signals and corporations commenced labor cutbacks, as a result of which unemployment began to increase greatly. In times when the recession was reaching its peak, the only alternative was to look for cheap labor and ou...
In many cases outsourcing has proven to be beneficial for businesses. It can help a business’s management by allowing executives to focus on the core structure of the firm rather than every specific element. Production, manufacturing, or additional servic...
Information Security (INFOSEC) consultants help client companies through strategic partnerships (Ghodeswar & Vaidyanathan, 2008). A short review of United States outsourcing creates a prospective baseline for outsourcing endeavors of private institutions (Ghodeswar & Vaidyanathan, 2008). Despite the fact that the vendor has accountability and duties (detailed in the statement of work), the client is predominantly in charge of supervising strategic partnerships (Ghodeswar & Vaidyanathan, 2008).
Kibbe, C. (2004, 07 09). Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the inevitable. New Hampshire Business Review, pp. 1A-21A.
There are many benefits to outsourcing, many reasons that company has to outsource some of its business. According to Robin Gareiss, “The No. 1 reason companies turn to outsourcers is to save money--64% say that’s the main goal of their outsourcing contracts” (3). Companies are able to save money because they outsource to another country, and the third party that is in the outsourcing contract, runs the business in that country and is able to pay wages in accordance with that country’s laws, which for the most part there are none. The business usually outsources to a developing nation, and as a result can pay much, much lower wages than if it were to stay within the US. This cost-saving idea has become a much strong reason for outsourcing since the economy has been in a recession, a...
This is about how a man broke into the orchard, took a bunch of cherry
Thesis: Catherine’s superiority complex, wildness, manipulativeness, and frivolousness make her the source of Heathcliff’s revengeful actions and further deterioration and thus, she can be recognized as the catalyst for the horrors that occur in the novel. Her tactlessness not only causes Heathcliff’s downfall, but her own dramatic end.
Outsourcing has been around for many years. In this paper I will discuss some of the history of outsourcing, the goods things about outsourcing, and the bad things about outsourcing.
In "My Last Duchess", by Robert Browning, the character of Duke is portrayed as having controlling, jealous, and arrogant traits. These traits are not all mentioned verbally, but mainly through his actions. In the beginning of the poem the painting of the Dukes wife is introduced to us: "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,/ looking as of she were still alive" (1-2). These lines leave us with the suspicion that the Duchess is no longer alive, but at this point were are not totally sure. In this essay I will discuss the Dukes controlling, jealous and arrogant traits he possesses through out the poem.
Throughout "My Last Duchess," Browning uses diction to further increase the haunting effect of his dramatic monologue. His precise and scattered word choice is meant to make the reader recognize the underlying haughtiness in his speech to the Count's emissary. The Duke refers to his former wife's portraits "depth" and "passion" in order to place a cloudiness over the realism of the painting. This, along with the "faint" and "half-flush" appearance that "dies along her throat," brings about an overcast appearance to the poem. The Duke's "trifling" lack of "countenance" is evident in his jealousy of