People in the novels Brave New World, A Tale of Two Cities, and the play A Doll House show similar interests about becoming individuals and wanting freedom from a dominate figure in their life, and those characteristics seemed to be a repeating pattern among all three books. Respectively, each book has a sort of uprise from the oppressed demanding the authoritative husband, nation, and even society to provide that party a better life unlike the one they live presently. From A Tale of Two Cities the Marquis explains, “Repression is the only lasting philosophy, the dark deference of fear and slavery...will keep the dogs obedient to the whip” (A Tale of Two Cities p. 128) and this is what I challenge. If repression is the only lasting philosophy, …show more content…
then a question needs to be asked, will the dark respect of fear and slavery keep the peasants in line? Fear is effective on Nora from A Doll House and the characters within A Tale of Two Cities, fear is proven to be an efficient tool to keep those who are not influential under control so the influential can obtain more capability to repress. What happens when the people who are oppressed have had enough of the tyranny put upon them? The people will inevitably form a rebellion, and get revenge on the dominate figure. Nora is able to make a harsh decision that Torvald isn’t expecting, eventually leading him to offer to give up the dominance he’s shown over her so she doesn’t leave him and the kids, but even this doesn’t work to make her stay. People want more than the monster oppressing to turn over power, they want them to pay for the harm they’ve done to the masses. Certainly a large group of people could do harm to the repressors, and this is what we see with the french revolution. To keep the common person under them, the Leaders of France heavily taxed peasants so they couldn’t afford to eat or sustain a steady job.
The people of France had no real opportunity to rise up past being peasants all their lives due to overpopulation ,and most of them will inevitably meet their demise due to starvation. Additionally, as an example from A Tale of Two Cities, when a wine cask falls and breaks the wine spills all over the cobblestone, and the peasants, in a frantic motion, try to drink the wine as fast as they can and some of them even chewed on the soaked red wood from the cask. That paints an image of how desperate those people are to drink some wine off a bacteria ridden street, and do whatever it takes just to get a drop of something to moisten their dry mouths. To a degree the reader is able to observe the crowd of people fighting over this wine, and it shows they could do this with the French government in a larger scale. The people have been in desperation for food and water for so long that the automatic response is to lick wine off the road, the scene should resonate with the reader because it shows a form of conditioning. Fear strikes horror in the minds of people, and it’s very effective as a classical conditioning tactic, as we’ve seen in the book Brave New World. I find it astonishing the classical conditioning treatment that the director has the nurses apply to the children to produce a scared and avoidance response, thus creating a response to travel generating it undesirable and causing work to subsequently be more important in their
mind. Undoubtedly, amidst the conditioning process the nurses are giving the delta children to despise books and flowers, is a way to oppress a populous and allow them to conform in a way that the director knows they wouldn’t want to learn anymore than what they're given in hyp_____. This process facilitates their status as factory workers for their entirety in this world, no one is their own person. But even though it sounds like the Delta’s have it bad, they don’t. Gammas and Epsilons are created to be unsatisfactory, usually handicapped, “creatures” who will be servants to the prestigious class of Beta’s. With the divisions of class seen in this book, the oppression is blatantly shown. I find this quote from Brave New World especially eye opening displaying the constant community education the people are taught, “For I am you and you are I.” (p.82). They create an unity, a bond, when being taught this. Everyone knows the same basic information Each one of the novels outlines a specific fear, and outlines a certain slavery vibe. Brave New World displayed the slavery in an utopian society where the populace doesn’t know they’re apart of a world that has taken away their individual rights, they are programed to do what the world controller want them to do not what they want to do as their own self. Repression will always be present, but once the people of that society start to realize, if ever, they’ve been brainwashed into believing this faulty society is perfect, then we will see upheaval and people breaking away from the slavery they’ve been put into without their say.
Those who choose to reject the pressures society employs to keep people docile and impressionable are punished. Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a prime example of those perspectives. Nurse Ratched used rules and psychological abuse to chip away at the individualism of her patients and gain power over them. McMurphy showed these oppressed people how to combat their oppressor and think for themselves. He was punished by Ratched, but served as a martyr for freedom and inspired Bromden to reject his imprisonment and escape the institution. However, we are forced to question whether Bromden actually escaped and on top of that, whether or not escape is even possible. The open-endedness of the story leaves the reader to question their individual essence, how they are being affected by their society, and if human beings are able to completely reject society while maintaining their
Fear is a powerful emotion. Wikipedia.com describes fear as “an emotion induced by threat perceived by living entities, which causes a change in brain and organ function and ultimately change behavior, such as running away, hiding or freezing from traumatic events.”Most people tend to avoid fearful situations, not realizing that something positive may come out of the event or experience. Victor Villaseñor focuses on the topic of fear in his novel titled Burro Genius. Villaseñor demonstrates to readers how growing up he was extremely fearful of any situation. Victor also tells his readers how he turned his fear into motivation into motivation to keep going and reach his ultimate goal of becoming a published author.
In society, people are oppressed in many ways, such as blacks not being able to vote back in the 60’s, or women not having as many rights as men. There are many social constraints that hold people back from their dreams and desires. The two novels, Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton and Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, both accurately portray the power of social constraints. In each novel the main character struggles with the tremendous impact of social constraints on their lives but their is a great difference between repression and oppression.
Comparing A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof In the game of life, a man is given the option to bluff, raise, or fold. He is dealt a hand created by the consequences of his choices or by outside forces beyond his control. It is a never ending cycle: choices made create more choices. Using diverse, complex characters simmering with passion and often a contradiction within themselves, Tennessee Williams examines the link between past and present created by man's choices in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. "
In “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell and “A Dollhouse” by Henrik Ibsen, the authors use symbolism to shed light on the way woman were once looked down upon by men. In both plays the woman face similar derisive attitudes from the men in their lives. Women are treated as property, looked down upon and only useful in matters pertaining to cooking, taking care of children, housework and sexual objects. The women’s marriages, socioeconomic and social status are completely different, but both women reach their emotional breaking point, and grow so discontent with their situations they are willing to take drastic actions.
In Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," the main character is a woman who has been controlled and conformed to the norms of society. Louise Mallard has apparently given her entire life to assuring her husband's happiness while forfeiting her own. This truth is also apparent in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. In this story, Nora Helmer has also given her life to a man who has very little concern for her feelings or beliefs. Both of these characters live very lonely lives, and both have a desire to find out who they really are and also what they are capable of becoming. Although the characters of Nora and Louise are very much alike in many ways, their personalities differ greatly when it comes to making decisions regarding the direction of their lives.
The book has four metaphors, all of which have a significant part in the understanding of the novel. The first metaphor the readers encounter is the broken wine cask. The wine cask represents the plight of the poor and the blood of the revolution. The scene explicitly describes the people literally licking the streets and dripping the wine into the mouths of their children. The novel states, “Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish.” The novel also shows the wine cask as a metaphor for the blood of the revolution. The red color of the wine is similar to that of rich, red blood, shed by many because of the plight of the poor experienced in France. The second metaphor would be revealed as the grind stone. The grind stone, which was used to grind the food the poor needed so badly, later became used to sharpen the tools the poor would use to overthrow the government. The grindstone became a metaphor of killing and empowered poor throughout the novel. The third metaphor is the shadow. A shadow represents the great unknown, the great unexpected. Not a single person may prepare for the unknown. None of the characters could prepare for the events that came about in the plot, such as the denouncement of
Fear motivates many people to act upon matters, right or wrong. This emotion has been important in many events in both works of literature, and in the real world. It has forced military geniuses into retreat, and influenced them to plan another method of attack. Fear can be both a positive and a negative acting force in one’s life, a quality that can motivate one to success as well as to downfall.
Imagine living in a society where there is no sense of independence, individual thought, or freedom. A society where the government uses disturbing methods that dehumanize people in order to force conformity upon them. Taking away any sense of emotion, it would be very undesirable to live in a society with such oppression. Such society is portrayed in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World. The World State uses social restrictions to create permanent artificial personalities for people within the society.
The feminist Lois Wyse once stated, “Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths.” Women should express remorse for their strengths, when men should feel guilt when exposing their weaknesses. Wyse believed that women should have been able to show their strengths in their oppressive societies instead of covering them up. The 19th century setting in the two plays, A Doll House and Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, caused much grief in both Nora and Hedda. They both lived in Europe during the 1800’s where males dominated the way society ran. Ibsen created an environment for women to question the society they lived in. Nora and Hedda, two feminists living in a masculine household bereft of happiness, desired to evade their unhappy life at home under the guidance of a man. Eventually, both women escaped from their husband’s grasps, but Hedda resorted to suicide in order to leave. Nora agreed with Lois Wyse by showing her strengths with pride to everybody, while Hedda hid her strengths like a coward by killing herself. Ibsen used numerous literary elements and techniques to enhance his writing and to help characterize the two protagonists. Nora, characterized as a benevolent and strong person, left her husband to explore the beliefs in society and to interpret ideas herself. Unlike Nora, the belligerent, selfish Hedda destroyed the lives of people around her just to take her own life in the end. Even though it appeared that Nora abandoned all responsibility for her children and hid an insidious secret from her husband, Nora showed greater fortitude than Hedda in the way she faced the obstacles of her life.
"A Doll's House" (1879) and "Death of a Salesman" (1949) are plays written by Henric Ibsen and Henry Miller respectively. And, although they were published in different centuries, and "A Doll's House" was written seventy years before than "Death of a Salesman" Nora's portrayal of the wife's role is much more modern, liberal and less chauvinist than Linda's. Nora and Linda's main differences are reflected in their way of acting towards their husbands, their children and them selves; how they each see life.
A Doll 's house is one of the modern works that Henrik Ibsen wrote. He was called the father of modern drama .He was famous for writing plays that related to real life. A Doll 's House is a three-act play that discusses the marriage in the 19th century. It is a well-made play that used the first act as an exposition. The extract that will be analyzed in the following paragraphs is a dialogue between Nora and the nurse that takes care of her children. This extract shows how she was afraid not only of Krogstad blackmail, but also of Torvald 's point of view about those who committed any mistake. Torvald says that the mothers who tell lies should not bring up children as they are not honest . Nora is also lying to her family and to Torvald. So she is afraid because she thinks she maybe 'poisoning ' her own children. The analysis of this extract will be about of Nora 's character, the theme, and the language in A Doll 's House.
The theme of appearance and reality is an essential tool for many dramatists. Although appearance and reality contrast heavily with each other, writers use them to convey underlying messages in their works. William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen use the theme of appearance and reality in A Midsummer Night's Dream and A Doll's House in order to highlight the downsides to love.
The literary work, A Doll’s House, was written by Henrik Ibsen and has been a historical work of literature since the late 1800’s. There are many themes through out the story that impose the different ideals of the 1870’s. Many of the characters reflect the time period through the positions they hold, the activities they do, as well as how they behave and act. Torvald Helmer and his wife Nora traditionally represent the upper-middle class in the way they present themselves, what types of activities they engage in, as well as what they do as an everyday task.
A Doll House was one of Henrik Ibsen's most controversial plays. He wrote this realistic play in 1879. Ibsen's writing style of realism was clearly shown in this play. This play was controversial at the time it was written, shocking conservative readers. But, at the same time, the play served as a rallying point for supporters of a drama with different ideas.