Elements of Fiction in Danielle Steel’s Mixed Blessings
Danielle Steel, in her work of fiction, Mixed Blessings, has effectively used plot, setting, and theme as she weaves a powerful tale of three couples who face decisions about having children that will test, in unexpected ways, the ties that bind them as lovers, partners, and friends. Steel has used these elements to emphasize that there are people who have such a great need and love for children. In Mixed Blessings, she represents women radically and optimistically as shown by Diana Goode, Barbie Mason, and Pilar Graham, unlike the negative representation of womanhood in the movie version of her other novel, The Ring, where Kassandra feels that taking her own life would save her children and her husband from the shame of her unfaithfulness.
First, there is a major plot structure in Mixed Blessings, the plot of complications. Right from the beginning, Steel portrays the female characters in terms of their dreams, careers, and their curiosity about having a family. For instance, Diana is the middle child amongst three sisters; her goal is to classically strive to be better, smarter, and more successful. She feels that she has to achieve something more than her sisters have done. Gayle, Diana’s older sister has a dream of attending medical school, but she happily succumbs to marriage temptation. In fact, in Steel’s own words Gayle’s situation is described as:
Her oldest sister, Gayle, had been set on going to medical school until she met her husband in her first year of premed, married him that June, and instantly got pregnant. . . . Gayle never looked back at a career in medicine once. She was happily married, and satisfied to stay home with her girls and keep busy with them and her husband. She was the perfect doctor’s wife, intelligent, informed, and completely understanding about his hours as an obstetrician. (6)
As the plot progresses, Diana has her own complications from the Intrauterine Device (IUD) she has been using for the past eighteen years. The IUD delayed her from having a child immediately after her marriage.
Another aspect of plot that Steel has used in this novel is the reversal of fortune, where Diana, the young elegant looking woman, who knows where she is going and what she wants out of life, ends up being frustrated about inability to have a child.
Like the Good Other Woman, the Evil Other Woman often spends much of her life hidden away in the castle, secret room, or whatever, a fact suggesting that even a virtuous woman’s lot is the same she would have merited had she been the worst of criminals. The heroine’s discovery of such Other Women is in the one case an encounter with women’s oppression-their confinement as wives, mothers, and daughters-and in the other with a related repression: the confinement of a Hidden Woman inside those genteel writers and readers who, in the idealization of the heroine’s virtues, displace their own rebellious
These economic models are immensely useful and help us to understand what is going on in the world economically speaking. These particular economic models are usually shown in graph or diagram form as they are clear representations of data. The production possibilities curve is a model used to understand how the economic problem relates to a nation’s productive capacity. The PPC (Production possibilities curve) enables economists to gather information on what level of production is possible when all resources are being used and what will occur when there is no availability or unemployment of particular resources. This particular model, PPC, is represented by a two dimensional diagram, therefore assuming that resources can be used to produce either product on the model. The PPC can clearly visualize opportunity cost between two products as the model demonstrates that to produce more of one good, e.g. vegemite, whilst using the same amount of resources, economies must produce less of the other good, e.g.
portrayed as the “femme fatale” and also “mother,” the “seductress” and at the same time
As the women narrate the harm caused by men, they lose track of the beings that they once were and become different people in order to cause a reaction in others. These women are hurt in ways that cause them to change their way of living. The Lady in Blue becomes afraid of what others will think of her because a man impregnated her: “i cdnt have people [/] lookin at me [/] pregnant [/] I cdnt have my friends see this” (Shange, Abortion Cycle # 1 Lines 14- 16). Instead of worrying about the life of her child, she worries about how her...
...hree women of one family as being women of extremes. These women are bound together through generations of being away. Someone who is away is there in body, but not in mind, they know only of their new state of mind. The women are connected to each other genetically and spiritually. They connect through their distinct landscapes and where they have lived. They are all connected to the water and the forest and they continue to live the life of the tortured Irish. The women all share relationships with men. They are very similar, but Eileen is the only one who gets to be with her man for an extended period of time and is the only one that bares a child from that man. The women of the family are connected through their experiences in life. The women are connected both genetically and experientially.
Kate Chopin is very well known for her extremely unique writing. Not only are her works striking of feminism, but the way she approached topics were not easily tolerated at that time especially for her gender. Many of her stories tie into marriage and the unhappiness that it brings. In Desiree’s Baby Chopin says, “And the very spirit of Satan seemed suddenly to take hold of him…” Comparing the woman’s husband to that of Satan shows the intensity of disgust between the two in the relationship. Strong statements such as these are often seen in “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour.” In Chopin’s life she was married, and her stories lead me to believe that she viewed her marriage as a trap and suffered from lack of privacy and control. Despite how provoking Chopin’s works were she was long ignored by readers and critics until her stories hit the surface in the 1960’s and became more popular. The women in her stories are constantly seeking freedom, lust, and attention.
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While it has traditionally been men who have attached the "ball and chain" philosophy to marriage, Kate Chopin gave readers a woman’s view of how repressive and confining marriage can be for a woman, both spiritually and sexually. While many of her works incorporated the notion of women as repressed beings ready to erupt into a sexual a hurricane, none were as tempestuous as The Storm.
... of tragedy and lets her be the diamond in the rough. She is the one person whose vision is unaltered from the very beginning of the book and to her the other survivors draw their own courage.
During the course of the spring semester, as a class, we read and watched movies about fallen women and femme fatale in American Literature. Throughout each piece that we studied, I have chosen a book and a movie that I believe will compare and contrast effectively. We watched a movie in class written by J.F. Lawton called Pretty Woman, a movie that made a tragedy into a love story. This story exposed the life of a prostitute in Los Angeles, California. The prostitute, Vivian, happened to give directions to a rich man because he was lost, which led to her staying the night in his hotel room. The man needed Vivian to be his date on a social outing, which later led to more. On the other hand, during the semester we read a book by James M. Cain titled The Postman Always Rings Twice, a book that verbalized a forceful story. The story was about a girl named Cora, a prostitute who lives in a hash house. Then along the way she meets a man named Nick, whom she eventually marries. However Cora has a discomfort of being around her husband that provided her with a pretty virtuous lifestyle. Her solution to her discomfort creates problems that lead to more threatening problems. The movie and the book were both about women being saved from a place they felt undesirable. One fell in love after prostitution while the other never felt love. Now, with that in mind, The Postman Always Rings Twice is more realistic because Cora’s life explains the outcome of a prostitute that readers can relate to unlike Vivian from the movie Pretty Woman whose life is not a realistic outcome that readers can relate to.
Riding, Christine; Riding, Jacqueline, eds. (2000). The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture. London: Merrell Publishers. ISBN 978-1858941127.
In a nation brimming with discrimination, violence and fear, a multitudinous number of hearts will become malevolent and unemotional. However, people will rebel. In the eye-opening novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns written by Khaled Hosseini, the country of Afghanistan is exposed to possess cruel, treacherous and sexist law and people. The women are classified as something lower than human, and men have the jurisdiction over the women. At the same time, the most horrible treatment can bring out some of the best traits in victims, such as consideration, boldness, and protectiveness. Although, living in an inconsiderate world, women can still carry aspiration and benevolence. Mariam and Laila (the main characters of A Thousand Splendid Suns) are able to retain their consideration, boldness and protectiveness, as sufferers in their atrocious world.
Haynes, William M.., and David R. Lide. CRC handbook of chemistry and physics a ready-reference book of chemical and physical data : 2012-2013. 93e édition. ed. Boca Raton (Fla.): CRC Press, 2012. Print.
The production possibility frontier (PPF) is a curve depicting all maximum output possibilities for two goods, given a set of inputs consisting of resources and other factors. When predicting the production possibility frontiers for Brazil and United States the following factors such as labor, capital and technology, among others, will affect the resources available, which will dictate where the production possibility frontier lies. The production possibility frontier is also known as the production possibility curve or the transformation curve would be as follows. The two countries form a synergetic alliance where Brazil exclusively produces clothes while United States exclusively produces soda, with open
V. Amarnath, D. C. Anthony, K. Amarnath, W. M. Valentine, L. A. Wetterau, D. G. J. Org. Chem. 1991, 56, p. 6924-6931.