A Romance of the Republic, written by Lydia Maria Child, is an intriguing novel which reflects certain predominant 19th-century views about racism, patriarchy, and class status. One aspect of this story that is unique is the constant use of a flower motif, through which the reader is drawn into a Paradise that is fantastically created, an Eden that is not limited in its range of vision due to the wealth, class, nationality, and color of its individuals, but rather embraces the many hues and varieties of life that any beautiful and perfect garden must possess. Although one could argue that this utopia is never obtainable, Ms. Child successfully demonstrates that a society can be egalitarian, not constructed on class consciousness By allowing numerous characters to be raced as something they are legally not, the novel works to dispel the popular 19th-century belief that what you are assigned at birth must continue throughout your life. The flower motif used here further propagates the feeling of individuals having special beauty whether they are pure bred, prize-winning roses, or a hybrid of several mixes; all are equally beautiful when transplanted side-by-side in Paradise, as is the case with Rosa, Flora, and Tulee. The desire of the author to establish a society that mixes colors and culture is evidenced by Flora’s conversation that states, "They are a good-looking set, between you and I, though they are oddly mixed up. See Eulalia, with her great blue eyes, and her dark eyebrows and eyelashes. Rosen Blumen looks just like a handsome Italian girl. No one would think Lila Blumen was her sister with her German blue eyes, and that fine frizzle of curly light hair. Your great-grandmother gave her the flax, and I suppose mine did the frizzling" (432). All characters were genetically mixed into a beautiful blend that incorporated the best of all By allowing slaves to be the wealthiest of the aristocracy, the unquestioned norms of patriarchal society are broken. By having other slaves given their freedom while being able to live side-by-side, equally with their past owners, the notion of race being the foundation of society’s structure, and class the determiner of position in that edifice, is destroyed because all people can start at the bottom of the ladder and work for a higher goal. The appreciation of many cultures for the unique and various gifts they contribute to their spheres allows those individuals to branch out into other spheres and impact many new clusters of people. Just as Paradise is beautiful, so is equality. This leaves the reader with the logical progression of: 1) Flowers are beautiful: just as all people are beautiful; 2) Flowers are from many genuses and possess many hues: just as people are from many cultures and have many different colors; 3) People of many colors and cultures are beautiful. When all varieties of people are planted in the same garden and live in peaceful coexistence, they will develop their own accepting culture, which is nothing less than
Another factor that clearly brings out the theme is the fact that she claims that orderliness of family roses is her pride. However she may not necessarily be that orderly as depicted in the development of that story. The author of the story Shirley Jackson uses the author and her ambiguous cha...
and beauty are represented by a rose and the laurel, which are both subject to
Fully bloomed roses conjure the image of a flower whose petals are at the stage of falling off.... ... middle of paper ... ... She creates, first, an image of the fish as a helpless captive and the reader is allowed to feel sorry for the fish and even pity his situation as the narrator does.
Beauty can be defined in many ways. Though, regardless of its definition, beauty is confined by four characteristics: symmetry, health, vibrancy and complexity. Michael Pollan, in the book The Botany of Desire, examines our role in nature. Pollan sets out to discovery why the most beautiful flowers have manipulated animals into propagating its genes. Most people believe that humans are the sole domesticators of nature, although, beauty in some sense has domesticated us by making us select what we perceive as beautiful. In flowers, for example, the most attractive ones insure their survival and reproductive success; therefore the tulip has domesticated us in the same way by insuring its reproduction. Whether it is beauty or instinct humans have toward flowers they have nevertheless domesticated us.
Despite the popular belief that all flowers have an equal opportunity when it comes to attracting pollinators the competition over the basic needs of angiosperms causes the practice of deceptive pollination to be very common. Pollination is in most cases a mutualistic relationship that requires some form of benefit to both the pollinator and the flowering plant. The pollinator is attracted to a flower that looks like they can offer food or shelter. However if the flower lacks the benefit of a reward there is a low chance that the pollinator would find the flower desirable enough to pollinate. It is estimated that a large portion of angiosperms are non-rewarding, as a result most rely on the use of other pollination strategies, such as deception to attract pollinators. In deceptive pollination when a flower advertises a reward that they do not actually posses it is known as mimicry. There are two types of mimicry when it comes to deceptive pollination. The awards that the flower mimics are either nutritive or reproductive.
of her own life as well as a critical study of characters and events during the
[Slaves] seemed to think that the greatness of their master was transferable to themselves” (Douglass 867). Consequently, slaves start to identify with their master rather than with other slaves by becoming prejudiced of other slaves whose masters were not as wealthy or as nice as theirs, thereby falling into the traps of the white in which slaves start to lose their
...eing of pure Aryan descent was a survival tactic, he had “…Beautiful blond hair and big, safe blue eyes.” Liesel’s eyes are not just brown. She had “…dangerous eyes. Dark brown. You didn’t really want brown eyes in Germany around that time.”
Although imagery and symbolism does little to help prepare an expected ending in “The Flowers” by Alice Walker, setting is the singular element that clearly reasons out an ending that correlates with the predominant theme of how innocence disappears as a result of facing a grim realism from the cruel world. Despite the joyous atmosphere of an apparently beautiful world of abundant corn and cotton, death and hatred lies on in the woods just beyond the sharecropper cabin. Myop’s flowers are laid down as she blooms into maturity in the face of her fallen kinsman, and the life of summer dies along with her innocence. Grim realism has never been so cruel to the innocent children.
The structure of a society is based on the concept of superiority and power which both “allocates resources and creates boundaries” between factors such as class, race, and gender (Mendes, Lecture, 09/28/11). This social structure can be seen in Andrea Smith’s framework of the “Three Pillars of White Supremacy.” The first pillar of white supremacy is the logic of slavery and capitalism. In a capitalist system of slavery, “one’s own person becomes a commodity that one must sell in the labor market while the profits of one’s work are taken by someone else” (Smith 67). From this idea of viewing slavery as a means of capitalism, Blacks were subjected to the bottom of a racial hierarchy and were treated nothing more than a property and commodity that is used for someone else’s benefit. The second pillar involves the logic of genocide and colonialism. With genocide, “Non-Native peoples th...
The theme throughout the poetry collection is the emotion of melancholy and the speaker speaking with a wise and philosophical tone. She has also used the repetition of nature and religion-based implications in her poems. Most of the poem titles is named after a specific plant because it fits in the meaning of her entire poem collection. The title of the poems hold symbolism because of the flower language. You can constantly see the cycle of rebirth through the beautiful description of a nonphysical form of a soul and develop into beautiful flowers in her garden. The vivid imagery of the flowers by describing the color and the personification of these living beings. She is also trying to explore the relationship between humans and their god. The poet is a gardener who tends to the flower and she prefer the flowers in her garden over her god, “knowing nothing of the
Jackson, Shirley. "Flower Garden." Introduction to Literature: Reading, Analyzing, and Writing. 2nd ed. Ed. Dorothy U.Seyler and Richard A. Wilan. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1990.
In the short story by John Steinbeck, The Chrysanthemums, symbolism, allegory and foreshadowing flood the story from start to finish. Steinbeck’s chosen words to describe the setting, plot and conclusion allows readers to evaluate and analyze the story in many ways. The story begins by describing the setting as enclosed, gray and repressive. Elisa Allen is introduced as the central character of the story, onto which the symbolism and allegory mainly affect. As the story develops further, Elisa’s encounter with a Tinker, leads her to “explode those repressed desires,” (Shockett) which have been suppressed by the symbolically “closed pot” (Steinbeck) in which the story takes place. The use of literary techniques
As citizens of the contemporary world, we apt to regard ourselves as unique and nonpareil individuals. We regard our personal identity as something to which we alone have privileged access and in which we are especially entitled to speak. We, citizens of the free world, think of ourselves as singular beings, who are capable of self-knowledge and who can differentiate between the authentic self and the unauthentic self. So therefore with this self-knowledge, we tend to project our own belief onto the less fortunate. In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, one of the main characters, Pecola Breedlove wants blue eyes. In the 21st century, this is possible, but in 1941, the dream was not feasible. Pecola bought into the conviction that a person who has blond hair and blue eyes can achieve success because of their appearance.
The main conflict in “The Flowers” is the clash between ignorance and experience. At the beginning of the story, Myop is portrayed as a naïve and innocent child who was unaware of racial discrimination. Her ignorance was demonstrated when she went outdoors from her house to the smokehouse, singing: “She was ten, and nothing existed for her but her song…and the tat-de-ta-ta-ta of accompaniment.” (Walker) This childish behaviour of Myop’s forced her to close her eyes from viewing the previous reality of her race. However, after she had noticed the lynched man on her way home, her innocence dissipated and she began to realize the agony and tortures that African-Americans underwent in the past. Myop’s transformation in personality was displayed