Going Beyond the Pale with William Trevor
In William Trevor’s short story ‘Beyond the Pale’, the reader is presented with a text that seethes with the angst of a writer whose country’s Colonial past has been gnawing on his bones. Although there is nothing unusual in this (especially in Irish writing), Trevor manages to fumble the ball in the course of his didactic strategy and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: what should have been a successful indictment of British Colonial Rule in Ireland becomes nothing more than the grumbling of an intelligent writer who cannot negotiate his patriotic feelings.
The story is presented as a first-person narrative by one of four English holidaymakers who regularly visit a small hotel, Glencorn Lodge, in County Antrim (see the Map of Ireland). All the details the narrator, Milly, supplies the reader with in the introductory paragraphs indicates a lack of Irishness in the whole make-up of this group’s holiday: Glencorn Lodge is a Georgian building, the driveway of which is lined with rhododendrons (a non-indigenous species of plant); the couple who run Glencorn Lodge - the slyly named Malseeds - are English; the garden has figs, the greenhouse has apricots and peaches - and the greenhouse is presided over by ‘old Mr Saxton, another aptronymous character. Essentially the reader is given a picture not of Ireland, but of the remnants of Imperial supremacy.
So far, so good. Trevor is in control, and he has created a good backdrop for his tale. Where does it all go wrong? Quite simply, Milly, the narrator is not up to the task of telling the story Trevor wishes to unfold: for subtlety she is fine, but it is when events become more action-oriented that Milly fails to prove herself the correct storytelling device for this narrative.
As the story progresses, we learn much of the four characters’ past, both together and apart - Milly is ideal as a teller of the more dubious or purely speculative elements of a character’s past. Further details indicate a lack of Irishness in this ritualized holiday along the way - for example, Strafe, one of the male characters, drinks ‘whisky’ rather than ‘whiskey’, the former indicating Scotch, the latter indicating an Irish or American distillation. In the midst of their holiday world, it is noticed that an intrusion has occurred: a red-haired man, ‘uncouth-looking’, has appeared, ...
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...ard because, essentially, he is trying too hard to make the reader feel sympathy not for the English conscience (Cynthia), but for Ireland itself. Having a an admission of guilt (albeit on behalf of a nation) from one English conscience described by an English consciousness that is consumed by its obliviousness towards any reason for feeling guilt (both at a personal and national level) is an ambitious idea - one which Trevor should have pulled off. The urge to preach (which can only be regarded as some attempt to justify guilt that Cynthia feels, and, by extension, Britain should feel) should have been stifled, completely repressed. The subtle detailing of the early part of the narrative displays Trevor’s ability to deftly sketch the particulars of a scene without descending to caricature, and to embed his agenda while doing so. The loss of subtlety in the final pages (and Cynthia’s monologue does cover a number of pages) is actually a loss for the reader, because whether a reader of this story is British, Irish or otherwise, one can only leave the tale wondering who Trevor had in mind when he wrote it, and who ultimately would gain in the way he obviously intends for the reader.
The publication history of all of John Clare’s work is, in the end, a history about editorial control and influence. Even An Invite to Eternity, written within the confines of a mental institution seemingly distant from the literary world, is not an exception to this rule, for it and Clare’s other asylum poems do not escape the power and problem of the editor. And, further, this problem of the editor is not one confined to the past, to the actions of Clare’s original publisher John Taylor or to W.F. Knight, the asylum house steward who transcribed the poetry Clare wrote during his 20 odd years of confinement. In fact, debates continue and rankle over the role of the editor in re-presenting Clare’s work to a modern audience: should the modern editor present the unadulterated, raw Clare manuscript or a cleaned up, standardized version as Taylor did? Only exacerbating and exaggerating this problem o...
The community, although it is very tight and strongly bound by tradition and family, is also troubled and varied. The potato crop is failing, the maps are being changed for the convenience of the English, people want to move out of Ireland, (for example when Maire tells Hugh she wants to learn English for when she moves to America). Things appear to be at peace when we are put into this environment and everything seems well at first, but as we look further into it we can see things are much more deep seeded and dark than at first glance. For example, Doalty steals a piece of equipment from some English soldiers; this cheeky mischief seems harmless until we hear about some of the English horses being lead off a cliff to their deaths. Nothing is what it seems in this play, there are many more issues that lurk beneath the rather innocent surface of this seemingly simple, rural community; feelings of hatred and betrayal course through the bodies of many of the populous. What the English are doing is not right, nor is it fair. They have no right to change the identity of a people for their own convenience.
Translations depicts the cultural take over of Ireland by the British Empire, yet it cannot be said to be simply pro-Irish.’ Consider this comment. English Literature Coursework- ‘Translations depicts the cultural take over of Ireland by the British Empire, yet it cannot be said to be simply pro-Irish.’ Consider this comment on the play. The Cultural take over of Ireland by the British Empire is a central issue in Translations.
Paddy’s Lament is about the terrible sufferings of the Irish people during the potato famine and of the cruel treatment that the Irish went through at the hands of the British people. The British did nothing to help the Irish survive when if they just shared their food they could have saved millions of people from a horrible death. They wrote in their newspapers that the Irish were lazy and didn’t want to work. At the time before the famine, the Irish loved their homeland and few wanted to immigrate to other countries. They had little money to buy a passage to America. They would send one member of the family to America and he would get a job to help those back home. As the famine got worse, the English were looking bad to the rest of the world and decided on a plan to ship all the Irish they could to America and Canada. This way they would rid themselves of the Irish problem. The British paid passage to families who would immigrate. The Irish were happy to leave, but the conditions on the British ships were deplorable. They had to stay on deck through the whole voyage, and about one in three people died. So many Irish people died that they became known as coffin ships. When they arrived in New York, the Irish were examined by a health examiner. Some families were separated from others, and children were separated from their mothers. The Irish were taken to tenements to live in. The conditions of the tenements were horrible. There were so many people living in them that the places we...
Included within the anthology The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction,1[1] are the works of great Irish authors written from around three hundred years ago, until as recently as the last decade. Since one might expect to find in an anthology such as this only expressions and interpretations of Irish or European places, events or peoples, some included material could be quite surprising in its contrasting content. One such inclusion comes from the novel Black Robe,2[2] by Irish-born author Brian Moore. Leaving Ireland as a young man afforded Moore a chance to see a great deal of the world and in reflection afforded him a great diversity of setting and theme in his writings. And while his Black Robe may express little of Ireland itself, it expresses much of Moore in his exploration into evolving concepts of morality, faith, righteousness and the ever-changing human heart.
Burnout occurs when a person does not have effective coping skills to deal with the demands of the work they are performing; it is also said to be chronic stress caused by the high demands of a job. Burnout has three dimensions that make it up, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment (Vargus, 2014). Some causes include long hours, not having enough or the proper equipment, having inadequate staffing and caring for demand...
Athletes are often pressured from an early age to be better than the rest. In sports such as football, baseball, basketball, and soccer, the need to be “great” is becoming a dominant factor in the world of sports. Regardless of which sport is chosen, the stigma to be great is slowly surpassing the main goal of sportsmanship among team players. With the notion that being great is the key; many athletes, both amateur and professional, are relying on steroids to help bring them to the top of their game. Steroid use can cause damaging effects to the body and preventing this may save the lives and careers of current and future students. This essay is written to explain the problems of steroids in sports and the solutions in which to help deter or stop this problem.
Since this research is only focusing on the Baby Boomers and on, our timeline begins not in 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, but in the 1950’s with the return to normalcy movement. The first question asked to all the interviewees was “What do you think when you hear the word ‘feminism’ or ‘feminist’?”. This questions tackles the first idea of the change in how feminism has been and is viewed by women in the three generations. Patricia Santangelo answered in the same way described in the first chapter of Women’s Voices Feminist Visions in the sense that she states she does not believe herself to be a feminist, saying that she “thinks it’s baloney” (personal communications, March 15, 2014), yet subscribin...
...average Amish family consists of about seven children due to the fact that the Amish do not believe in birth control.
Jonathon Swift, the legendary Irish clergyman and author penned many a fantastic essays and stories, yet one stands out of the many due to it’s importance and significance in the era it was authored. In this essay, “ A Modest Proposal” Swift introduces his audience to the terrible potato famine that gripped the northern part of the British Isles through his use of irony, sarcasm, and many other rhetorical appeals. Swift’s reasoning for transcribing this paper was to turn the British away from their petty luxuries and show them the the terrible conditions the Irish were facing in their biblical struggle with famine. In Swift’s observation he adopts a satirical persona which he uses to weave his argument into and to also mock both the British and Americans.
A collection of short stories published in 1907, Dubliners, by James Joyce, revolves around the everyday lives of ordinary citizens in Dublin, Ireland (Freidrich 166). According to Joyce himself, his intention was to "write a chapter of the moral history of [his] country and [he] chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to [b]e the centre of paralysis" (Friedrich 166). True to his goal, each of the fifteen stories are tales of disappointment, darkness, captivity, frustration, and flaw. The book is divided into four sections: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life (Levin 159). The structure of the book shows that gradually, citizens become trapped in Dublin society (Stone 140). The stories portray Joyce's feeling that Dublin is the epitome of paralysis and all of the citizens are victims (Levin 159). Although each story from Dubliners is a unique and separate depiction, they all have similarities with each other. In addition, because the first three stories -- The Sisters, An Encounter, and Araby parallel each other in many ways, they can be seen as a set in and of themselves. The purpose of this essay is to explore one particular similarity in order to prove that the childhood stories can be seen as specific section of Dubliners. By examining the characters of Father Flynn in The Sisters, Father Butler in An Encounter, and Mangan's sister in Araby, I will demonstrate that the idea of being held captive by religion is felt by the protagonist of each story. In this paper, I argue that because religion played such a significant role in the lives of the middle class, it was something that many citizens felt was suffocating and from which it was impossible to get away. Each of the three childhood stories uses religion to keep the protagonist captive. In The Sisters, Father Flynn plays an important role in making the narrator feel like a prisoner. Mr. Cotter's comment that "… a young lad [should] run about and play with young lads of his own age…" suggests that the narrator has spent a great deal of time with the priest. Even in death, the boy can not free himself from the presence of Father Flynn (Stone 169) as is illustrated in the following passage: "But the grey face still followed me. It murmured; and I understood that it desired to confess something.
James Joyce began his writing career in 1914 with a series of realistic stories published in a collection called The Dubliners. These short literary pieces are a glimpse into the ‘paralysis’ that those who lived in the turn of the century Ireland and its capital experienced at various points in life (Greenblatt, 2277). Two of the selections, “Araby” and “The Dead” are examples of Joyce’s ability to tell a story with precise details while remaining a detached third person narrator. “Araby” is centered on the main character experiencing an epiphany while “The Dead” is Joyce’s experiment with trying to remain objective. One might assume Joyce had trouble with objectivity when it concerned the setting of Ireland because Dublin would prove to be his only topic. According the editors of the Norton Anthology of Literature, “No writer has ever been more soaked in Dublin, its atmosphere, its history, its topography. He devised ways of expanding his account of the Irish capital, however, so that they became microcosms of human history, geography, and experience.” (Greenblatt, 2277) In both “Araby” and “The Dead” the climax reveals an epiphany of sorts that the main characters experience and each realize his actual position in life and its ultimate permanency.
... we see that life is a façade; the characters disguise their sorrow in modesty. Joyce’s portrayal of Ireland undoubtedly creates a desire to evade a gloomy life.
Not only are performance-enhancing drugs destroying our athletes’ bodies, they are destroying the sports we enjoy. The athletes we look up to are leaving a negative effect on the children looking up to them. If we allow this practice to continue, or even worse, legalize steroids, we run the risk of hurting our athletes, our students and the good integrity of our sports.
Happell, Martin, and Pinikahana (2007) also argue in their research that “despite the strength of discourse and debate in relation to stress and burnout in psychiatric nursing, limited research has been conducted in this area” (p. 40). Although a handful of studies (Cañadas et al., 2013, Dickinson and Wright, 2008; Happell, Martin, and Pinikahana, 2007, Ewers et al., 2001) agree that burnout reduces employee effectiveness which can compromise quality of care provided for the patient, there is still little research and support in this