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Society in the word of literature
Society in the word of literature
How is society reflected in literature
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Intolerance in the Chrysalids by John Wyndham The Chrysalids was by John Wyndham. It Involves Children that have ESP (Extra Sensory Perception) living in a community that does not tolerate differences. They are eventually found out and escape to Sealand (New Zealand). All societies in this novel practice intolerance in one way or another, even though Wyndham doesn't approve of it. We see it with the Norms, the Fringes, the Sealanders and even people of today. I feel this was a great way of depicting intolerance. Intolerance is most visible in this novel with the Waknuk civilization. You could also say that the Strorm family is one of the most intolerable families there. David didn't have a lot of choices growing up, including the tolerance of deviants. His father was considered the leader of the Waknukians, so he would put signs up around his house like "Watch Thou for the Mutant", and "The Norm is the Will of God". These came from there set of laws, Nicholson's Repentances. So all these combined, David wasn't given a lo...
David had strong ties and a compact relationship with his immediate family. During the course of the trial, the evidence was presented which seems to clear him:
A sinful nature is an aspect in man that makes him rebellious against God. Everyone has a sinful nature and it affects every part of us. Sin corrupts the human mind and has consequences for doing wrong in the eyes of the Lord. Every individual on Earth sins, and this is represented in the novel The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale to portray how different people cope with their sin and the consequences of that sin.
Just because people within a family are blood related and living together, it does not mean they are identical in their beliefs and actions. In some cases the generations of people in the family have the same way looking at things and understand the same sets of rules and believe in same kind of moral behavior. Unlike that, in the novel, “The Chrysalids”, the protagonist, David Strorm and his father, Joseph, the antagonist have very different characters and conflicting points of view.
Despair is evident throughout the book, more so from Waknuk citizens oppressing those who are different. “Katherine, a girl from a neighboring farm who could produce thought shapes similar to David’s was found out and taken to the inspector, where, she was ”broken”. Sally, who was also taken with Katherine to the inspector, said to the rest of the thought shapers, “They’ve broken Katherine…Oh Katherine darling… [t]hey’re torturing her…She’s all clouded now. She can’t hear us.” Her thoughts dissolved into shapeless distress.” (Wyndham 130). Clearly Katherine had been severely hurt enough to reveal her ability of producing thought shapes which would put all the thought shapers in danger and tortured enough that Sally sends distress showing how hopeless they indeed are. Furthermore when David found out his father was apart of the party coming to battle the Fringe people he is in sheer distress. He states, “ ‘Purity…’I said. ‘The will of the Lord. Honor thy father…Am I supposed to forgive him! Or try to kill him?’” (182). David is conflicted and rather flustered between his respect and love for his father yet as a deviant they are fighting for different sides and he knows either he or his father will die in the end. Additionally, during the battle itself, one of David’s most loyal friends parishes before his eyes. D...
Background: John Wyndham, born in 1903, tried more than four careers before starting to write short stories in 1925. The Chrysalids was written in 1955.
“If thou feelst it will relieve thy suffering, speak out the name of thy fellow sinner. Be not silent because thou wouldst protect him.” (Hawthorne 21). This was said by Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, one of the main characters of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel, The Scarlet Letter. He says this to his secret lover, Hester, as she stands on the scaffold in front of the entire Puritan community that the story takes place in. She is standing there with her three-month old child, Pearl, as a part of her punishment for her sin of committing adultery. The purpose of the scaffold in this novel is to represent the shame and torture that Hester and Dimmesdale each handle alone and to show how hypocritical and judgmental the Puritans were.
...e culture does not support free-thinking or expression, as seen by the banning of books and mindless entertainment. In the novel, people who express individuality and question life, they are seen as a threat. Clarisse McClellan, who was one of these people, eventually disappeared. In the novel, those go against conformity are in danger. Our society, while less drastic, processes in a similar way. Due to the spread of media, conformity is more widespread than ever before. Now with a touch of a button, everyone knows what is popular around the globe. We have encouraged ourselves to conform to certain ways in order to be favored by the masses. While we still express individuality, we express it in a narrow spectrum that will not cause others to ridicule or question us. In our society, conformists are normal, and those expressing individuality may be seen as outcasts.
The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, had a large influence of a very popular religion during the 17th century, known as Puritanism. The Oxford Encyclopedia defines Puritanism as “religious sensibility centered around conservation” (?). The reason behind many people traveling to America during the 1600s from England was only for one specific reason: religious freedom (Joselit). “For leaving England for what would become New England, the Puritans were not seeking economic opportunity and security for themselves and their families. They were on a religious mission or, what later became known in Puritan circle as an “errand into the wilderness””(Joselit, 21). The first set of Puritans came to America in 1620, and started a colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts. By the 1640s, there were over twenty-five thousand English settlers in New England. The group of Puritans that settled in the 1630s lived in an area that they named the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which is present day Boston. This is where the setting of The Scarlet Letter takes place (Joselit).
As Harriet Braiker once said: “Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing.” There are many people that always seek for being perfect, but what does that leads to? In Waknuk society, “perfection” just led to destruction. Joseph Strorm, the father of the main character David Strorm and the leader of this society, started forgetting about the values he should have had and also he was forgetting about the love he needed to give to his family. In addition, God sent Tribulation because He wanted society to become better than what they were being. The citizens in Waknuk were seeking to look more like God, according to the people from the Fringes, which were people who were sent to another place because they were born with a deformation. At last, Waknuk was getting farther from perfection because they were trying to be more like the people from the past, the Old People, but at the same time there were many others like the Sealanders that saw perfection as something new; something any other society had had before, which was being able to communicate with telepathy. This and many other reasons are clues that show that Waknuk was getting father from perfection. In The Chrysalids by John Wyndam, diverse characters like Joseph Strorm, The Fringes People, and the Sealanders view perfection in three diverse ways.
Hawthorne depicts the social repression of the society in the 17th Century, which involved the use of psychic repression to ensure control over the subjects. The law prohibited things that were perfectly fictitious about people’s instincts and desire in order to persuade them into believing that they had intentions consistent with the restricted fiction. As a result, the law is able to achieve the intention to make the unconscious guilty. An example of psychic repression is the casual plot of Hester‘s disobedience and obedience between the transcendental law of erotic aspirations and the law of marriage with its own sanctification. Further, Hawthorne suggests that sin was one of the fundamental issues of Puritanism. It was a social aspect that
An Enemy of the People, by Henrik Ibsen, is the story of a man named Dr. Thomas Stockman, who becomes a deviant to society. After discovering that the waters in the town’s baths are polluted, Dr. Stockman tries to spread the news and have the baths shut down. He assumes that the townspeople will be happy to hear his news, since the water is what has been making everyone sick. However, many people in the town aren’t very happy to hear such news, and before Dr, Stockman realizes it, the entire town has turned against him. Stockman criticizes the townspeople for this, and even refers to them as “street curs.” What made the town turn against him? Did they honestly all disagree with the doctor’s opinion? Did they fall to group pressure? Or, was it his brother the mayor’s influence?
History has been troubled many times by the combats created by the controversy between science and religion. In John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, children live in a theocracy where the image of God is strongly enforced and anything opposing the religion would be cast away. Therefore, these quarrels between fact and fiction must have reshaped today’s society. Cultures with powerful views and being scared of any difference like in The Chrysalids have greatly affected humanity and culture, and these habits will linger eternally.
thou knowest that I was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any"
Q1) The obvious affect or prejudice is discrimination, which can come in many different forms including those that come about daily, like smaller hate crimes (eg: causing someone names based on their appearance), or a person feeling constantly ostracised from a group, and social stigma has made them feel this is because of a personal factor like their ethnicity or race.
A patriarchal social system can be defined as a system where men hold all authority over women in all aspects of life. Men also have the most influence on society and the way it functions. When this kind of philosophy exists within a civilization, it can very well form the way each gender is treated. This is extremely clear in John Wyndham’s novel, The Chrysalids. I believe that the citizens of Waknuk hold a patriarchal ideology and that this ideology directly influences the way men and women are treated and represented in Wyndham’s novel.