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Solitude in one hundred years of solitude
Solitude in one hundred years of solitude
Theme of isolation in literature
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“Eveline,” by James Joyce, is a story about a woman who is all alone and can’t escape the life that she is living. She is naïve and wants to move on to have a better life but has many things holding her back. The main thing being her promise to her mother. The whole story she sits in the house alone in a chair surrounded by dust. Eveline is isolated from the rest of the world but can’t leave when she has a man right in front of her that she thinks she loves. Eveline is isolated from the world: “She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue” (Joyce). The evening invading the avenue is symbol of darkness. This is showing that Eveline is in a dark place. She is isolated from everything around her. She sat in the chair, in the
She wants Frank to give her life and “perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live” (Joyce). This states that she doesn’t really love Frank. She just wants to get out, and if Frank could give her love, too, that would be a plus. The story recalls that, “Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition” (Joyce). This shows that she doesn’t look at Frank as her love or husband. She just wants a way out and Frank is her only way out of the life she lives now. Eveline states that, “Frank would save her. He would give her life” (Joyce). This suggests that she just wants more life back into her isolated life. She wants to go with him and move on because she wants to be saved and wants to have life because the house she lives in now doesn’t have life. If Eveline goes with Frank “People would treat her with respect then” (Joyce). She would have a better life with Frank and would be treated better, but she is too scared to leave her old life behind even if it is worse. At the end of the story she can’t leave her family behind and won’t get on the boat with Frank to leave her other life behind. “Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy” (Joyce), “its protagonist literally left frozen at the point of her escape, unable to board the ship that promises to carry her out of the city” (Latham 123). This is a symbol of her holding on to her old life and not being able to leave that behind to go and live with
The author illustrates the “dim, rundown apartment complex,” she walks in, hand and hand with her girlfriend. Using the terms “dim,” and “rundown” portrays the apartment complex as an unsafe, unclean environment; such an environment augments the violence the author anticipates. Continuing to develop a perilous backdrop for the narrative, the author describes the night sky “as the perfect glow that surrounded [them] moments before faded into dark blues and blacks, silently watching.” Descriptions of the dark, watching sky expand upon the eerie setting of the apartment complex by using personification to give the sky a looming, ominous quality. Such a foreboding sky, as well as the dingy apartment complex portrayed by the author, amplify the narrator’s fear of violence due to her sexuality and drive her terror throughout the climax of the
Throughout her time in the room she notices the wallpaper “a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” (514). After a couple of days in her opinion the wallpaper is starting to change. She sees “a women stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (518). In the daytime she sees the women outside the house “I see her in that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in those dark grapes arbors, creeping all around the garden“(521). The places where the women is creeping is where the narrator can’t go so she he creeps in the daytime “I always lock the door when I creep by daylight” (520).
Both “The Story of an Hour” and Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” display women discovering freedom from society’s standards during the setting’s time period. In “The Story of an Hour,” Louise locks herself in her room after discovering that her husband has died and at that point in the story she finds herself more confident in herself. She exclaims, “Free! Body and soul free!” (Chopin 83). After she believed her husband died she finally had reason to take initiative in life and did not have to live a life were nothing was expected of her. She found freedom in locked quarters. Just as John’s wife did in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” As the wife’s sickness progressed, her anxiety over the yellow wallpaper increased. The patterns developed within the walls showed the image of a woman creeping along, and as the shadows of the bars from the window cast across the woman. This can symbolize how she is like the shadow, imprisoned in her room and mansion. As time moved forward, the wife fully identifies with the image in the wall, and by the end of the story she locks herself in her room and frees the woman behind the bars by pealing off most of the wallpaper.
Darkness is one of the main themes in this scene. She said, and brought in cloudy night. immediately. I will be able to do so. Spread thy curtains, love performing night', this.
The first narrative is Virginia Woolf, the famous author. She is one of the main women in this complex story. Woolf has a troublesome life. She has multiple thoughts of suicide and death. She is anorexic and caught in a marriage that is doomed. The first chapter by Cunningham tells of Woolf's suicide drowning in 1941. Cunningham tells of the demons within Woolf's head and the consequently her fatal death from listening to these voices. The novel then moves to the stories of two modern American women who are trying to make rewarding lives for themselves.
... her true feelings with her sister, or talking to her husband or reaching out to other sources of help to address her marital repressed life, she would not have to dread living with her husband. “It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long” (Chopin 262). Her meaning for life would not have to mean death to her husband. In conclusion, her lack of self assertion, courage and strong will to address her repressed life made her look at life and death in a different perspective. When in fact there is no need to die to experience liberation while she could have lived a full life to experience it with her husband by her side.
These lines may seem confusing if not read properly. At first look, these might not make sense because the night is acquainted with darkness, but when the lines are read together as intended, one can see that the night is “cloudless” and filled with “starry skies” (1, 1-2). The remaining lines of the first stanza tell the reader that the woman's face and eyes combine all the greatness of dark and light:
"Eveline" is the story of a young teenager facing a dilemma where she has to choose between living with her father or escaping with Frank, a sailor which she has been courting for some time. The story is one of fifteen stories written by James Joyce in a collection called "Dubliners". These stories follow a certain pattern that Joyce uses to express his ideas: "Joyce's focus in Dubliners is almost exclusively on the middle-class Catholics known to himself and his family"(the Gale Group). Joyce's early life, family background, and his catholic background appear in the way he writes these stories. "Where Joyce usually relates his stories to events in his life, there are some stories which are actually events that took place in his life" (Joyce, Stanislaus). James Joyce in his letter to Grant Richard writes:
...at people think and what happens to herself. In the end of the whole novel, both characters make the right and conscious decision to live their lives as they have before they met each other.
Isolation, a state of alienation often enforced to protect one’s self from any unwanted persons and/or societal functions. This protective barrier otherwise known as isolation is usually established when one has not yet resolved their own inner conflicts and is instead accusing society and its members. Isolation is not only a physical state, but a state of mind that can severely impact one’s mentality. In recent years, a professor from the University of Chicago centered his attention on examining the minds of the socially isolated. While conducting multiple cerebral experiments, the professor along with his colleagues discovered that “The brains of lonely people react differently than those with strong social networks.” The human mind is created in a peculiar way, to therefore experience regular communication with others, to be able to share ideas and ultimately create strong social connections. However when the mind lacks these fundamentals on a daily basis, it can have a huge underlying effect on one’s overall persona and can drastically alter one’s view on society and its components. Through protagonist, Holden Caulfield’s character in J.D Salinger’s novel; “The Catcher in the Rye”, readers are able to examine to which extent constant isolation can truly influence and alter one’s moral beliefs and/or personal convictions. In the novel, Holden Caulfield voluntarily isolates himself physically, emotionally and socially, as a method of self protection against what he perceives to be a victimizing world around him. As each chapter progresses, Holden Caulfield is delineated by his constant isolation, eventually leading it to become such a crucial aspect in his life that it ultimately shapes not...
In the majority of the story Eveline "sat at the window," (512) which parallels with her paralysis because she does not move. Eveline "was going to go away like the others" (512) because she was one of the only people left in Dublin from her childhood. However, Eveline doesn't go since she is trapped in her setting. Almost nothing in Eveline's setting ever changes throughout her life. The significance of Eveline looking around the room "reviewing all its familiar objects" (512) is that she "never dreamed of being divided" from them. All around her Eveline "had those she had know all her life about her" (512). Eveline is a product of her environment. The reader can see how the setting never changes, Eveline's life molds to it. This explains the reason for her not going away and starting a much happier life.
The short story, "Regret," by Kate Chopin is about a childless spinster who accepts the responsibility of caring for a neighbor's four young children while their mother is away. The main idea of the story is that even though independent people like Mamzelle Aur'elie become used to living alone, they still need affection and human intimacy.
In “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin a woman, Louise Mallard, makes a startling and disturbing realization about her true feelings. After she is informed by her sister Josephine that her husband Brently had been killed in a train accident, Louise instantly breaks down and sobs into her arms. She then goes upstairs to her room, and stares out the window as a sudden apprehension comes to her: she is now free, her own person, and she does not have her husband to hold her back anymore. She becomes overwhelmingly excited about what her new life could now be, and the moment she goes back downstairs with Josephine, Brently walks through the door unharmed. Before Louise sees, Brently’s friend Richards and Josephine attempt to shield her eyes from the shocking development. They fail, however, and Louise dies on the spot from her heart disease.
In the short story “Eveline “ by James Joyce, Eveline, the protagonist is given the opportunity to escape from her hard unendurable life at home and live a life of true happiness at Buenos Ayres with Frank, her lover. Throughout the story, Eveline is faced with a few good memories of her past from her childhood and her mother, but she also faces the horrible flashbacks of her mother’s illness and her father’s violence. In the end, she does not leave with Frank, Eveline’s indecisiveness and the burden of her family’s duties makes her stay.
In the short story "Who Said We All Have To Talk Alike," author Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel demonstrates how isolation is not found through being different, but in how one's communities react to one's differences. In Snowball, Neffie's speech impediment didn't cause anyone to treat her any different than if she had perfect speech. It is only Beryl's snide comments and eventual firing of Neffie because of her pronunciation problem that made Neffie feel isolated. Sometimes it does not matter how many people accept you openly if one person does not.