Rooms are a great place to unwind and recollect after a long day. They hold precious items and memories, and are the one place we can get away from the world. Bedrooms tend to be a place where we feel at our safest, and where we keep all our personal items. Items that we subconsciously identify ourselves with because they mirror our inner self. In my room, I have items that I feel reflect my inner values. However, it did take me quite some time to find these items among my family’s things. Just as John McPhee states in his essay, “The Pines,” “It was something of a wonder that I noticed the pump, because there were, among other things, eight automobiles in the yard, two of them on their sides and one of them upside down, all ten years old or …show more content…
It is a tan, sticker covered, beat up Regal, and it actually began my collection of instruments. This guitar represents my creative values, because it was my first guitar and the first of many creative outlets that I have explored throughout my life thus far. I received it from my parents, as a birthday present, when I was in eighth grade and the first songs I learned were beginner level versions of, “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple, and “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath. It has a light tan wooden face, a light brown back and a smooth, shiny gloss finish. Over the years, it has been dented and scratched, so I used a cover up technique that my cousin told me about when I first got it. The technique is to cover up the dents and scratches with stickers, lots and lots of stickers. So far there are: three stickers on the back, five around the sides, one on the head of the neck, and four on the front. Some with various meanings, and some were just what I had at the …show more content…
Another refurbished and recycled item that we own is my desk. Which is made up of an old, wine red, counter top that was a scrap counter from a hotel; two short, dark brown, weather worn beams that were found by the river which flows near the house we currently reside in; and a white wood scrap shelf that just rests on top of the desk. Thanks to my handyman husband, who built this lovely hodgepodge desk, I now have a designated work area. However, because we are currently living with family, it was built as a temporary fixture of the room and can easily be broken down, and moved. This desk has been a place where I work hard, not only on school work, but on work that is required to keep my household going. That’s why my desk is a great example of a value that my whole family holds in high regard, hard
“I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all!”(199), these were the last words of Chris McCandless in a picture with him smiling and waving good-bye. Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer is an extension of an article first published in Outside magazine. In the book, Krakauer further explains the journey of Chris McCandless, while providing his own insight to provide the reader a better understanding of the McCandless reasoning. McCandless lived a nomadic life after he graduated from college, traveling from South Dakota to Mexico. However, his two year journey proved fatal when he took a trip to Alaska, his greatest undertaking. Among his remains several books were discovered, including a copy of Walden by Henry D. Thoreau
Kleinfeld tries to categorize Chris McCandless as a hero, dumb jerk, or soul searcher. She uses pathos as well as blatantly stating her opinion to achieve her goal. In Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild we see many aspects of Chris McCandless that both support and contradicts these categorizations given by Kleinfeld. Jon Krakauer shows us every aspect of Chris McCandless’s journey as well as his life before, by doing this Krakauer shows Chris McCandless is not just one category, he is not any category at all. Kleinfeld’s condescending tone expresses the lack of heroism she sees in McCandless. (Adjust thesis to fit new purpose).
Sigmund Freud introduces some powerful ideas in his book Civilization and Its Discontents. Many of his ideas and theories are evident in the life of John Wade in The Lake of the Woods. In my opinion, one can apply Freud’s theories to accurately analyze John Wade in three main ways: Freud’s structural model of the psyche, his argument of suppression of aggression, and neurosis “as the outcome of a struggle between the interest of self preservation and the demands of the libido, a struggle which the ego had been victorious but at the price of sever sufferings and renunciations.” (Freud 104). All of which lead to unhappiness and discontent.
George Saunders, a writer with a particular inclination in modern America, carefully depicts the newly-emerged working class of America and its poor living condition in his literary works. By blending fact with fiction, Saunders intentionally chooses to expose the working class’s hardship, which greatly caused by poverty and illiteracy, through a satirical approach to criticize realistic contemporary situations. In his short story “Sea Oak,” the narrator Thomas who works at a strip club and his elder aunt Bernie who works at Drugtown for minimum are the only two contributors to their impoverished family. Thus, this family of six, including two babies, is only capable to afford a ragged house at Sea Oak,
The bedroom is an overvalued fetish object that nevertheless threatens to reveal what it covers over. John's time is spent formulating the bedroom in a way that conceals his associations of anxiety and desire with the female body, but also re-introduces them. The bedroom's exterior, its surface, and its outer system of locks, mask a hidden interior that presumably contains a mystery--and a dangerous one. The bedroom in "The Yellow Wallpaper" generates this tension between the desire to know and the fear of knowing: on one hand, the enigma of the bedroom invites curiosity and beckons us towards discovery; on the other hand, its over- determined organization is seated within a firm resolution to build up the bedroom, so that what it hides remains unrealized. Mulvey writes, "Out of this series of turning away, of covering over, not the eyes but understanding, of looking fixidly at any object that holds the gaze, female sexuality is bound to remain a mystery" ("Pandora" 70).
...establishing a “home” has essentially been transferred from the parent to the child, and the traditional home, and consequently family, has all but disappeared in our society. This shift undermines the roles of the parents, and forces the child to take on adult responsibilities at a premature age. We live in an on-the-go day and age where nothing seems to remain constant for any time at all, and with this lack of continuity we have lost a great deal of what was once an integral part of society. The thought of a child ascribing to a “home” devoid of anything infallible is not a pleasant one. If every parent would spare a moment in their busy, fast-paced lives to consider the impact of the dissolution of the traditional home upon our children, we might not need films such as “Milo and Otis” to instruct our children to dissociate home from the world around them.
Trapped in the upstairs of an old mansion with barred windows and disturbing yellow colored wallpaper, the main character is ordered by her husband, a physician, to stay in bed and isolate her mind from any outside wandering thoughts. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, describes the digression of the narrator’s mental state as she suffers from a form of depression. As the story progresses, the hatred she gains for the wallpaper amplifies and her thoughts begin to alter her perception of the room around her. The wallpaper serves as a symbol that mimics the narrator’s trapped and suffering mental state while she slips away from sanity reinforcing the argument that something as simple as wallpaper can completely deteriorate an entire identity.
A person’s home is a good representation of himself or herself. The way one takes care of their home can tell a story about the owner of the home and its residence. The members of the home may also affect the situations that take place, creating good or bad circumstances. In a story, a character's home does just that. The more or less elaborate it is explained, the more detail is presented about how the character is or will be. In “The House of Usher” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the elaborate descriptions of the characters and their homes set the story and can predict the outcome. A writer’s home and view of life may have a profound impact on their idea of home and therefore their writing that is produced.
These feelings seem to be indicative of the time period. In this case our “unnamed” narrator’s feelings deteriorate throughout the story as she becomes more out of touch with reality. In the first few lines the narrator describes the house as “a haunted house” (Gilman 655), musing there was something “queer” (Gilman 655) about it. The protagonist describes her surroundings as “quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village” (Gilman 656), this appears to be an indication of the loneliness and isolation she feels in her current situation. In the beginning she says, “I don’t like our room one bit. I wanted one downstairs…but John would not hear of it “ (Gilman 656). This small act of denial is significant in the outcome of the narrators’ mental health. The narrator is ensconced in a room upstairs formerly used as a nursery with the infamous yellow wallpaper. The imprisoning bars in the wallpaper mimic the actual physical metal bars on the nursery windows. The bars are mentioned throughout the story, reinforcing the idea that the narrator is imprisoned and needs to escape. She writes, “the windows are barred for little children” (Gilman 656). Outside the barred window the narrator see’s a garden with “a view of the bay and a private wharf…a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house”
The central characters in both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and A Doll’s House are fully aware of their niche in society. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator’s husband believes her illness to be a slight depression, and although she states "personally, I disagree with their ideas,” she knows she must acquiesce their requests anyway (Gilman 1). She says, “What is one to do?” (Gilman 1) The narrator continues to follow her husband’s ideals, although she knows them to be incorrect. She feels trapped in her relationship with her husband, as she has no free will and must stay in the nursery all day. She projects these feelings of entrapment onto the yellow wallpaper. She sees a complex and frustrating pattern, and hidden in the pattern are herself and othe...
"The furniture you see was built for these rooms and for these rooms alone."(House Beautiful, April 1937)
follow his father’s footsteps, but is obligated to stay to support his family. He feels the need to abandon all his problems and change his life’s fate. Through the symbol of the fireplace, Tennessee Williams suggests that people want to escape the confinements of reality to chase their dreams, but are restrained by their sympathizing emotions.
Housekeeping is a novel written by Marilynne Robinson, whose title heavily implies a deeper meaning within itself. The story is centered around two girls, Ruth and Lucille, who have been left in the hands of others as a result of their mother 's suicide. The novel is very simplistic in it’s nature paralleling the type of lifestyle that most of the members of the family live, excluding of course Molly who goes to do missionary work and China, and also Helen who drives herself off of a cliff. After the death of Helen the two sisters, Lucille and Ruth, are sent to live with their grandmother in Fingerbone. While the grandmother is a very loving person, she struggles with relaying these same ways of going about life to her daughters, Molly, Helen, and Sylvia. This is one of the first implications that “housekeeping” is something other than a title. Throughout the novel we see each character 's version of “housekeeping.”
The place where I feel the most comfortable, and show my personality, is my bedroom. This is the place where I can really be myself and do what I want; it’s the place I come home to, and wake up every day. My room makes me feel comfortable because it is my own space. My house is always crazy, with my dog barking, and my siblings running around making noise, my room is the only place in the house where I can come and relax without caring about everything else, the only place that I can go to clear my mind.
Henry David Thoreau implies that simplicity and nature are valuable to a person’s happiness in “Why I Went to the Woods”. An overall theme used in his work was the connection to one’s spiritual self. Thoreau believed that by being secluded in nature and away from society would allow one to connect with their inner self. Wordsworth and Thoreau imply the same idea that the simple pleasures in life are easily overlooked or ignored. Seeing the true beauty of nature allows oneself to rejuvenate their mentality and desires. When one allows, they can become closer to their spiritual selves. One of William Wordsworth’s popular pieces, “Tintern Abbey”, discusses the beauty and tranquility of nature. Wordsworth believed that when people