The 20th century introduced a number of changes, both externally and internally.
For Britain, the Great War rudely awakened the empire to the horrors of war. A new
cynicism developed and the old ideas of nobility and honor diminished with the loss of
many lives. The “romantic nonsense” dissipated along with their innocence. As a result,
British literature of the 20th century reflects its loss of innocence. Three different works,
“Araby,” “Fern Hill,” and Heart of Darkness, exemplify the common emotions and
struggles Britains faced in their new reality.
The story of “Araby” by James Joyce tells of a young boy who is wild with
imagination. He is fascinated with a young girl to the point of romantic infatuation. He
absolutely worships
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The reality of his situation hits, and he realizes his is standing uselessly in
the middle of a closing flea market without a hope, even hope of winning her love. He
then sees himself with new eyes, “as a creature driven and derided by vanity” (Joyce
990). Sadly, the boy’s imagination, dream, and innocence are stripped from him, leaving
him empty.
Another work expressing loss of innocence is the story “Fern Hill” by Dylan
Thomas. This is a tale of a child at play who is free to dream the joys of childhood. He
is able to romp and stomp and simply be a boy. Inevitably, time does not allow him to
exist as a child forever. He must grow up and change as he reflects “[t]ime held me
green and dying . . .” (Thomas 1035). The man lived on, but the child died. As must
every individual grow and loose his or her childlike innocence.
Thirdly, the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad represents an innocence
lost. Specifically, the character of Marlow undergoes this changing process. Marlow sets
out on his journeys at sea with a boyhood imagination of wandering the seas. Once he
sets sail, he even takes notice of the jungle and recognizes it as a place of
Analyzing innocence has always been a difficult task, not only due to it’s rapid reevaluation in the face of changing societal values, but also due to the highly private and personal nature of the concept. The differences between how people prioritize different types of innocence - childhood desires, intellectual naivety, sexual purity, criminal guilt, etc. - continually obscures the definition of innocence. This can make it difficult for people to sympathize with others’ loss of purity, simply because their definition of that loss will always be dissimilar to the originally expressed idea. Innocence can never truly be adequately described, simply because another will never be able to precisely decipher the other’s words. It is this challenge, the challenge of verbally depicting the isolationism of the corruption of innocence, that Tim O’Brien attempts to endeavour in his fictionalized memoir, The
Bo Bennett said “those who improve with age embrace the power of personal growth and personal achievement and begin to replace youth with wisdom, innocence with understanding, and lack of purpose with self-actualization.” In Sandra Cisneros’s novel, House on Mango Street, there is a family who moved into a neighborhood called Mango Street. While living there, a young girl named Esperanza starts to mature emotionally and sexually. Throughout the year, conflicts occur with Esperanza and some of her neighbors. The main character, Esperanza, shows the theme “loss of innocence” when she talked about death, her getting rape, and wanting guys to like her. Loss of innocence is the thought of an experience or period in a child's life that widens their awareness of evil, pain or suffering in the world around them (Wikipedia).
Innocence is usually associated with youth and ignorance. The loss of one’s innocence is associated with the evils of the world. However, the term “innocence” can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Similarly, the loss of one’s innocence can be interpreted in more than one way, and, depending on the interpretation, it may happen numerous times. The loss of innocence is culture specific and involves something that society holds sacrosanct.
In her story, "Araby," James Joyce concentrates on character rather than on plot to reveal the ironies inherent in self-deception. On one level "Araby" is a story of initiation, of a boy’s quest for the ideal. The quest ends in failure but results in an inner awareness and a first step into manhood. On another level the story consists of a grown man's remembered experience, for the story is told in retrospect by a man who looks back to a particular moment of intense meaning and insight. As such, the boy's experience is not restricted to youth's encounter with first love. Rather, it is a portrayal of a continuing problem all through life: the incompatibility of the ideal, of the dream as one wishes it to be, with the bleakness of reality. This double focus-the boy who first experiences, and the man who has not forgotten-provides for the dramatic rendering of a story of first love told by a narrator who, with his wider, adult vision, can employ the sophisticated use of irony and symbolic imagery necessary to reveal the story's meaning.
His home and neighborhood are not the only sources of the boy's animosity. The weather is also unkind to the boy. Not only is it cold, but the short days of winter make play more difficult under the “feeb...
In “Araby”, author James Joyce presents a male adolescent who becomes infatuated with an idealized version of a schoolgirl, and explores the consequences which result from the disillusionment of his dreams. While living with his uncle and aunt, the main character acts a joyous presence in an otherwise depressing neighborhood. In Katherine Mansfield’s, The Garden Party, Mansfield’s depicts a young woman, Laura Sherridan, as she struggles through confusion, enlightenment, and the complication of class distinctions on her path to adulthood. Both James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield expertly use the literary elements of characterization to illustrate the journey of self-discovery while both main characters recognize that reality is not what they previously conceptualized it as.
In the opening scenes of the story the reader gets the impression that the boy lives in the backwash of his city. His symbolic descriptions offer more detail as to what he thinks about his street. The boy says “North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street [it’s houses inhabited with] decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces” (Joyce 984). This shows that the boy feels that the street and town have become conceited and unoriginal. While to young to comprehend this at the time the matured narrator states that he now realizes this. The boy is also isolated in the story because he mentions that when the neighborhood kids go and play he finds it to be a waste of time. He feels that there are other things he could be doing that playing with the other boys. This is where the narrator starts to become aware of the fact that not everything is what is seems. He notices the minute details but cannot quite put them together yet. As the story progresses one will see that th...
The boy is haplessly subject to the city’s dark, despondent conformity, and his tragic thirst for the unusual in the face of a monotonous, disagreeable reality, forms the heart of the story. The narrator’s ultimate disappointment occurs as a result of his awakening to the world around him and his eventual recognition and awareness of his own existence within that miserable setting. The gaudy superficiality of the bazaar, which in the boy’s mind had been an “oriental enchantment,” shreds away his protective blindness and leaves him alone with the realization that life and love contrast sharply from his dream (Joyce). Just as the bazaar is dark and empty, flourishing through the same profit motivation of the market place, love is represented as an empty, fleeting illusion. Similarly, the nameless narrator can no longer view his world passively, incapable of continually ignoring the hypocrisy and pretension of his neighborhood. No longer can the boy overlook the surrounding prejudice, dramatized by his aunt’s hopes that Araby, the bazaar he visited, is not “some Freemason affair,” and by the satirical and ironic gossiping of Mrs. Mercer while collecting stamps for “some pious purpose” (Joyce). The house, in the same fashion as the aunt, the uncle, and the entire neighborhood, reflects people
In his brief but complex story "Araby," James Joyce concentrates on character rather than on plot to reveal the ironies within self-deception. On one level "Araby" is a story of initiation, of a boy's quest for the ideal. The quest ends in failure but results in an inner awareness and a first step into manhood. On another level the story consists of a grown man's remembered experience, for a man who looks back to a particular moment of intense meaning and insight tells the story in retrospect. As such, the boy's experience is not restricted to youth's encounter with first love. Rather, it is a portrayal of a continuing problem all through life: the incompatibility of the ideal, of the dream as one wishes it to be, with the bleakness of reality. This double focus-the boy who first experiences, and the man who has not forgotten provides for the rendering of a story of first love told by a narrator who, with his wider, adult vision, can employ the sophisticated use of irony and symbolic imagery necessary to reveal the story's meaning. The story opens with a description of North Richmond Street, a "blind," "cold ... .. silent" (275)street where the houses "gazed at one an-other with brown imperturbable faces.".(275) The former tenant, a priest, died in the back room of the house, and his legacy-several old yellowed books, which the boy enjoys leafing through because they are old, and a bicycle pump rusting in the back yard-become symbols of the intellectual and religious vitality of the past. Every morning before school the boy lies on the floor in the front parlor peeking out through a crack in the blind of the door, watching and waiting for the girl next door to emerge from her house and walk to school. He is shy and still boyish.
Childhood is usually understood as a set of experiences and behaviours, gained in the early stages of the human existence, considered as the preparation for the adult world. However, the history of childhood is a very complex topic and it has become a very influential area of study in recent years. In 1962, the ‘Centuries of Childhood’ by Philippe Ariés introduced the idea that childhood was a new creation developed in recent centuries and as a concept it was believed to be nonexistent before the seventeenth century. This concept means that there was no awareness of the process of childhood. In several studies of the medieval period, Ariés noticed that childhood was not acknowledged or even attempted to be portrayed during this period. For instance, in art during the tenth century, artists were unable to depict a child, except as a man on a smaller scale. It is hard to state how long childhood lasts or even what it means; the common kernel of many studies on childhood is the attempts to understand its nature, to define the core of being a child and to relate this to the experience of life. The main concern of this essay is to understand the meaning of childhood and childhood innocence in the Romantic Period, and in turn to analyze and see how William Blake perceived it in his poetry.
which is the second theme of the story. He quickly grew from an innocent, young boy into a confused, disillusioned adolescent. The boy arrived ...
Abstract In this essay, I intend to explain how everyday lives challenge the construction of childhood as a time of innocence. In the main part of my assignment, I will explain the idea of innocence, which started with Romantic discourse of childhood and how it shaped our view of childhood. I will also look at two contradictory ideas of childhood innocence and guilt in Blake’s poems and extract from Mayhew’s book. Next, I will compare the images of innocence in TV adverts and Barnardo’s posters. After that, I will look at the representation of childhood innocence in sexuality and criminality, and the roles the age and the gender play in portraying children as innocent or guilty. I will include some cross-cultural and contemporary descriptions on the key topics. At the end of my assignment, I will summarize the main points of the arguments.
In many cultures, childhood is considered a carefree time, with none of the worries and constraints of the “real world.” In “Araby,” Joyce presents a story in which the central themes are frustration, the longing for adventure and escape, and the awakening and confusing passion experienced by a boy on the brink of adulthood. The author uses a single narrator, a somber setting, and symbolism, in a minimalist style, to remind the reader of the struggles and disappointments we all face, even during a time that is supposed to be carefree.
In the beginning of the story the boy sees everything as beautiful, exciting, and full of life, but at the end his outlook on life is changed in one moment. While he is at the bazaar, he is hit with the realization that he is a mere child-- a nobody. This realization takes away all of his romantic fantasies, thus, his innocence vanishes along with them. Finally, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad embraces the more extreme side of loss of innocence, because a man’s view of the world is shattered.
In the eyes of a child, there is joy, there is laughter. But as time ages us, as soon as we flowered and became grown-ups the child inside us all fades that we forget that once, we were a child.