I chose this essay based largely on the title. I am not sure if that was the best way to go but my decision has been made. Of course we all know that the meaning behind the word “reluctant” usually means to struggle with something or to be cautious. When the word attached is the word “mistress”, I think I can understand why these two words are paired next to each other. A mistress struggling with her role in man’s life or feeling cautious does not seem like such a crazy thought. Personally, if I was in that situation I would feel a huge need to be cautious because who would want to be found out by someone else’s significant other? This begs me to question the morals of this mistress. Deciding to get involved with someone who already has a …show more content…
partner is a bold move and I would think the person who decided to do this was not very apprehensive about it. Is it possible this mistress thought this situation was something she wanted then realized she made a mistake? The first and second lines of the poem read, “You want to know the mistress’ thoughts but I can only tell you what she’s dreaming;” this leads me to think about how the mistress operates while outside in world versus how she acts when she is alone or sleeping. I know I can remember times when after a long day, when my body finally rests at night I can begin remembering different things or my thoughts going to a place I didn’t necessarily want them to go to. We get to the next two lines and they describe pretty much my exact thoughts. It seems as though she feels lost during her days but her dreams are extremely clear. Could this be because she feels lost without her lover? If she only sees her lover at night, his presence could possibly help her feel more relaxed and in touch. “After the lover leaves, his scent on the pillows, the feel of him ghost-like between her legs.” is the last two lines in the first stanza. I feel as though these two lines speak to how attached this mistress may be to her lover. Is she obsessed with him? The poem then states that the mistress dreams of the sun which seems like something positive. Then the description of her dreams seems to get more negative. Her dreams include the sun being destroyed, her body being burned in flames, and basically her whole life going up in flames. This leads me to believe that she feels some guilt about her arrangement with her lover. It’s possible that her dreams indicate how she would feel her life would fall apart if she ever should lose her lover. She claims she will survive but she knows she will lose everything. I am almost positive the “everything” she speaks of is her lover. At this point in the poem I am questioning why her lover seems to have such a big impact on her life. I am also wondering if her lover feels the same way about her. Is this a situation of unrequited love? If the lover is using the mistress only for the physical nature of the relationship and this caused the mistress to develop some romantic feelings, this could have started her obsession with him. When reading this poem I did not first know who the person named Apollo was or what this could mean as it relates to the mistress. Apollo was the Greek God of many things including light, the sun, and what I believe is the most important: prophecy. The word prophecy usually means you have the ability to know all things. The mistress dreaming of this God leads me to believe she is someone looking for answers. Is she looking for a way out of her relationship with her lover? Maybe she is hoping dreaming of someone who is believed to have all the answers, she will find hers. She then mentioned “gnarled branches” and a widow’s “arthritic” hands. Gnarled has a meaning of “rough and twisted, especially with age”. I believe this means that the mistress can feel dead inside. With the mention of trees being hollow, she may feel empty inside without her lover.
She could also feel this feeling when he leaves her to go be with his family. “A haunting melody trails her, and she cannot hide in the sunlight;” I believe this is the mistress feeling the weight of the bad decision of her having an affair follow her around. Her explaining of how she cannot hide in the sunlight could be her feeling that she can no longer hide her feelings for her lover. Could she be preparing to let her secret be known to someone else? The next line reads, “she prays for the ability to take root somewhere” and I believe this means she is looking for something stable. I can only imagine the chaos the mistress must feel in her life. She may believe that be letting go of her secret, she will feel the dead weight of that relationship off her shoulders. Somehow this could make her feel …show more content…
free. She then mentions that she dreams about the future. The man she describes seems to be somewhat of a simple man. I must say that when the mistress mentions she’s in other men’s beds, I was extremely surprised. Then it dawned on me that this was the future for her. Maybe her future includes other men, multiple men even. This is all after her lover. She envisions him reading a novel somewhere in an apartment somewhere. Is her lover alone now? Did she let go of their secret affair and cause him to lose his wife and/or family? With the mention of Cassandra who is another figure in Greek mythology being a reluctant mistress, this interested me greatly. During my research on who Cassandra was and what caused her to be called a reluctant mistress made the mistress’s relation to her seem that much more understandable. Cassandra was one of the Princesses of Troy. She was beautiful and blessed with the gift of foreseeing the future. This was the same gift that the God Apollo was blessed with. The story is that Cassandra was given this gift because Apollo had fallen in love with her. However, he cursed her so that no one would believe anything she said. While I looked into the reasons as to why Apollo gave her this gift but cursed her as well and I found there was only one that made sense. One version of the story claims that Cassandra promised her body to Apollo so he blessed her with the gift of foreseeing. However, when Apollo summoned her to act on her promise, she backed out of the deal. Apollo was angered by this and this is when he cursed her with the fault of no one believing any of her stories. After reading this, I saw the connection and why Cassandra was considered a reluctant mistress.
Cassandra thought she wanted to be a mistress to Apollo, or maybe she even planned to betray him all along. This then begs the question of, what did the mistress do to her lover? Was the betrayal her not keeping their arrangement a secret? Or was there some internal problem within their relationship? The last lines of the poem read, “You don’t understand, she’s saying, what he gave me was a gift, but the gift was the same as the curse.” I believe this is of course a reference to the story of Cassandra and Apollo. Did the mistress feel as though her lover blessed her with some type of gift the way Apollo did? This leaves me with another question, what was the curse for the mistress? If I am using the model of the story between Apollo and Cassandra, I began to wonder if the curse was exactly the same thing. Did the mistress decide to go public with the relationship and was met with objections to her claims? Was she comparing her lover to Apollo, meaning he was seen as someone in great power in their world? When I reached the end of the poem, I was then forced to think that maybe this was
not written by the mistress, but it was written about the mistress. Or is there a possibility that this is the mistress telling her story to someone else? During this text I realized that there were wide arrays of emotions throughout this poem. This caused me to think about what type of actual emotions people feel when they are in this position themselves. Do they feel regret? Do they feel happiness? Do they feel shame? I also wonder, what does the other person who is being betrayed feel about their significant others extra activities? Do they notice any strange changes in their partners? Or are they simply oblivious to all the signs that are more than likely there? While wondering about the feelings of all parties involved, I began to question a person’s motives behind being unfaithful. Does it come from stress? Does it come from happiness? Could money ever be a motive for something like that? Maybe someone just isn’t attracted to their partner anymore. Then this brought me to wondering if we as people search for different things in different people and expect all those different people to fit into our lives without and conflict. I am not sure if the thoughts I have just previously shared are off track with what a Reader-response essay should represent. However, from what I understand and from what I learned, a reader response essay should talk about what that text made you feels. I think that with all feelings come questions. I don’t believe I could have a proper reader response essay with involving all the questions I had while reading the text and after I was finished with it. I stated in the beginning that I picked this text based solely on its title. I was reluctant myself about if that was the best idea but now that I am at the end of this essay I feel more blessed than cursed.
In the end of the narrator’s consciousness, the tone of the poem shifted from a hopeless bleak
Like I stated above, I picked essays that I believed I could resonate with, and I was correct.
The following Essay must be a minimum of 5 paragraphs of 10-12 sentences each (a sentence is 10 words or more) .
This heavy word choice made by Harper continues throughout the following stanzas as well, and this evokes a sympathetic feeling from the audience. At this point, it has not been revealed that the person with the "burden'd heart" is a mother, but it still conveys the anguish that the woman is feeling. The woman is also described as having a "bowed and feeble head," and this conveys the helplessness that the woman is feeling in the scene (stanza 2, line 6). The author continues with this tone when the son is introduced as well. He is described as having a "trembling form" that the mother is trying to hide behind herself (stanza 4, line 16). At this point in the poem, it is made much clearer that the mother and son are slaves because the narrator says that "he is not hers," meaning that even though she gave birth to the boy, he was owned by the slave owners (stanza 5, line 17). Therefore, her own son could never truly belong to her. Slavery has created this situation, and the woman was so desperate to get out that she was willing to run away with her son in order for him to have a better love. When they were caught and the threat that he would be taken from her became real, she became devastated and desperate. However,
If I would have delved more assiduously into the meaning of the poem, I think I would have raised my grade
NOTE: This isn’t even close to how I would like the essay to be laid out. I’m just writing paragraphs and eventually I will get them in an order I like them and revise.
The story begins when she and her husband have just moved into a colonial mansion to relieve her chronic nervousness. An ailment her husband has conveniently diagnosed. The husband is a physician and in the beginning of her writing she has nothing but good things to say about him, which is very obedient of her. She speaks of her husband as if he is a father figure and nothing like an equal, which is so important in a relationship. She writes, "He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction." It is in this manner that she first delicately speaks of his total control over her without meaning to and how she has no choices whatsoever. This control is perhaps so imbedded in our main character that it is even seen in her secret writing; "John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition...so I will let it alone and talk about the house." Her husband suggests enormous amounts of bed rest and no human interaction at all. He chooses a "prison-like" room for them to reside in that he anticipates will calm our main character even more into a comma like life but instead awakens her and slowly but surely opens her eyes to a woman tearing the walls down to freedom.
The first essay assignment of the class was a simple five-page narrative essay about any moment in my life that left a large impact on me. This
It sounds like her father’s death made her angrier at the fact that she is not able to get anything from him anymore. There are several times in the poem when she switches emotions on her father. She forgives him and then is angry again. It’s hard for her because she does not know whether or not she can forgive him, considering all the pain and hardships the family was put through. She tries to justify her father’s actions by blaming his father, but is still angry because her father didn’t help the situation. At the same time, the daughter is almost as upset with her mother as she is with her father when she says “you were each other’s bad bargain, not mine” (Line 21). By the end of the poem, she is able to accept the fact that the broken relationship with her father and content relationship with her mother has to remain untouched. She is able to see that she cannot fully blame her father for being the reason why she is not emotionally content with their relationship. There’s nothing she can do about it now since both her parents are dead, but she is able to let go of it at this
...ience the same situation has her father. When she tries to commit suicide she reconnects with the “bag” again, relating to the “a bag full of God”. It is very difficult for her to move on from her deceased father based on the matrimonial mistake. The speaker of the poem could have has Electra complex, which means the daughter is actually in love with the father through childhood. That assumption could relate to the hatred/ love relationship with her father. This then contributes to her inferiority and childish qualities that are emphasized throughout the poem. The tone changed frequently during the poem in order to repress the love for her father. The story is no longer the daughter’s attempt to reunite with and to marry the dead father; it is now the daughter’s wish to overthrow his dominance over her imagination and to “kill” him and the man who takes his place.
In the last line of the second stanza, the subject enters dramatically, accompanied by an abrupt change in the rhythm of the poem:
The title “The Willing Mistress” instantly suggests the action taken by the female protagonist. She has little or no sexual inhibitions, and is a full participant in the tryst. The title also alludes that the woman may be unmarried, or betrothed to another man. This poem describes how the female speaker becomes aroused by the excellent courtship of her lover; to such an extent that she is open to engage in a passion exchange. She explains this by saying, “Which made me willing to receive / That which I dare not name" (Lines 15-16). Behn allows the character to embrace her sexual passion which was forbidden by social standards. Further, she can be said to assume the position of a man, resulting in role-reversals. Albeit the position of sexual power is normally held by the man both in literature and in reality, she takes control of her sexual pleasure, and boldly assumes charge of her desires.
For me, I found this aspect of my essay to be the most challenging to accomplish because I felt as though there was no clear way I could do this without using first person narration. I tend to avoid first person narration in my essays at all costs because especially at my high school, using first person narration was heavily looked down upon. But in this essay I subtle transitioned to my personal opinion and experiences in order to show a strong connection between my personal experience and the arguments I’m trying to make and
At first I had a lot of doubt in myself because I did not think I could write a two-paged paper on one word. I proved myself wrong, and it was an essay that I enjoyed. I started out by thinking of words that meant a lot to me personally which made the assignment less complicated. However, even though it was a shorter page length, it took me quite a while to write. I had a difficult time coming up with examples instead of only defining the word with other words. At the time, I felt like I put full effort into this essay, but looking back at it I feel like I could have done a little better. Some improvements I would have made would be to go deeper with some of my examples. Some of my thoughts I feel like I could have taken a lot further. To me, they seemed explained fully, but as another reader it may have been hard for them to understand my full view. For instance, I mentioned that I chose to become a nurse rather than a doctor. Many would not understand why because it seems logical to pick an occupation on top for obvious reasons. I should have explained that I do not want to spend 8-10 years going to school to become a Pediatrician when they are on the lower pay scale compared to most doctors. Also, I would rather be doing more hands-on work while doctors tend to spend less time with their patients than nurses. Overall, I decided to listen to myself instead of others because I wanted to be happy and that to me is