The traumatizing scenes a man experiences during a plague probably haunt him throughout his life – if he manages to survive. In Jack London’s 1912 novella, “The Scarlet Plague”, London brilliantly narrates the life of an elderly man, “Granser” who managed to survive the lethal hands of the plague that decimated millions sixty years ago, reverting the once “colossal civilization” to cave-man existence. (16) Granser recounts the emergence of the Scarlet Plague and its catastrophic impact on society as he tells his savage grandsons the world before and after the epidemic. London’s use of imagery offers a graphic appeal to open the reader’s eye and ears to the physical pandemonium of the plague, evoking the reader’s soul to the themes the plague symbolizes: reclamation of …show more content…
Jack London makes sure his readers grasp the magnitude of the plague’s destruction through inclusion of vivid, sensory details, making the past incident a present terror in the reader’s mind. London, through Granser’s narrative, discusses how the plague intensifies from a “scarlet rash spreading over a person’s face” and body, (19) marking the presence of the plague, to decaying bodies lying everywhere. This shows how a mere rash, which no one seemed to be bothered about before, has turned millions of people into corpses, all within a span of an hour. London then describes the chaos the people in large cities are suffering. No one is spared alive, even the government officials who are supposed to be preventing the deadly disease, resulting to ceasing of law and order. Insanity and irrationality become prevalent, as described by “mobs of the hungry poor … pillaging the stores and warehouses”, “murder and robbery [being] everywhere”, and sounds of rioting and of pistol shots.” (22) Because of the plague, people are resorting to all these irrational acts, disregarding the concept of right and wrong, only in attempt to escape.
Some things are not as they seem. “Ring Around the Rosie” seems like a pleasant children’s nursery rhyme, but many believe it is actually a grisly song about the Black Death in Europe. The Black Death was a serial outbreak of the plague during the 1300s. During the Black Death, more than 20 million Europeans died. One-third of the population of the British Isles died from the plague. Moreover, one-third of the population of France died in the first year alone, and 50% of the people in France’s major cities died. Catastrophic death rates like these were common across all of Europe. However, just like the poem “Ring Around the Rosie”, the true effects of the Black Death differed from what many people believed. Though tragic, the Black Death caused several positive societal changes. Specifically, the Black Death helped society by contributing to the economic empowerment of peasants and disempowerment of nobility that led to the decline of manorialism, as well as by encouraging the development of new medical and scientific techniques by proving old methods and beliefs false.
Even today, children innocently chant this old nursery rhyme, bringing the old saying into reality, “Ignorance is Bliss”. It’s eerie, to think that this old rhyme in fact gives a perfect description of one of Europe’s worst nightmares, the Great Plague. Many people forget the horrors of the Plague, and when they do remember and think about it, Public heath is rarely a factor that plays a big part when people start to think things through.
Families abandoned families and therefore the home’s unity was corrupted. Why could national and local institutions not adequately handle the crisis? No one understood the disease. They thought it spread through un-pure air, but that was an uninvestigated hunch. The victims, cities, and doctors also had inadequate knowledge of the human body, how it worked, and how the plague itself spread and worked.
...sease. The medieval outlook on the plague, mingled with feelings of hysteria and greed, was a fearful one.
An unknown eye witness accounts details of the immediate stress the plague brought to Europe. "Realizing what a deadly disaster had come to them, the people quickly drove the Italians from their city. But the disease remained, and soon death was everywhere. Fathers abandoned their sick sons. Lawyers refused to come and make out wills for the dying.
The plague affected people not only on a physical level but a mental one as well. The mental health of the citizens of Oran was amongst the plague's many victims, it suffered of exhaustion as well as being forced to handle mental confrontations. When the citizens dealt with these issues, some people lost their capacity to love as intently, but overall the general capacity of people to uphold their devotion remained resilient to the challenges the plague provided.
Camus’ book “The Plague” demonstrates the fight between a community and the bubonic plague. Camus creates a range of characters that deal with the plague in their own individual ways; the only hero among them is Jean Tarrou. Dr. Bernard Rieux comes close to being a hero but he falls short of this by the fact that he is doing his duty as a doctor, which is expected of him. Camus uses Jean Tarrou to speak to the reader on how to heroically deal with death. Jean Tarrou is also used as an example of heroes who get crushed by fate for rebellion.
In his piece, The Scarlet Letter and Revolutions Abroad, Larry J. Reynolds aims to link Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, to historical revolutions both past and present. He explains that one can draw parallels between the story and revolutions by examining the structure, themes, setting, language, as well as characterization within the story. As to why these parallels are present, Reynolds doesn’t give much explanation but justifies his claim by saying the revolutions and disrupts abroad were constantly on Hawthorne’s mind.
Cantor, Norman F. In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made. New York:
Albert Camus’s The Plague is a novel about an ordinary town that is suddenly stricken by plague. A few of Camus’s philosophies such as the absurd, separation, and isolation are incorporated in the events of the story. The absurd, which is the human desire for purpose and significance in a meaningless and indifferent universe, is central to the understanding of The Plague. In The Plague, Camus uses character development and irony to show that even through the obvious superiority of the universe, man is in constant effort to outlive the absurd. The Plague is crafted around the belief that humans live life in search of a value or purpose that will never be revealed to them because it does not exist.
Kira L. S. Newman, “Shutt Up: Bubonic Plague and Quarantine in Early Modern England,” Journal of Social History, 3, (2012): 809-834
Think of a North America without electricity, no running water, no government, almost no buildings left intact, and ravaged by a Chinese manufactured plague, even though it’s hard to imagine that's what happened in Jeff Hirsch’s The Eleventh Plague. In Jeff Hirsch’s Eleventh Plague a family made up of the Dad, Mom, Grandfather, and son are trying to survive in a North America ravaged by a Chinese Plague , But then the mom and grandpa die and dad and Stephen are left on their own, but when the dad gets injured running away from some slavers, A Town named Settlers Landing that seems too good to be true takes them in. Then Stephen befriends a girl named Jenny, and when they play a prank that sends Jenny, and when they play a prank that sends the town into chaos. A war is started and it is up to them to help stop it. I thought that The Eleventh Plague was a believable piece of Speculative Fiction because of Hirsch's use of elements of Conflict, Theme, and Red Herrings.
Pamela K. Gilbert, “’Scarcely to be Described’: Urban Extremes as Real Spaces and Mythic Places in the London Cholera Epidemic of 1854,” Nineteenth Century Studies 14 (2000): 149-72.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is one of the most respected and admired novels of all time. Often criticized for lacking substance and using more elaborate camera work, freely adapted films usually do not follow the original plot line. Following this cliché, Roland Joffe’s version of The Scarlet Letter received an overwhelmingly negative reception. Unrealistic plots and actions are added to the films for added drama; for example, Hester is about to be killed up on the scaffold, when Algonquin members arrive and rescue her. After close analysis, it becomes evident of the amount of work that is put into each, but one must ask, why has the director adapted their own style of depicting the story? How has the story of Hester Prynne been modified? Regarding works, major differences and similarities between the characterization, visual imagery, symbolism, narration and plot, shows how free adaptation is the correct term used.
Though they were not wanted, “Fires were not uncommon in seventeenth-century London” (Cowie, 59). Fires weren’t the only things that London residents worried about though. In 1665 a tragedy known as the Black Plague had occurred and killed many people in the city and though the plague was gone “People continued to fear another outbreak of plague for the rest of the seventeenth century” (Cowie, 56-57). The Great Fire of London was a tragedy that destroyed a whole city and scared all the people who inhabited it. Just as the city was recovering from the Great Plague, the inhabitants had to flee the city once again- this time not as a result of a disease, but the result of a human accident (“The Great Fire of London of 1666”, 1).