The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty The complex natures of love and family are so intricate that not many authors come close in truly unraveling their mysteries. Eudora Welty, the author of The Optimist’s Daughter, writes about the theme of how family can nurture through love, but they can also cause so much pain through unbeknownst cruelty and betrayal. We can clearly see this theme in Welty’s novel when she writes “Her trouble was that very desperation. And no one had the power to cause that except the one she desperately loved, who refused to consider that she was desperate. It was betrayal on betrayal.” This quote truly captures the overlying them of the novel; we can see how love nurtures, how love betrays, and how love changes us. One of the most fundamental roles of family, which this book highlights, is …show more content…
In the quote essential to the theme above, we see that this family starts off with an abundance of this love. We can see this due to the fact the betrayal on betrayal had such a profound impact on the life of the protagonist of the story, Laurel McKelva. Laurel was raised in a small, closely-knit southern town, where her father, mother, and family friends raise her well and nurture her into an adult. It isn’t until her mother and husband tragically die that she sees the betrayal of love. We can see this nurturing love throughout the novel in small acts such as when Laurel returns home after the death of her father. Welty writes “Half a dozen – a dozen – old family friends had been waiting here in the house. They came out into the hall from the rooms on both sides as Laurel walked in.” These small acts mean the
Eudora Welty's 'A Worn Path' is a story that emphasizes the natural symbolism of the surroundings. As the story begins, we are introduced to our main character, Phoenix Jackson; she is described as a small, old Negro woman. I believe that the name Eudora Welty gives our main character is very symbolic. The legend of the Phoenix is about a fabled sacred bird of ancient Egyptians. The bird is said to come out of Arabia every 500 years to Heliopolis, where it burned itself on the altar and rose again from its ashes, young and beautiful. Phoenix, the women in the story, represents the myth of the bird because she is described as being elderly and near the end of her life. Phoenix can hardly walk and uses a cane made of an old umbrella to aid her. Her skin is described as old and wrinkly, but yet with a golden color running beneath it 'Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath?(55). Her skin tone represents the golden feathers of the Phoenix and her grandson represents the next Phoenix that will be given life when she dies. The trip to the city to get the medicine represents the mythological trip that the Phoenix takes to the sun to die. Most likely this journey along a worn path through the woods, will be one of her last.
After her diagnosis of chronic kidney failure in 2004, psychiatrist Sally Satel lingered in the uncertainty of transplant lists for an entire year, until she finally fell into luck, and received her long-awaited kidney. “Death’s Waiting List”, published on the 5th of May 2006, was the aftermath of Satel’s dreadful experience. The article presents a crucial argument against the current transplant list systems and offers alternative solutions that may or may not be of practicality and reason. Satel’s text handles such a topic at a time where organ availability has never been more demanded, due to the continuous deterioration of the public health. With novel epidemics surfacing everyday, endless carcinogens closing in on our everyday lives, leaving no organ uninflected, and to that, many are suffering, and many more are in desperate request for a new organ, for a renewed chance. Overall, “Death’s Waiting List” follows a slightly bias line of reasoning, with several underlying presumptions that are not necessarily well substantiated.
Many times we feel that our family is against us or no one else cares for us. We even feel there is favoritism or preferences in our family, especially among other siblings. Most of the time it is our immaturity or jealously within ourselves that leads us to these conclusions. Moreover if we neglect others for our own selfish reasons, or if we choose to see things only from our point of view we usually end up by ourselves, longing for the presence of our family. In Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.”, the main character Sister, cannot step outside of her own perspective and is unable to understand the reality of the events taking place around her, therefore making her an unreliable narrator.
In the story A Worn Path, Eudora Welty shows an old woman living in a time period where racial prejudice is rampant and out of control. Phoenix Jackson is a grandmother whose only motivation for living is to nurture her grandson back to health. The strength of love may make people do or say unusual and implausible things. The central idea of this story is that love can empower someone to over come many life-threatening obstacles. The idea is shown when an old woman conquers all odds against her to show her everlasting love for her grandson. Throughout the story Phoenix Jackson has to overcome many types of obstacles that hinder her in her devotion to help her grandson.
The language, meaning, and otherworldliness of Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples, like the golden apples in Yeats' Song of the Wandering Aengus, invite yet often defy grasping. Gratefully, Lowry Pei has offered an informed and lucid perception of this collection, enabling readers to gain that much more ground towards achieving a valuable understanding of the stories, individually and as a whole.
Phoenix’s journey is a little long just by walking alone in the middle of the
Love caused his logic and sensibility to fail him, and provoked him to commit monstrous acts that destroyed many lives. Through analysis of “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood, it can be concluded that one of her many intended lessons was to show the value and the powerful effects of love. Atwood successfully proved this lesson by using powerful examples of both successful and disastrous relationships to illustrate the positive and negative effects of love. Atwood truly demonstrated what it is like to follow your heart.
The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty presents Wanda Fay on the surface as selfish, manipulative, insecure, thoughtless, shallow, spoiled, and flighty as well as thoughtlessly and carelessly cruel. On the contrary, it wasn’t difficult for me to see Fay as a victim of her family and her upbringing, the elite class of Mount Salus, and her own personal aspirations. Throughout the novel, even though I despised Fay and her weaknesses I did feel sorry for her. Her apprehension discovering that her family was downstairs when she finally decided to leave the bedroom to see her husband, the Judge’s, body for the last time showed me that she had probably hoped to escape her family by marrying the Judge, only to discover that she was forced to confront them when the Judge passed away and no longer ‘belonged’ to her. The Optimist’s daughter is a deliberate metaphor for society. Eudora Welty was slightly prescient, as she never focuses on political issues, but instead crass materialism/boundless energy vs. civilized values/privilege and class.
Myth, symbol, and allusion are not an uncommon characteristic in Eudora Welty's works. By using characters such as Odysseus and leaving hints of symbolism in works such as The Optimist's Daughter Welty places many questions in the minds of her readers. After a reader has pondered these questions a categorization of the story takes place in the readers mind. Although different readers have different interpretations of literature one collection of Welty's short stories can be classified into two categories. Katherine Anne Porter's introduction to Eudora Welty's A Curtain of Green explains the two categories:
In her book On Revolution, Hannah Arendt carefully characterizes a revolution, giving the exact classifications that are required of an event for it to be revolutionary. She also asserts exactly how a revolution is a beginning, using the American Revolution as an example. Through her explanation of how a revolution is a beginning, she explains how the idea of attempting to date a revolution is paradoxical.
When food is wasted water is wasted. The amount of food that gets wasted everyday worldwide is incredibly high. There
Cymbeline and The Tempest illustrate daughterhood as a daughter’s inability to break the boundaries of the relationship with the father. The impact on daughterhood arises from a father’s behaviour, which influences the daughter’s actions. Innogen in Cymbeline and Miranda in The Tempest seek to understand self-acceptance over their father’s lack of trust towards them. Therefore, a father’s lack of trust disrupts the daughter’s ability to find self-trust; Innogen and Miranda rebel as an act of self-control to find trust with themselves. They also realize their problems and self-worth. In other words, the daughters reflect on their problems to take control and protect themselves. Innogen and Miranda represent daughterhood as an emotional journey that reflect the impact of a father’s trust.
Mary Barton, the first novel of Elizabeth Gaskell, shows a thoughtful portrayal of the lives of the common laborers amid a time of fast industrialization and financial gloom. Starting in the industrial center of nineteenth-century England; Manchester, the work joins the characteristics of a sentimental romance with the features of a social-problem novel, a genre that was at the height of its popularity during this time.
...tain aspects of humankind’s collective existence that are undoubtedly applicable across an almost endless array of situations and manifestations, destined to pertain to every single individual within society during at least some point in their lifetime. Particularly relevant facets of the human condition in this respect incorporate the sheer dominating irrationality of potent love, interpersonal social relationships between human beings as a framework upon which society is built, and the irrepressible tendency to ponder regretfully over one’s position as a result of significant decisions. A consideration of T.S. Eliot’s The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Leunig’s The Life You Lead, and Guy de Maupassant’s All Over conclusively imparts the notion that the aforementioned concepts of humanity are inextricably and directly linked to our accompanying emotional condition.
In one way or another, this novel, as Silas Marner, calls for a universal theme of love and kinship. Life cannot be based on reason, and materialism. It can be based on kindness and friendship. To have the mind and heart in peace.