The narrator in “The Axe” by Penelope Fitzgerald is the Manager of an unsuccessful company. This unnamed protagonist addresses a letter to his elitist, stereotypically self-important boss. The Manager explains the outcome of the redundancies that he had been assigned, reporting in full detail the termination of his clerical assistant, W.S. Singlebury, an older gentleman whose work is “his life” (Fitzgerald 667). In his letter, the Manager repeatedly makes reference to a pungent smell in the office, about which many staff members complain. The smell of the building is brought up at crucial points in the narrative, and thus the sickening scent, combined with dampness, becomes a strong motif throughout the story.
What is the smell that permeates the office building? This essay will argue that the smell in the office is a physical manifestation of the attitudes and emotions of its inhabitants. The reactions of different characters to the smell in the office building will be examined from cognitive and anthropological viewpoints. For the purpose of this essay “cognitive” will refer to the emotional associations that the characters make with the physical smell and the function of memory in its relation to smell. From the “anthropological” aspect, this essay will focus on the cultural representations of scent appraisal within the narrative. The reader learns about many of the static characters by their reported reactions to the smell: their persistent complaints are contrasted by Singlebury and his alleged understanding of its origin. In this way, the smell in the office building acts as a foil for the Manager, Singlebury and their colleagues. The smell lurks antagonistically throughout the story, growing stronger, highlighting crucial ...
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...n the air, and readers of “The Axe” might suspect that it is more than just a smell. The noxious odour represents the guilt of the manager, the bitter memory of W.S. Singlebury, and the relationship between Singlebury and his colleagues. The air of greed and self-absorption is more than stale; it can be a silent killer.
Works Cited
Dowdey, Sarah. "How Smell Works." HowStuffWorks.com. 29 October 2007. Web. 23/02/
2014. .
Fitzgerald, Penelope. "The Axe." The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Twentieth
Century and Beyond. Ed. Don LePan. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2006. 666-680. Print.
Howes, David., Anthony, Synnott., and Constance Classen. "Anthropology of Odor." David-
Howes.com. The Concordia Sensoria Research Team. Web. 20/02/2014.
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In “Barn Burning”, Abner enters the house at dusk and “could smell the coffee from the room where they would presently eat the cold food remaining from the afternoon meal.” (14) A warm meal would indicate fulfillment and cohesiveness within the family. The inclusion of the detail that the food was cold represents an inversion of these associations. The cold meal symbolizes the family’s distaste with Abner’s actions. The memory of the dinner lingers with the family as they get ready for bed and appears linked with negative images of “Where they had been were no long, water-cloudy scoriations resembling the sporadic course of a lilliputian moving machine.” (15) In addition, the emphasis that this dinner was in fact a left-over meal symbolizes that the pattern of Abner’s destructive behavior and its effects on his family will not change.
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When Divakaruni moved to the United States, tried to abandon the smells of her childhood in favor of acculturation. She realized this is a mistake when she has a child of her own. She eventually comes to appreciate the smells’ abilities to comfort, give joy, and motivate. One smell in particular she told about is how the smell of iodine reminded her that “love sometimes hurts while it’s doing its job.” In rearing her own offspring, she intentionally tried to replicate the “smell technique” with her own twist in hopes that her children reap similar benefits. One example is how she filled the house with the aroma of spices and sang American and Indian tunes with her
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In William Blake’s poem “The Chimney Sweeper,” the speaker, a young boy, introduces himself and relays a common story among all lower-class individuals of the late-eighteenth and early- to mid-nineteenth centuries—that story being a life of woe and untimely death. Blake relays the plight of these victims of the Industrial Revolution in England by using the speaker, a chimney-sweep himself, to retell a story that his young friend told him—one taken from a dream, which, given its subject matter, strangely comforts the dreamer. And this boy, Tom, who is all but born into sorrow, takes solace in the thought of dying, of leaving his earthly toils behind for another, better life with God in heaven. In this poem, Blake essentially takes issue with two powerful forces in eighteenth-century England: a blind government and a pacifist religion.
When the newlyweds move in they are wary of their new landscape, the unfamiliar surroundings, cultural barriers and difference to their old landscape along with the people in the landscape cause them to be unreceptive to the landscape. The changing relationship between the people is demonstrated through the comparative description of the couple in their old and new neighbourhoods. Their prior residence was “in the expansive outer suburbs where good neighbours were seldom seen and never heard”. This is juxtaposed against the noisy Macedonian family that “shouted, ranted and screamed”. The accumulation implies the severity of the noise and juxtaposed against the silence of their old neighbours, Winton demonstrates his purpose that the landscape shapes us and irrational emotions of fear and worry interfere with our receptivity to the landscape. The negative connotations of “uncomfortable”, “nervous”, “disapproval”, “resented” and “disgust” used to describe their neighbours highlights their lack of receptivity to their new landscape. The strained relationships with the neighbours continued into autumn and although displeased, the couple “took careful note of what was said”. The gradual acceptance emphasises the time required to fully accept the new people and their landscape as well as the shift in perspective that is only possible with time. The lack of receptivity to the landscape impacts the couple’s relationship with the neighbours and hence this shows the complexity of human behaviour because it is based on emotions which are impacted by the receptivity to the
...narrator then "buried the axe in [his wife's] brain" our deepest fear come true (23). The walls of the home, that normally represent happiness, reverse and become horrifying. The repetitious abuse breaks the wife, ever so silently, and she loses a piece of herself each time. Every cycle of abuse takes the wife lower and lower into the cellar, until one day, there is nothing left of her. Down she goes, until she is physically, emotionally, and spiritually annihilated.
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
Süskind sets his novel, Perfume; The Story of a Murderer, in the self-empowering period of the Enlightenment. However, his use of animalistic symbolism -especially referring his main character as a tick- as well as motifs of greed and darkness reflect the more maleficent side of humanity through the horridities human perform, and how humans seem to focus on their own desires.
The novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Süskind takes place in the densely populated and repugnant slums of 18th century Paris where protagonist Jean-Baptiste Grenouille resides as a lowly peasant with an incomparable sense of smell that sets him apart from the rest of the world. However, Grenouille is unaffected, and endures the hardships of brutal peasant life with an iron will, in the hopes of discovering every scent the world had to offer as his only motivation for living. He craves to be alone to further enhance his knowledge in capturing scent; Grenouille becomes so estranged and enthralled in the art of capturing fragrances that he sets out on a quest to concoct the “ultimate perfume” which leads him to commit a series of murders to capture human scent. Süskind, by way of Jean Baptiste’s obscure life and fine nose allows readers to explore the concept of alienation and the effects it has on the character development of Jean Baptiste Grenouille.
Throughout the Industrial Revolution in England in the 18th century, many children were forced to work against their own will, to support the growing need for labor in the demanding economy. William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper,” meticulously portrays the mindsets of two individuals obligated to carry out these societal expectations of working at a very young age. However, contrary to societies opinion on harmful child labor, Blake uses irony and sarcasm to convey his critical allegation of the wrongdoings of the church and society on their lack of effort to intervene and put an end to the detrimental job of adolescent chimney sweeping. By creating this ironic atmosphere, Blake establishes a poem that is full of despair and suffering but is sugar-coated and disguised with happiness and content provided by the church and society of London.
In the poem, “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake, the author attempts to educate the reader about the horrors experienced by young children who are forced into labor at an early age cleaning chimneys for the wealthy. The poem begins with a young boy who has lost his mother but has no time to properly grieve because his father has sold him into a life of filth and despair. The child weeps not only for the loss of his mother and his father’s betrayal, but also for the loss of his childhood and innocence. Blake uses poetry in an attempt to provoke outrage over the inhumane and dangerous practice of exploiting children and attempts to shine a light on the plight of the children by appealing to the reader’s conscience in order to free the children from their nightmare existence.