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Literary critique of the garden party by katherine mansfield
Literary critique of the garden party by katherine mansfield
Literary critique of the garden party by katherine mansfield
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The Theme of Death in The Garden Party
Katherine Mansfield explores profoundly the world of death and its impact on a person in her short story, "The Garden Party."
Enter the Sheridans, a wealthy, high-class family who live in England. They are your everyday rich snobs who think themselves better than the common person. There is, however, one person who is quite unlike her family, and that is Laura Sheridan.
Laura started off in a bubble, and has lived in it all her life. She has been protected from the real world, so she has never experienced the effects of betrayal, poverty, or labor, let alone death, which she does get to experience, by the end of the story. Laura meets face to face with death, and the results of it will change her look on life forever. It is a wonder she ever had a chance to be a caring, sensitive person with a sibling like Jose. Jose is an unfeeling, heartless and self-absorbed person who is completely clueless to those around her who don’t have lots of money or expensive assets. She sings songs with mock passion:
This life is wee-ary
A Tear – a sigh
A Love that Chan-ges
This Life is wee-ary
A Tear – a sigh
A Love that chan-ges
And then…good bye!
This is the song that Jose sings before the garden party is held. It’s ironic how she can sing a song about life being weary, a tear-a sigh when she cannot-could not, even remotely relate to ever being in the position of being weary. She is singing about something that she doesn’t understand, something she can’t feel. She can’t sing it with any real compassion, because she has none. This shows when she breaks into a brilliant smile at the end of the song, which is supposed to be full of sadness. This is what gives the effect of...
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... She knows her hat is grossly inappropriate. It brags to these poor people that she is wealthy and they are not. It is a party hat, but also it is everything Laura was. It represents her narrow-minded upbringing, such as the way she was taught to treat others of "lower class" and it represents a person who doesn’t care much for the well being of others. "Forgive my hat" is truly the heart of this story.
When Laura sobs, "Isn’t life, isn’t life-" she is trying to explain how she feels now about life, how the experience of seeing the dead affected her. She can’t put it into words though, because it was a feeling that she experienced-an understanding. It could be concluded that she had the words all along, only she had them mixed up. What Laura was really trying to say, is "life isn’t." That is the effect Mansfield wished to create, and she succeeded beautifully at it.
The interpretations of what comes after death may vary greatly across literature, but one component remains constant: there will always be movement. In her collection Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey discusses the significance, permanence and meaning of death often. The topic is intimate and personal in her life, and inescapable in the general human experience. Part I of Native Guard hosts many of the most personal poems in the collection, and those very closely related to the death of Trethewey’s mother, and the exit of her mother’s presence from her life. In “Graveyard Blues”, Trethewey examines the definition of “home” as a place of lament, in contrast to the comforting meaning in the epitaph beginning Part I, and the significance
Who is Laura Wingfield you might ask? Without the knowledge of her age one might assume Laura is quite young the little sister. However she is not, Laura is almost 24 and is someone who didn’t want to be treated like a child but just became complacent with her status. Furthermore, Laura is unemployed which creates one of the main conflicts in the play, and her response to this problem highlights Laura’s attempt at ignoring reality by lying to her mother. The entirety of the play takes place in Saint Louis and Laura’s family apartment. Highlighting, why Laura’s has a clear inability to accept change since Laura has lived in Saint Louis, Missouri her whole life. Similarly, Laura has also lived her entire life in the same apartment located in
..., but Laura saw a beauty in death which helped her to see the beauty of life. Elizabeth realized the frightening possibility that life was just an immediate placement and that her reality resided in death.
Imagine that the person you love most in the world dies. How would you cope with the loss? Death and grieving is an agonizing and inevitable part of life. No one is immune from death’s insidious and frigid grip. Individuals vary in their emotional reactions to loss. There is no right or wrong way to grieve (Huffman, 2012, p.183), it is a melancholy ordeal, but a necessary one (Johnson, 2007). In the following: the five stages of grief, the symptoms of grief, coping with grief, and unusual customs of mourning with particular emphasis on mourning at its most extravagant, during the Victorian era, will all be discussed in this essay (Smith, 2014).
"Anabolic steroids is the familiar name for synthetic substances related to the male sex hormones (e.g., testosterone). They promote the growth of skeletal muscle (anabolic effects) and the development of male sexual characteristics (androgenic effects) in both males and females”(National Institute on Drug Base).First, the benefits of steroids are very obvious to see. The user gains strength, mass, and speed in a short amount of time. Also, the user has a more aggressive attitude, which is good for football players. However, there are more bad side effects than good. The side effects include hair loss, acne, liver damage, kidney damage, increased breast tissue and becoming very aggressive. These are just some of the horrible bad side effects by using steroids.
There are many types of steroids abused by athletes in order to increase their muscle mass and strength. Though steroids have a negative reputation, there are some that can be beneficial to athletes and certain patients. There are types of steroids called corticosteroids that have more medical uses to them and another type called anabolic-androgenic steroids that have a more limited medical use. The anabolic-androgenic are usually the steroids that are being abused by athletes (Bigelow, par.10). The use of steroids goes back to the end of World War II around the 1940’s. Doctors were giving the freed prisoners from the Nazi concentration camps that were at risk of death anabolic-androgenic steroids to help gain back their muscle mass and weight faster. From this knowledge, steroids began to be used by body builders and athletes to get more fit than they already were. It is believed that the abuse of the steroids started in the late 1940’s by weight lifters and bodybuilders, and by the 1950’s, it was spread to the Olympics (Bigelow, par.11). Any type of steroid should not be used if they are only going to be abused by being used in large doses with the intentions of increasing lean muscle mass and strength (Bigelow, par.11). After years of abuse of anabolic-androgenic steroids in the Olympics they were added to the list of banned substances and random testing of athletes were announced to start taking place (Bigelow, par.35).
Towards the beginning of this poem where Laura gives the goblins a piece of her hair for this fruit, basically she’s giving a piece of herself for this fruit which kind of like the first time you have sex. You give up your virginity to Experience that, and for some their virginity is a big thing for them especially religious people who want to stay pure for marriage. After this Laura goes on a complete down turn and begins
When he asks what she gives it to him for, she replies, “A—souvenir.” Then she hands it to him, almost as if to show him that he had shattered her unique beauty. This incident changed her in the way that a piece of her innocence that made her so different is now gone. She is still beautiful and fragile like the menagerie, but just as she gives a piece of her collection to Jim, she also gives him a piece of her heart that she would never be able to regain. Laura and her menagerie are both at risk of being crushed when exposed to the uncaring reality of the world.
Anabolic steroids have been involved in the world of sports for quite some time. Their scandalous presence has brought many debates about whether or not they should be allowed. There has been countless amounts of research to find out what they do to your body, if they are safe and if they are healthy. Steroids have been shown to bring unhealthy side effects and various health risks. Not to mention, they give unfair advantages and are considered cheating. Steroids do not belong in the sports community. Steroids are unfair, unhealthy, unjust, and should not be allowed or accepted in sports.
Anabolic steroids are chemicals that are similar to testosterone, the male sex hormone. Steroids are used by a number or young people to enhance their muscle mass and increase their performances. While anabolic steroids are successful at building muscle, they can damage many human body organs, such as the heart, kidneys and liver. Steroids are taken by injection or in pill form, after steroids enter the bloodstream; they are distributed to organs and muscle throughout the body.
Laura Wingfield is described by Williams as having “failed to establish contact with reality, [and] continues to live vitally in her illusions.” Laura is unmotivated to move beyond the daily life she has with her family. She seems comfortable and content, in the sense that because she has always been taken care of, she believes that she always will be. She is not concerned about her future unlike her mother who vocalizes her concerns to Tom, “nothing has happened. She just drifts along doing nothing. It frightens me terribly how she just drifts along,” (34). Amanda has Laura attend Business College to help her in the future. However, Laura drops out the day after she “was sick to the stomach and almost had to be carried into the washroom,”
Steroids are a big problem and can cause many different issues. “Steroids can have long-lasting and sometimes irreversible side effects on the body. Steroids have been linked to increased cholesterol, stroke and blood clots.” (“Steroids use among high school students”) Blood clots, strokes and other deadly health problems are not worth being a little stronger. “Flooding the body with any hormone at ten to twenty times greater strength than normal is dangerous”. (“Steroids in baseball”) Steroids are not worth hearing your body forever and never being
Many arguments have been made for legalization of steroids in sports. One of these arguments is that even with rules making steroids illegal, athletes will not stop trying to get the advantage. Athletes may play their respective sport for the love of the game, but all athletes understand
In sports, everyone wants to be the next Lebron James, the next Derek Jeter, or the next Peyton Manning. The problem is, athletes will do almost anything to get to that point. That includes Anabolic Steroids. An Anabolic Steroid is a drug in the form of a pill or an injection, that increases the level of testosterone in the body, which in turn allows muscle tissue to grow faster and stronger than it would in a normal persons body. A normal male produces 40-50 milligrams of testosterone per week. A male using steroids could produce almost 4,000 milligrams a week. That is about 40 times the testosterone of a normal male. What most people don’t realize about these drugs, they hold serious health consequences which in most cases eventually kill
Primarily, Mansfield uses the foil characters Laura and Mrs. Sheridan to accentuate Laura’s beliefs in social equality while bringing out Mrs. Sheridan’s opposite actions. After the news of the death of their neighbor, Mr. Scott, Laura feels she “...can’t possible have a garden-party with a man dead just outside [her] front gate”(5) she feels sympathetic towards the family as she knows they will be able to hear their band as they are mourning. On the contrary, Mrs. Sheridan does quite the opposite when alerted of the news, and even more so when Laura tells Mrs. Sheridan of her plans to cancel the party. Mrs. Sheridan strongly believes that “People like that don't expect sacrifices from us.”(6) Mansfield shows the reader how these two characters are quite different from each other. Laura doesn’t want a garden party to be disrespectful of the Scotts, but Mrs. Sheridan believes quite the opposite as she is rude and doesn’t believe the Scotts are on the same level as the Sheridans, being quite lower...