The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy
“The Withered Arm” is a tragedy of fate and is a story of two women
linked to one man. The nature of the tragedy is that the suffering is
always a punishment that is disproportionate to the ‘offence’. In this
story it is the innocent who are punished for the sins of others
(Rhoda’s son, Gertrude). They exemplify the unfairness of existence.
The story begins with a group of milkmaids gossiping about the
farmer’s new, young wife. It is, perhaps, a comical scene, but it is
quickly apparent that the humour of these sharp tongued, common folk
is a bare veil over the hardship of rural life that Hardy finds
everywhere. One milkmaid, Rhoda, is quickly established as a former
lover of the farmer. She is separated from the others, physically, and
by their alienating chatter. At the end of Chapter One, Rhoda’s
cottage is a painful, if obvious, metaphor for her worn-down
existence. Her cottage has been attacked by the elements and is
virtually at the point of collapse:
“ It was built of mud-walls, the surface of which had been washed by
many rains into channels and depressions that left none of the
original flat face visible; while here and there in the thatch above a
rafter showed like a bone protruding through the skin.”
At first Rhoda is presented as the protagonist. She is frail, keenly
protected by the milkmen in the first chapter, and a single mother.
Yet as she is presented as increasingly jealous, and as Gertrude
appears increasingly perfect, our sympathies veer towards the latter.
In fact, Gertrude is less well drawn than Rho...
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...ssed her and she did not
altogether deplore that the young thing at her side should learn that
their lives had been antagonised by other influences than their own.”
Gertrude is a pathetic victim of ‘other influences’ but Rhoda, in
spite of being confirmed as a sorceress, takes on an almost tragic
quality. She attracts the sympathy that any jilted woman left with a
child might attract. Her jealousy is understandable, her ‘malignity’
is subconscious rather than conscious and she suffers from a sense of
guilt as she witnesses Gertrude’s decline. Finally, her agony and
anger over her son’s corpse are, if not exactly justified, excusable.
And the body over which she wails is the victim not only of law’s
harshness but also of his parents’ negligence. Nothing could better
illustrate the unfairness of existence.
Men and Women in The Withered Arm and Other Stories by Thomas Hardy and Men and Women in Turned by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The Story of an Hour” and “The Hand” both has remarkable similarities and differences. They share a common theme of women and marriage and the sacrifices they make for their family. The setting in both stories is significant to understand the role of women hundreds of years ago. The symbolism portrayed in “The Hand” is about relationships and marriage. When a relationship is new and everything is wonderful there are not any fears or regrets. As time goes by even the most desirable qualities in someone will begin to be an annoyance rather than a joy.
The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were just ordinary men, from a variety of backgrounds, education, and age. It would appear that they were not selected by any force other than random chance. Their backgrounds and upbringing, however, did little to prepare these men for the horrors they were to witness and participate in.
The most evil in the world at that time and what Harriot Stow tells readers about the evil that is slavery. The regards to the slavery the evil is that it affects everyone. The way she details the events in the story shows the struggle of slavery but also the way family life was affected by it. Not because it was just cruel but that to the white slave owners would act as if it was completely normal. That is what the evil is the fact that it is nothing to them just a part of their lives.
Allegra Goodman was born in Brooklyn New York in 1967, but she grew up in Honolulu, where her parents moved and taught at the University of Hawaii in 1969. She received a Ph.D. in English Literature from Stanford University. Ms. Goodman began writing short stories in high school, and the summer after she graduated in 1985. Now, she has published two short story collections and six novels. The Other Side of the Island, which was published in 2008, describes how the world was controlled by Earth Mother after eight years of the Flood, and what the Greenspoons, especially Honor, did while they were living in the Colonies on Island 365 in the Tranquil Sea. On one hand, Earth Mother and the Corporation were protecting and providing citizens with the new weather, the Enclosure; on the other hand, they were trying to control everybody from Unpredictable and defeat the Forecaster and his partisans. Ms. Goodman wrote the book while she suffered from the heat wave in Boston. She realized that everywhere around her things are attached air conditioners: her house, her car, and shops. People didn’t live in the real world anymore; she even wished there were air conditioned streets as well. Therefore, she started with that concept: “All this happened many years ago, before the streets were air conditioned. Children played outside, and in many places, the sky was still naturally blue.”
In the short story, “The Story of an Hour,” author Kate Chopin presents the character of Mrs. Louis Mallard. She is an unhappy woman trapped in her discontented marriage. Unable to assert herself or extricate herself from the relationship, she endures it. The news of the presumed death of her husband comes as a great relief to her, and for a brief moment she experiences the joys of a liberated life from the repressed relationship with her husband. The relief, however, is short lived. The shock of seeing him alive is too much for her bear and she dies. The meaning of life and death take on opposite meaning for Mrs. Mallard in her marriage because she lacked the courage to stand up for herself.
Albert Camus has his own toolbox of literary devices when it comes to accentuating the theme of The Stranger, one of them being his unique sense and use of secondary characters. Whether major or minor, every character in the book serves a purpose, and corroborates the theme in some form of fashion. Camus describes his secondary characters as foiling Meursault in one aspect or another, and thus, shining light on Meursault’s characteristics. Whether through close connections like familial relationships (Maman) and friendships (Salamano, Raymond, and Marie), or through bonds as distant as people he briefly converses with (Chaplain), or even so much as complete strangers (Perez and unidentified lady at the restaurant), characters that Meursault encounters foil and therefore, emphasize many aspects of his nature. Furthermore, because Meursault aptly embodies Camus’s ideology of Absurdism, emphasizing Meursault through secondary characteristics simply highlights Camus’ doctrine and theme of the book.
Rhoda is curious about the new wife and sends her son of to "check her
For my book I chose to read The Body by Stephen King. This novel is about four young boys taking a journey to find a body somewhere in the woods that is at the county line. This story is about more than just four boys going on an adventure its about them becoming closer to each other and learning real life lessons along the way. The four boys are all going into their first year of middle school so this is a time in their life when they learn things that will help them in life.
During the American literary movement known as Transcendentalism, many Americans began to looking deeper into positive side of religion and philosophy in their writing. However, one group of people, known as the Dark Romantics, strayed away from the positive beliefs of Transcendentalism and emphasized their writings on guilt and sin. The most well-known of these writers is Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was a dark romantic writer during this era, renown for his short stories and poems concerning misery and macabre. His most famous poem is “The Raven”, which follows a man who is grieving over his lost love, Lenore. In this poem, through the usage of tonal shift and progression of the narrator’s state of mind, Poe explores the idea that those who grieve will fall.
Mrs. Marian Forrester strikes readers as an appealing character with the way she shifts as a person from the start of the novel, A Lost Lady, to the end of it. She signifies just more than a women that is married to an old man who has worked in the train business. She innovated a new type of women that has transitioned from the old world to new world. She is sought out to be a caring, vibrant, graceful, and kind young lady but then shifts into a gold-digging, adulterous, deceitful lady from the way she is interpreted throughout the book through the eyes of Niel Herbert. The way that the reader is able to construe the Willa Cather on how Mr. and Mrs. Forrester fell in love is a concept that leads the reader to believe that it is merely psychological based. As Mrs. Forrester goes through her experiences such as the death of her husband, the affairs that she took part in with Frank Ellinger, and so on, the reader witnesses a shift in her mentally and internally. Mrs. Forrester becomes a much more complicated women to the extent in which she struggles to find who really is and that is a women that wants to find love and be fructuous in wealth. A women of a multitude of blemishes, as a leading character it can be argued that Mrs. Forrester signifies a lady that is ultimately lost in her path of personal transitioning. She becomes lost because she cannot withstand herself unless she is treated well by a wealthy male in which causes her to act unalike the person she truly is.
Capital punishment plays a major part in "The Withered Arm", as Gertrude must place her damaged arm on the neck of a hung criminal, to cure it.
George Herbert throughout his poem “The Collar” puts his thoughts, feelings and complaints on paper on freedom restrictions. He resolves to break free from the binds fastening him to the life he fights to be free from. In various ways, countless things hold down and confine us from doing certain things daily. All the way through history people fought for the rights that tied them down for what they believed in. Herbert explains in his poem that one requires some restrictions even if we cannot understand the motive behind it.
The Life of Women in The Withered Arm and Other Wessex Tales by Thomas Hardy
The Scarlet Letter is a blend of realism, symbolism, and allegory. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses historical settings for this fictional novel and even gives historical background information for the inspiration of the story of Hester Prynne in the introduction of The Scarlet Letter, ‘The Custom-House’. The psychological exploration of the characters and the author’s use of realistic dialogue only add to the realism of the novel. The most obvious symbol of the novel is the actual scarlet letter ‘A’ that Hester wears on her chest every day, but Hawthorne also uses Hester’s daughter Pearl and their surroundings as symbols as well. Allegory is present as well in The Scarlet Letter and is created through the character types of several characters in the novel.