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Social effect of the great depression on the American society essay
Grant Wood. American Gothic analysis
The affect of the great depression
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In Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” he portrays America’s dark age and the values its citizens evoke. During the Great, Depression Americans went back to their roots and focused on on the importance of home, work, and church to get through the tough time for the nation. Grant Wood illustrates this with details. The man portrays work, his faded overalls and strong hands grasping the pitchfork solidify his role. Mr. Wood purposely painted the red barn on his right side to continue to cement this idea. His overalls echo the design of the pitchfork directly connecting him to farm work. The woman is the home. She cares both for the house and the man. Being the caretaker is not easy, her stray hair fallen from her hard work. She does work hard but
Grant Wood was a Regionalist artist who continually endeavored to capture the idyllic beauty of America’s farmlands. In 1930 he had been roaming through his hometown in Iowa searching for inspiration when he stumbled upon a house that left him spellbound. From this encounter came America’s iconic American Gothic. Not long after Wood’s masterpiece was complete the once ideal countryside and the people who tended to it were overcome by despair and suffering as the Great Depression came to be. It was a time of economic distress that affected nearly every nation. America’s stock market crashed in 1929 and by 1933 millions of Americans were found without work and consequently without adequate food, shelter, and other necessities. In 1935, things took a turn for the worst as severe winds and dust storms destroyed the southern Great Plains in the event that became known as the Dust Bowl. Farmers, who had been able to fall back on their crops during past depressions, were hit especially hard. With no work or way or other source of income, many farms were foreclosed, leaving countless families hungry and homeless. Ben Shahn, a Lithuanian-born man who had a deep passion for social injustice, captures the well-known hopelessness of the Great Depression through his photograph Rural Rehabilitation Client. Shahn and Wood use their art to depict the desperation of everyday farmers in America due to the terrors and adverse repercussions that the Great Depression incited.
Southern gothic is a type of literature that focuses on the harsh conflicts of violence and racism, which is observed in the perspective of black and white individuals. Some of the most familiar southern authors are William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy. One author in particular, Flannery O’Connor, is a remarkable author, who directly reflects upon southern grotesque within her two short stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Revelation.” These two short stories are very similar to each other, which is why I believe that O’Connor often writes with violent characters to expose real violence in the world while tying them in with a particular spiritual insight. The first short story that O’Connor refers to with southern grotesque and violence is in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
Physical surroundings (such as a home in the countryside) in works of literary merit such as “Good Country People”, “Everyday Use”, and “Young Goodman Brown” shape psychological and moral traits of the characters, similarly and differently throughout the stories.
Set during the Great Depression in America, The Parsley Garden by William Saroyan, is a thought-provoking short story about how an impulsive decision leads to humiliating and traumatic consequences for the protagonist, eleven-year-old Al Condraj, the stubborn and curious son of a poor Armenian immigrant woman. After attempting to steal a hammer from a store, Al’s strong desire to make things right and seek redemption leads to a transformation in his thinking and a realization of his place in society. This is a society which is quite different from the calm milieu of Al’s mother’s parsley garden. The garden is a sanctuary where Al is able to find peace in
Different documents in the Gilded Age prominently illustrated gender inequality in their portrayal of men and women within society. Many photographs in the time period by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine did not shed light on a woman’s hardships, but rather undermined their domestic work. Society failed to give women credit for their work at home due to the common misconception that a woman’s work was easier than that of a man’s. Margaret Byington’s article Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town contrastingly gave an accurate portrayal of the distress women faced in their everyday life. The representation of women in the Gilded Age varies significantly between that in the photographs, and their domestic, weak personification, and in Byington’s article, which gives women a more accurate depiction through their domestic duties.
James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” reveals a rather pessimistic narrative of the various lifestyles that are described, and also the inescapable destinies that hold for the townspeople. This utmost despair experienced through the people, forms an ambition that transcends onto their children; who are their last hope. Therefore “Autumn Begins”, the season that holds many possibilities for the townspeople, and even a glance into the past for others.
Word by word, gothic literature is bound to be an immaculate read. Examining this genre for what it is could be essential to understanding it. “Gothic” is relating to the extinct East Germanic language, people of which known as the Goths. “Literature” is defined as a written work, usually with lasting “artistic merit.” Together, gothic literature combines the use of horror, death, and sometimes romance. Edgar Allan Poe, often honored with being called the king of horror and gothic poetry, published “The Fall of House Usher” in September of 1839. This story, along with many other works produced by Poe, is a classic in gothic literature. In paragraph nine in this story, one of our main characters by the name of Roderick Usher,
Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning,” captures the intensity and dynamics of a father and son relationship. The story is set in the Old South, where the dry farming grounds of the plantations are the only places that promise hardworking men a means to support their families. Though Faulkner presents these two man characters as vastly different, the father, Abner, and the son, Sarty, share a striking similarity. They both see themselves as victims and display the traits of a victim’s status. The father is a victim of social injustice and poverty. The son, on the other hand, is a victim of child abuse at the hand of his controlling and impulsive father. Faulkner sets the tone of the story by displaying the strategies of the victims and the complexity of their abuse through the narrator’s voice.
They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. If that is true, I would have to say that many people praise American Gothic every day. It is parodied in the political cartoons of the newspapers around the country and on television as well. Almost anyone could recognize the solemn couple from having been printed on everything from coffee mugs to mousepads. Grant Wood’s classic tale of a farming family in rural Iowa has truly
William Faulkner is concerned with the south and its problems with black slavery. The issues in Barn Burning deal with the conflict between father and son. The theme of this story focuses on justice. The boy, Sarty, objects to his father burning barns and wants people to be treated fairly. His father, Abner, believes his son should respect and support kin. Abner thinks family is right no matter what. Faulkner’s intent is to show that choosing between one’s own family and justice is very difficult to do, and in the end justice must prevail. The theme is best illustrated by its point of view, its characterization, and setting.
Yet the similarity between these two stories raises some interesting questions about how we read Carver. That he is adored as few late-century American writers are is not news -- as Bloom points out there's almost a cult of Carver. Readers treasure not only his taut, bleak, deeply moving short stories but the legend of his life, as well: unhappy, alcoholic, stifled by frustrating poverty and saddled with the overwhelming responsibilities of teenage parenthood ("[My wife and I] didn't have any youth" he told Simpson), Carver's singular talent didn't have room to develop until relatively late. His eventual triumph over adversity, a story of late, spectacular blooming against all odds, has given him a rare hold on his readers' affection. Carver chronicled the lives of the lumpen proletariat and the demoralized white working class with a sensitivity and eye for detail unmatched in his contemporaries and, many would argue, his followers. He is commonly thought of as a truly American writer, perhaps stylistically indebted to Sherwood Anderson, Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway (he himself suggested the link to Hemingway in his book "Fires"), but in a sense sui generis -- a talented, sensitive soul who rose up out of the deadening laundromats and strip malls of the great, dreary American suburban wastelands and wrote beautiful, sad stories in clipped, stripped prose. The minimalism and domestic realism of his short stories made his work read very differently from the cerebral literary styling of his contemporaries, the university-ensnared postmodernists. But perhaps Carver's work wasn't as unfettered or as American (in his literary influences, at least) as all that.
Southern Gothic Literature is a subgenre of Gothic fiction writing, which takes place in the American South. The Southern Gothic style is one of that employs the topics such as death, bizarre, violent, madness, and supernatural. These tools are used “to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South (Wikipedia).” The view of the South which is self-identified as the “national” or “American” view is basically a colonial Romance, with the rest of the nation identified with the forces of the light and the South with the forces of the darkness (Wacker 107).The authors of Southern Gothic typically use damaged characters to make their stories better, and to show deeper meanings of unpleasant Southern characteristics. These characters are diverse from society due to social, physical or mental disabilities.
If ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’, than an album can show a lifetime. During the Great depression, many jobs were created in hope for a better economy. Walker Evans became a photographer capturing the moments of the times. In the Bud Fields and his family, Hale county, Alabama, summer 1936, the hardships and the struggle can be shown that reflects the great recession. Three Generations are shown in the pictures living in a small bedroom with little or no material goods. Only the grandmother is wearing shoes that it shows power among the family, as well as, virtue, because if she is the only one in the family that is wearing shoes in the family, there might only be a few people wearing shoes in the community that they live in. The Children
This paper examines Abner’s tendencies to burn barns in Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning.” Is this just a defense mechanism? Or a way to get back at those who make him feel insecure. By performing a psychoanalysis on Abner, I hope to find out the reason or reasons behind his Barn Burning. By using the research I documented in this essay I hope to prove that the reasons that Abner burns barn is because he is insecure personally, insecure financially and is also insecure about his identity. I hope to bring a different perspective to the story “barn burning” and maybe even a different perspective on the character Abner.
The Others is a film about a mother named Grace raising her children alone until three new housekeepers come and Grace begins to suspect that her family may not be alone in their home, and The Turn of the Screw is the story of the governess and how she decides to take care of two children but begins to see ghosts of people who used to take care of the same children and she begins to think something sinister is happening. This essay will be a comparison between The Others and The Turn of the Screw’s exhibition of the Gothic elements of large empty mansions, the focus on darkness, and the effects of fog.