Lily Essays

  • A Rose Lily by Alice Walkers

    760 Words  | 2 Pages

    the name A Roselily @ means A beauty and perfection, happiness and grace and lily means purity, and guiltless@(Symbolism in literature pg.3) But this symbolism doesn’t come across in the story, instead the exact opposite of there definition comes across. For instance, from the beginning of the story she talks about having three kids with her at the time of the ceremony which definitely means she=s not as pure as the lily portrays her to be. One of the other things that strike me about this reading

  • Lily as the Goddess Diana in The House of Mirth

    2081 Words  | 5 Pages

    Lily as the Goddess Diana in The House of Mirth One of the tragedies in The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is that Lily Bart is unable to marry Laurence Selden and thereby secure a safe position in society. Their relationship fluctuates from casual intimacy to outright love depending on how and where Selden perceives Lily. Selden sees a beautious quality in Lily Bart that is not present in any of the other women in the novel. This mysterious beauty that is so often alluded to, in addition to

  • Lily Bart’s Tragic Oscillation in The House of Mirth

    3816 Words  | 8 Pages

    Lily Bart’s Tragic Oscillation in The House of Mirth In his article “Disowning ‘Personality’: Privacy and Subjectivity in The House of Mirth,” William Moddelmog explains that the interaction between Selden and Lily in Selden’s apartment the second time captures “the novel’s drama of subjectivity” (337) This drama exists at the core of Edith Wharton’s novel of upper-class manners and social morality, where a conflicted protagonist presents an amicable appearance in spite of her complex internal

  • Claude Monet Water Lilies Essay

    976 Words  | 2 Pages

    Water lilies was a series of approximately 250 oil paintings Claude Monet (1840-1926) produced late in his life while he was 74 till his death at 86 in his garden at Giverny, west of Paris along the Seine. Claude Monet was a impressionist. To illustrated, Louis Leroy, writing for the satirical journal Charivari, sized upon the tile of Monet’s painting IMPRESSION, SUNRISE while Monet exhibited his painting in Paris in 1874 (Marilyn 495). And this was the first time the term impression was used. Impressionists

  • Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse

    1895 Words  | 4 Pages

    presence inspires Lily to create a painting that irons out the folds.  Lily eventually accepts some distance from Mrs. Ramsay, as well, which becomes another liberating step in the process of smoothing out her jagged soul. When those images are rediscovered, and sometimes re-invented, change is produced. Ultimately, Lily is released from the past, while smoothing out the creases. Lily's ambivalent feelings toward Mrs. Ramsay make her life creased and conflicted: "Lily feels forced to choose

  • William Faulkner's 'Kew Gardens'

    1548 Words  | 4 Pages

    Simon asks his wife, Eleanor, if she ever thinks about the past. He tells her that he is thinking about Lily and asks her if this bothers her. Eleanor says she doesn't mind. She tells him that everyone thinks about the past, especially in the Kew Gardens, a place that is filled with young couples that lie together under the trees. She says these couples are

  • Comparing Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Kawabata's Snow Country

    1029 Words  | 3 Pages

    of contradictory image. Lily Briscoe's metaphor stabilize the chaotic reality around her, order them into a visible representation, and make them timeless. She shares these goals with the Impressionists, for whom moments of being (as Woolf calls them elsewhere) are also "illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark" (161). The instantaneity of this image, and its reliance on light, is crucial for To the Lighthouse; through the single match Lily, and Woolf, light forest fires

  • Lily’s Reflections in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

    1359 Words  | 3 Pages

    Lily’s Reflections in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse Embodying the spirit of the female artist, Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse examines critical issues pertaining to her role in Virginia Woolf’s novel. In Part Three of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay’s legacy plays an especially important role in Lily’s thinking processes. Flowing experimentally like the sea that day, Lily’s thoughts encompass the novel’s themes of the passage of time, the role of the woman, and the role of the artist. Though

  • Naturalism in The House of Mirth

    1488 Words  | 3 Pages

    viewing The House of Mirth as a novel which embodies naturalism. Some arguments contend that naturalism does not play a vital role in the novel because of the fact that such a significant internal conflict belies itself within the divided being of Lily Bart and because Wharton focuses so intensely on this conflict, a discord which seems opposed to the naturalistic idea of inevitability (Gerard, 4 1 0). Indeed, Wharton's works are not as critically concerned with naturalistic themes as are the works

  • Lit. Analysis

    911 Words  | 2 Pages

    by Joan Aiken. In this paper, I intend to prove to you that the above statements are true. In the story “Searching for Summer”, two young people, Tom and Lily, are married. At this time, the sun was hidden behind large clouds from, possibly , a nuclear blast. This is not made clear to the reader in the story. For their honeymoon, Tom and Lily went off in search of the sun. they motorbike that they were driving on broke down so they stopped in the town of Molesworth. They met an elderly lady and

  • Who Is A Dynamic Character In Searching For Summer And A Son From America?

    991 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Final      Everyone in a story is bound to be a dynamic character for it to become more interesting. Samuel, Lily, and Tom were all filling this role as dynamic characters in these two stories. This essay of the stories Searching for Summer and A Son from America will be analyzed. They will first be explained in how Tom and Lily went to a Ms. Hatchings house, and also will speak of why Samuel went to America. The essay will explain the reasons for coming back and what

  • The Impact of Social Idealogy on Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse

    1195 Words  | 3 Pages

    patriarchial portrayal of feminism with the character of Lily Brascoe. Lily is constructed as an independent character who defies the ingrained beleifs of how a woman should act. She does this through her actions in a different style despite Mr Tansley¹s assertion that Œwomen can¹t write, women can¹t paint¹ and refuses to marry even though it was a popular belief that all women should marry Œas an unmarried woman has missed the best of life¹. Instead Lily thought that that 'she did not need to marry, thank

  • Fleeting Connections

    1590 Words  | 4 Pages

    Fleeting Connections in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse       In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay plays the role of a beautiful, dutiful wife and mother. She also is a peacekeeper, who struggles to find unity, even in situations where it seems that none can be found. Through Mrs. Ramsay's attempts to unify conditions, many characters experience an extreme sense of connection with her. Often, like Mrs. Ramsay's successful unifications, these connections are but fleeting ones

  • The Lotus And The Nile

    1009 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Lotus And The Nile The blue lotus (Nymphaea caerulea) belongs to the Nymphaeaceae (Water-Lily) family. The blue lotus has several common names including: Egyptian lotus, blue water lily, and sacred lily of the Nile. It should not be confused with the "blue lily" or Agapanthus africanus, a plant of an entirely different genus (Anonymous, 1999). Be careful also not to confuse it with the Nymphaea lotus, which is the "white lotus". Fossils of this plant have been dated back to the Jurassic period

  • Objectification of Women in The House of Mirth

    2117 Words  | 5 Pages

    false social values of fashionable New York society.  The heroine is Lily Bart, a woman who is destroyed by the very society that produces her.  Lily is well-born but poor.  The story traces the decline of Lily as she moves through a series of living residences, from houses to hotel lodgings.  Lily lives in a New York society where appearances are all.  Women have a decorative function in such an environment, and even her name, Lily, suggests she is a flower of femininity, i.e. an object of decoration

  • Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth as Satirical Commentary on Society

    2110 Words  | 5 Pages

    succeeds in portraying a world of calculation operating under the pretenses of politeness. The characters become competitors in the highly complex game of social positioning with an amorphous body of socially formed laws. Through her presentation of Lily Barton's ongoing struggles to "recover her footing-each time on a slightly lower level" in this game of skill, Wharton forces her audience to question this social order (272). Lily's fate gives way to a satirical commentary on how a social order governed

  • House of Mirth - The Nature of Nature

    1783 Words  | 4 Pages

    fittest." This contrasted sharply with the Romantic view, which worshipped Nature for its beauty, beneficence and self-liberating powers. In Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, Lily Bart attempts to "survive" within the urbane "drawing-room" society she inhabits. Although Selden uses Romantic nature imagery to describe Lily, throughout the novel such Romantic imagery and its accompanying meanings are continually subverted. By simply invoking different understandings and views of "Nature," Wharton

  • Individual vs. Society in Daisy Miller and Old Woman Magoun

    674 Words  | 2 Pages

    Woman Magoun is old, wise, and practiced in the art cooking and child-rearing, embracing a traditional feminine role and drawing power from it. She practises this art because it is her right, and, passive-aggressively, she uses her cooking lore to kill Lily, removing innocence from the world. Quite on the other side of the spectrum we have James’ Daisy: young, innocent, practised only in the art of flirting, yet drawing her powerful independence from the practise of this non-traditional feminine art.

  • The Importance of the Ghost in Hamlet

    1458 Words  | 3 Pages

    in terming Hamlet's visitor the "linchpin," but the history of critical opinion regarding its origin has been diverse and conflicting. Generally, critics have opted for a Purgatorial ghost: Bradley speaks of "...a soul come from Purgatory," (1) Lily Campbell believes "Shakespeare has pictured a ghost from Purgatory according to all the tests possible," but adds, "Shakespeare chose rather to throw out suggestions which might satisfy those members of his audience who followed any one of the

  • Comparing The House of Mirth and Daisy Miller

    767 Words  | 2 Pages

    mental decline of a young woman who, because of her own weakness and indecisiveness, falls from social distinction into poverty and griminess. The story presents a cruel measure of reality and ends quite sadly. Instead of marrying and living happily, Lily weakens slowly and commits suicide, possibly unintentionally, as a way of evading a lower-class humanity in which her upper-class needs cannot survive. Lily's life is the exact opposite of dignity or beauty; she had many chances to live the kind of