Below is a passage from I.2 of Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho concerning the concept of "precepts" in relation to the characters of St. Aubert and his daughter Emily:
I have attempted to teach you from your earliest youth, the duty of self- command […] not only as it preserves us from the various and dangerous temptations that call us from rectitude and virtue, but as it limits the indulgences which are termed virtuous, yet which, extended beyond a certain boundary are vicious…All excess is vicious; even that sorrow, which is amiable in its origin, becomes a selfish and unjust passion, if indulged at the expense of our duties. […] The indulgence of excessive grief enervates the mind, and almost incapacitates it for again partaking of those various innocent enjoyments which a benevolent God designed to be the sun-shine of our lives. My dear Emily, recollect and practice the precepts I have so often given you […]. (20)
The kinds of "precepts" instilled by St. Aubert are those that enjoin such "virtues" as moderation, simplicity, circumspection, and respect (5). Throughout the above passage and in her initial chapter, Radcliffe is establishing several binaries through which the novel as a whole can be mapped, and retirement in the country versus involvement in "the world" (1, 4), economy versus dissipation (2), simplicity versus exaggeration, serenity with congeniality versus tumult with incongruity (4), happiness and misery (4-5), affection versus ambition (11), health versus disease (physical and emotional [8, 18]), and life versus death, are only a few ways in which to articulate them. However, in the end, one binary can serve to organize the many: symmetry versus deformity. And it is in apprehending the logic of h...
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...s dissatisfied with is the extent of Quesnel's "improvements," for the enlargemenmt of which Quesnel boasts is characterized by excess. (It is to be noted that, when improving his own house, St. Aubert adapted his enlargements "to the style of the old one" [2]). Thus, as an exploration of the importance of boundaries, and of the symmetry and continuity that those boundaries give, Radcliffe's novel enters into the discourse of its decade.
Works Cited
Burke, Edmund. "Proportion Further Considered". A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909-1917 (New York: Bartleby.com, 2001). http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/305.html
Lewis, C. S. The Discarded Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Radcliffe, Anne. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Lastly, I would like to discuss the issue of Libertinism. Libertinism was a movement that started in the eighteenth century; about the time Dangerous Liaisons was written. It was a movement of questioning religion and God and of scandalous affairs. The people of this movement no longer thought the world is controlled by God, but by your own actions. The characters of Valmont and Merteuil were prominent Libertines. The book is definitely an example of this movement. It completely represents the values that come from Libertinism.
The characters in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones are faced with the difficult task of overcoming the loss of Susie, their daughter and sister. Jack, Abigail, Buckley, and Lindsey each deal with the loss differently. However, it is Susie who has the most difficulty accepting the loss of her own life. Several psychologists separate the grieving process into two main categories: intuitive and instrumental grievers. Intuitive grievers communicate their emotional distress and “experience, express, and adapt to grief on a very affective level” (Doka, par. 27). Instrumental grievers focus their attention towards an activity, whether it is into work or into a hobby, usually relating to the loss (Doka par. 28). Although each character deals with their grief differently, there is one common denominator: the reaction of one affects all.
Holman, C. Hugh and William Harmon. A Handbook to Literature. MacMillan Publishing Company, N.Y. 1992.
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).
Stillinger, Jack, Deidre Lynch, Stephen Greenblatt, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D. New York, N.Y: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print.
Scott, Lynn. "Beauty, Virtue and Disciplinary Power:" Midwestern Miscellany 24 (1996): 9-23. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 173. Detroit: Gale,2003.Literature Resource Center. Web. 14 Mar. 2011
The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Sixth Edition Volume1. Ed. M.H.Abrams. New York: W.W.Norton and Company, Inc., 1993.
Philosophies of Art and Beauty Edited by Hofstadter and Kuhns, (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1976) chapters one and two for an overview of the aesthetics of Plato and Aristotle.
Therefore, it is my belief that the religious setting of this novel in the Puritan society allowed further emphasis of the profound differences between the character’s gender roles, thereby creating deeper contrast and revealing the flaws of the Puritan’s preconceived notions of patriarchal societal norms.
The two topics, the sublime and the beautiful are very common in romantic poetry and novels. According to Edmund Burke’s essay, On the Sublime and the Beautiful, He explains the opposition of beauty and of sublimity by a physiological theory. Burke made the opposition of pleasure and pain the source of the two aesthetic categories, deriving beauty from pleasure and sublimity from pain. Edmund Burke describes sublime objects as “vast in their dimensions” and beautiful objects as “small and simple objects.” Edmund Burke goes into further detail describing the sublime and the beautiful in his novel. He describes the sublime as the strongest emotion, which the mind is capable of feeling and the beautiful as something little, humble and innocent. Authors such as Marry Shelly, William Wordsworth and Percy Shelly wrote various works infusing the elements of the sublime and the beautiful into their novels or poems. They took Edmund Burke’s explanation of the sublime and the beautiful and created works based upon his descriptions of the sublime and the beautiful.
Emily was kept confined from all that surrounded her. Her father had given the town folks a large amount of money which caused Emily and her father to feel superior to others. “Grierson’s held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (Faulkner). Emily’s attitude had developed as a stuck-up and stubborn girl and her father was to blame for this attitude. Emily was a normal girl with aspirations of growing up and finding a mate that she could soon marry and start a family, but this was all impossible because of her father. The father believed that, “none of the younger man were quite good enough for Miss Emily,” because of this Miss Emily was alone. Emily was in her father’s shadow for a very long time. She lived her li...
Katherine Philips is desperately trying to renew her faith in life, but she is struggling to do so because of the death of her son. She is attempting to justify the loss of her child as a form of consolation, while keeping somewhat emotionally detached to the later death of her stepson in “In Memory of F.P.” The differing phrases, words, and language contrast the two elegies and emphasize the loss and pain in “Epitaph” while diminishing the pain in “Memory of FP.”
Goldblatt, and Brown. Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, Upper Saddle Ridge, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.
Death is a concept that every human being must accept eventually. Some fight against death while others embrace it. There are even instances in which one may be living but already feel dead. Death is a common topic used in the writing world. Being that it is so universal it gives the reader a real life connection to the characters in a story. Beliefs of death are different amongst human beings. Some people see death as an ending where others see it more as a beginning. The story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and the poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas both express similar and different feelings towards death. “A Rose for Emily” is a story about an elder woman who was not living when she died. Certain life events cause this woman to refuse and ignore change. Death is an ultimate form of change so it was only natural for Miss Emily to ignore it.
Emily Dickinson suffered from loss and grief in her life. In 1850, Leonard Humphrey whom she considered to be her “Master” passed away. In 1953, she suffered the loss of another friend of hers Ben Newton. In a...