Within playwright William Shakespeare’s fantastic work The Merchant of Venice, the character Iago cries out, “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green ey’d monster” (Enotes). Jealousy is justly called a beast, and it is a hideous creature that is illuminated in William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies, and by Woman Warrior, the memoir of Maxine Hong Kingston. Through the use of the literary elements of plots, characters, symbols, and additional plots, both pieces illustrate how, by torturing people and driving them to rash decisions, jealousy is the most destructive emotion.
Jealousy builds up in a plot until it explodes, like a bomb, through the trouble that it induces. In The Lord of the Flies, Jack and Ralph both contend to be chief. “‘I ought to be chief,’ said Jack with a simple arrogance” (Golding 22). The speaker’s arrogance opens the door for a greater jealousy when Ralph is voted to lead. The envious emotion festers inside of the jealous chorister until it drives him mad. Jack turns savage as the plot thickens, and calls for Ralph’s blood. Jealousy turns Maxine to violence, as well. Kingston’s memoir depicts her younger self with a girl that refused to speak. “I squeezed one cheek, then the other, back and forth until the tears ran out of her eyes as if I had pulled them out” (Kingston 177). The violence narrated here is explained to be the result of Maxine’s hatred of the silent girl, but any reader can easily envision the green eyes. Jealousy is visible in the envious tone used to describe the other child’s attributes. The destructive force of Maxine’s jealousy is the source of her agenda to torture. Neither Maxine nor Jack could handle the fierce bite of jealousy, so they unleashed it on o...
... middle of paper ...
...long with the expected feelings of anger and betrayal, plagued Elin Nordegren with the news of her husband, Tiger Woods, having intimate relationships outside of their marriage; Tiger ended up dazed and bloodied in a crashed car, and many fingers point at Elin for assaulting him. Along with the real world, the novel and the memoir emphasize that jealousy is a destructive emotion. Jealousy twists characters’ hearts, harms through symbols, and causes dreadful turns in the plots. Bottled up, the green-eyed monster can trigger craziness. Unleashed, the beast creates destruction.
Works Cited
ENotes. 2010. Enotes.com, Inc. 16 May 2010.
Golding, William. The Lord of the Flies. New York: A Perigree Book of Penguin Group
Kingston, Maxine Hong. Woman Warrior. New York: Vintage International
Title Sir William Golding has constantly been a man who sees nothing good in anything. He examined the world to be a dreadful place due to the people who has populated the Earth. In order to display how he observes the world which was around the period of the second world war, he came to the decision of producing a novel. His novel was titled “Lord of the flies”. In the novel, William Golding familiarized his audience with three groups of boys; the hunters, the younger children and the gentle boys.
Epstein, E. L. Afterword. Lord of the Flies. By William Golding. New York: Berkley, 1954.
“People are often vain of their most criminal passions; but envy is one passion so mean and low that nobody will admit it” Francois de la Rochefoucauld(1613-1680), a French philosopher, once stated and that statement summarizes the undertone of A Separate Piece by John Knowles. The story is set at a highly competitive boy’s school on the East Coast that sets the perfect stage to develop the storyline. Gene’s insecurity, which led to jealousy of Finny, is the cause of the overall conflict.
Golding, William, The Lord of the Flies, New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 1954. Print.
First of all, Mr.Hillard’s jealousy destroys his relationship with his wife. At one point in the story he suspects his wife, and she questions, “I don’t know why you keep staring at me. You’re frightening me” (Callaghan 22). The author use of diction shows the reader how Mr.Hillard’s jealousy keeps him suspicious, so he habitually spies on his wife. His wife notices this, and begins to become afraid of him, showing how weak their relationship has become as a result of Mr.Hillard’s jealousy. This shows how jealousy can destroy romantic relationships. Furthermore, the author uses Mrs.Hillard’s isolation from society to convey the theme, “he insisted that they move out to the country and renovate the old farmhouse. There they lived like two scared prisoners in the house that was screened from the lane by three old oak trees” (Callaghan 20). The author uses the simile “like two scared prisoners” to show how Mr.Hillard and wife like prisoners are isolated and locked up from the rest of the world. One can view Mr.Hillard as a hunter, both living in a forest and closely guarding their possessions. Clearly, Mr.Hillard treats his wife as a possession and becomes jealous when she talks to other men, due to this, “He insist[s] they move out to the country]”. Evidently, he is scared that someone will take his possession which is why he is so doubtful of her actions and is keen on secluding her from society. Further, the author uses symbolism “the house was screened from the lane by three old oak trees to reinforce the idea that they are secluded from society. This is because, the three old oak trees symbolize how they are cut off from society. This all adds up, to the idea that Mr.Hillard’s jealousy destroys Mrs.Hillard’s social relationships as he keeps her hidden from
Envy is known to bring out the monster in everyone. It is an enmity that is buried deeply inside of us and causes us to do things we wouldn’t normally do.It even turns the people we love into people we hate. In the book A Separate Peace, Gene is filled with envy and it makes him act upon it blindly and injure his so called “best friend”, Finny. This envy endangers their friendship and one of their lives.
Lord of the Flies is a novel written by William Golding in 1954 about a group of young British boys who have been stranded alone together on an island with no adults. During the novel the diverse group of boys struggle to create structure within a society that they constructed by themselves. Golding uses many unique literary devices including characterization, imagery, symbolism and many more. The three main characters, Ralph, Piggy, and Jack are each representative of the three main literary devices, ethos, logos, and pathos. Beyond the characterization the novel stands out because of Golding’s dramatic use of objective symbolism, throughout the novel he uses symbols like the conch, fire, and Piggy’s glasses to represent how power has evolved and to show how civilized or uncivilized the boys are acting. It is almost inarguable that the entire novel is one big allegory in itself, the way that Golding portrays the development of savagery among the boys is a clear representation of how society was changing during the time the novel was published. Golding is writing during
William Golding’s novel ‘The Lord of The flies’ presents us with a group of English boys who are isolated on a desert island, left to try and retain a civilised society. In this novel Golding manages to display the boys slow descent into savagery as democracy on the island diminishes.
But jealousy, and especially sexual jealousy, brings with it a sense of shame and humiliation. For this reason it is generally hidden; if we perceive it we ourselves are ashamed and turn our eyes away; and when it is not hidden it commonly stirs contempt as well as pity. Nor is this all. Such jealousy as Othello’s converts human nature into chaos, and liberates the beast in man; and it does this in relation to one of the most intense and also the most ideal of human feelings. (169)
“Othello”, by William Shakespeare, is a story of jealousy’s potential to manipulate thoughts and eventually lead to ultimate demise. The key to extremely detrimental jealousy lies within one’s ability to recognize it or deny it. It seems that the important theme of “Othello” is that if jealousy is not recognized and immediately dealt with, it receives a head start to commence the process of rotting away all normal human reason. Othello’s speech in Act III scene iii beginning with line 178 is the first and most important indicator of the trouble ominously looming on Othello’s horizon. His immediate response to Iago’s accusations is that of total denial. By depriving himself of that initial venting process, Othello gives his jealousy the perfect culture on which his jealousy can turn cancerous and grow out of control. Othello does not spit out the seed that Iago has planted within himself soon enough and thus lets Iago water it with smooth speech until its roots spread and cannot be uprooted. The only way to appropriately illustrate this point is through an in depth analysis of specific text from the play.
Works Cited Golding, William. The. Lord of the Flies. New York: Coward-McCann, 1962. Print.
The Web. 4 Dec. 2009.. Nordlund, Marcus "Theorising Early Modern Jealousy: A Biocultural Perspective" Shakespeare's Othello. Studia Neophilologica: A Journal of Germanic and Romance Languages and Literature 74.2 (2002): 146-160. MLA International Bibliography.
In Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, good is often confronted by evil, in which almost every case is in the form of jealousy. Iago, the plays antagonist, is a very manipulative villain. Iago uses his own agony and distress brought upon him by his envy of others, to provoke the same agony within the characters in the play. Jealousy’s ability are shown to influence people to new ends and make all humanistic judgment disappear leaving that man a monster torn apart by envy. Jealousy’s true destructive wrath and the pure evil it brings out in people can be revealed through Iago’s actions throughout the tragedy Othello.
Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. Great Britain: Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire, 1954. Text.
Jealousy, whatever it may be driven by, can produce many different actions in a person depending on their desires. Othello craftly examines a few examples of these with highly contrasting characters driven by vastly different things. The different manifestations of jealousy in said characters can be analysed through the characters of Roderigo, Othello, and Iago, while also proving how jealousy can sometimes be a front for more cynister feelings.