The poem “The Ruined Maid” by Thomas Hardy tells the story of two women who run into each other in town and begin discussing the changes one has recently experienced. Melia, since seeing her friend, has become a prostitute and acquired luxuries. Her friend, a country girl, only notices Melia’s extravagance and admires what she has become, despite Melia’s ruin. Utilizing verb tense, ironic tone, and revelatory word choice, Hardy illustrates that Melia’s change in lifestyle does not lead her to abandon her true nature, but rather only changes her circumstances. Through the use of past and present verb tense, Hardy uncovers Melia’s life prior ruin, highlighting the contrast to her current lifestyle. After Melia and the country girl run into each other in town, the country …show more content…
While discussing Melia’s new lifestyle, the country girl notes a change in Melia’s speech. Rather than using slang terms, her speaking “quite fits ‘ee for high compa-ny,” as mentioned by the country girl (11). Agreeing with her observation, Melia says “some polish is gained with one’s ruin” (12). Not only does Melia change her appearance, she also changes the way she speaks. Unlike other country girls, she speaks properly, but only after becoming ruined. However, her facade of fancy attire and proper speaking only holds up for so long. In each statement she makes, Melia speaks with refinement, but in her last statement to the country girl, she claims “you ain’t ruined” (24). After abandoning her old lifestyle, she attempts to create a fancier, more polished version of herself. By the end of the poem, the facade cracks enough to see that she still clings to her roots, saying “ain’t.” Though she cannot return to the life she used to have, breaking her polished words reveals her true self and brings herself back to her true nature for just a
The state of a flawed society is an issue that many people recognize, but have different ways of approaching it. In the case of William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily” he examines the raw truth of the act of avoiding a flawed and evolving society. Whereas, “A Doll’s House” by Katherine Mansfield portrays the way that a flawed society can change through small acts of resistance that break the boundaries of social hierarchies. Both Mansfield and Faulkner use houses as symbols of a flawed society in their stories, however the manner in which they use these symbols are very different.
In the passage from the novel LUCY, author Jamaica Kincaid dramatizes the forces of self and environment, through her character whose identity is challenged with a move. The new home provided all she needed, but it was all so many changes, she “didn’t want to take in anything else” (15-16). Her old “familiar and predictable past”(40) stayed behind her, and she now had to find who she was in her new life. Kincaid uses detail, metaphor, and tone in the passage to show her character’s internal struggle.
A writer’s choice of nouns and verbs alters the feel and meaning of a poem. A prime expel of this fact is in the Crowder Collage literature book, on page even hundred seventy-three, more topics for writing, number two. I chose the poem “When the Time’s Toxins,” by Christian Wiman, for the exercise.
This expedition of sort is demonstrated when Lily, having lost her mother as a young child, seeks a sense of comfort within the Boatwright sisters and the bees. Experiencing this sense of comfort and joy for the first time, given from the bees, Lily is met with a feeling of euphoria and excitement. However, upon realizing that the love she was feeling wasn’t truly from a mother, Lily described a dramatic change in feelings as, “Then, without all warning, all the immunity wore off, and I felt the hollow spooned-out space between my navel and breastbone begin to ache. The motherless place” (Kidd 150-151). Due to the dramatic contrast between the two emotions, it is evident that the theme, how the lack of a motherly figure leads to a missing part in a person’s life, is constructed using the structure. The sudden change from exhilaration to guilt and sorrow adds to the organization of the passage. By including such a dramatic shift between emotions, the author draws the reader’s attention to the contrasting feelings. Because the euphoria that Lily was experiencing was converted back to dysphoria, it is evident that the lack of having a mother in a child’s life cannot be fulfilled with another feeling. Thus, Lily is lead back to the start of her
Under the orders of her husband, the narrator is moved to a house far from society in the country, where she is locked into an upstairs room. This environment serves not as an inspiration for mental health, but as an element of repression. The locked door and barred windows serve to physically restrain her: “the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” The narrator is affected not only by the physical restraints but also by being exposed to the room’s yellow wallpaper which is dreadful and fosters only negative creativity. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”
Both the brains and the hearts of the audience have been convinced. She also used many rhetorical strategies, like emotional appeal to convey her rough childhood to the reader. She gave numerous examples of being discriminated, and stereotyped because of their race. Tan’s audience reaches out to family members who speak broken English. Amy Tan also comprehends that although people may not be able to speak perfect English, they can comprehend what others are saying, and that you shouldn't discriminate others because of their race. A persons understanding of someone who speaks “broken-English” could be very limited, but the wisdom of the “broken English” speaker is
“She grieved over the shabbiness of her apartment, the dinginess of the walls, the worn-out appearance of the chairs, the ugliness of the draperies. All these things, which another woman of her class would not even have noticed, gnawed at her and made her furious.”
In ‘The Seduction’, the girl is betrayed by the teenage magazines promising her the romantic love story she always wanted and, in ‘Cousin Kate’, the young girl is betrayed by her cousin, who steals the man she loves. These are the predicaments that both the girls have. Both poems contain lines which question their actions, ‘Why did a great Lord find me out?’ and ‘For where, now, was the summer of her sixteenth year?’. This shows the regret that they had in that period in their lives, and also how betrayed they feel and the problems they have now of losing their childhood.
Josie finds it hard to adapt as she is caught between two cultural voices, Italian and Anglo-Saxon. She is caught b...
“It was a large, beautiful room, rich and picturesque in the soft, dim light which the maid had turned low. She went and stood at an open window and looked out upon the deep tangle of the garden below. All the mystery and witchery of the night seemed to have gathered there amid the perfumes and the dusky and tortuous outlines of flowers and foliage. She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mourning notes without promise, devoid even of hope. She turned back into the room and began to walk to and fro, down its whole length, without stopping, without resting. She carried in her hands a thin handkerchief, which she tore into ribbons, rolled into a ball, and flung from her. Once she stopped, and taking off her wedding ring, flung it upon the carpet. When she saw it lying there she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it. But her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the glittering circlet.
In “The Violets” I entwine the past and present, the reoccurring flower motif of ‘spring violets’ sprout in both memory and reality to reflect the persona’s age and perceptions “I kneel to pick frail melancholy flowers among ashes and loam”. The violets portray the persona as an adult, whose gained knowledge and lacking innocence has created a critical, melancholic view on her world. This is juxtaposed by the persona’s childhood perception; “spring violets in their loamy bed”. In childhood, beauty was simplistic and untainted by knowledge and human experience; blessed by innocence.
...seful miscommunication between men and women. Lastly, when looking through the imagined perspective of the thoughtless male tricksters, the reader is shown the heartlessness of men. After this reader’s final consideration, the main theme in each of the presented poems is that both authors saw women as victims of a male dominated society.
a look for oneself inside” as observed from the life of the elderly woman in the sonnet (153). Moreover, as the woman looks into the lake, she commemorates her attractive and pleasant figure as a young girl. As time passes, the inevitability of old age knocks on the door of the woman, readily waiting to change the sterling, rapturous lady perceived by many. One’s appearance can change; it is up to an individual to embrace it or reject it. Plath employs a shift to accentuate a change in time.
William Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily” is an example of gothic literature. Faulkner shows sadness for the love that is not returned and a drive that Emily uses to get what she wishes for. He has a gloomy and mysterious tone. One of the themes of the story is that people should let go of their past, move on with the present so that they can focus on welcoming their future. Emily was the evidence of a person who always lived in the shadow of her past, because she was afraid of changing for the future. She would not let go of the past throughout all her life, keeping everything she loved in the past with her.
Clarke, R. (n.d.). The Poetry of Thomas Hardy. rlwclarke. Retrieved February 1, 2014, from http://www.rlwclarke.net/Courses/LITS2002/2008-2009/12AHardy'sPoetry.pdf