Suffering In Fever 1793

1537 Words4 Pages

Suffering is apart of life, just like joy and love is. We can never choose how life treats us but we can always choose how we react and get back up again. Through Fever 1793 we see up close and personal how suffering can affect us, and how sometimes it can affect us in positive ways. How suffering can help turn the page to the next chapter in our lives. How suffering doesn’t always mean losing but also gaining.

Laurie Anderson clearly lays out the Yellow Fever through the eyes of 14 year old Mattie. We experience suffering and disease along with the characters, how it affects us and the kind of person we can become because of it. We see how a city raving with disease handles itself and how it is put back together again. We see the kind of people that survive and blossom because of suffering, like Mattie who …show more content…

“You’re sleeping the day away.I can’t tell who is lazier, Polly or you,” Mother muttered as she stalked out of the room. “When I was a girl, we were up before the sun . . .” (1)This is our first look into Mattie’s world, we see the tension between her and her mother and we get to see Mattie’s much more lazier and childish side.Through the rest of her day we see inside Mattie’s world at the coffee house, her family owns, we experience along with Mattie her Mother’s nagging, but also Mattie’s constant complaining. ”Dash it all, Grandfather said I was a Daughter of Liberty, a real American girl. I could steer my own ship. No one would call me little Mattie. They would call me “Ma’am.”(2) This shows us Mattie’s desire for a more adventurous life, how her dreams are so much bigger than what her family wants, mostly because she’s never really experienced more than her everyday life. This shows Mattie is ready to grow up, she just needs that

Show More
Related

  • How Does Laurie Halse Characterize In Fever 1793

    641 Words  | 2 Pages

    Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson is a historical fiction. It takes place during the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. The main character Mattie Cook lives there and her world is turned upside down by it. Mattie has to keep persevering to survive the epidemic. Laurie Halse Anderson teaches the lesson of perseverance and uses author’s craft to express her point. Anderson uses two types of author’s craft in Fever 1793 which are descriptive words and character development.

    Read More

  • Fever 1793 Chapter Summaries

    1053 Words  | 3 Pages

    At the start of the book, Fever 1793, the story takes place at the Cook’s Coffeehouse. The main character, Matilda, is woken up by her mom flipping open the curtains, yelling at her to wake up and get started on her morning chores before the guests arrive. Before the guests arrive, Eliza, a free black, also their cook, starts making food for the guests who will be arriving as soon as the shop opens. Matilda has to take care of the garden that is on the backside of the house, help get ready to open the shop, and also Polly’s chores because Polly, their serving girl, didn’t show up to work. After a while Matilda’s mom went to see where Polly was and found out Polly had died the previous evening because of an unknown illness. Matilda’s mom and Grandfather help out and did whatever else that

    Read More

  • Perseverance In Laurie Halse Anderson's Fever, 1793

    572 Words  | 2 Pages

    “We were in the center of a dying city.” Thinks Mattie in Fever, 1793, by Laurie Halse Anderson, a historical fiction novel. This book is about the yellow fever epidemic of August through November in 1793. The main character, Matilda, overcame many hardships including the pestilence itself. The theme of Fever 1793 is perseverance, because she doesn’t give up even when she is emotional. Secondly, she fights through her hardships. Lastly, she never stopped believing that people she cared about were alive.

    Read More

  • The Secret Life Of Bees Home Essay

    663 Words  | 2 Pages

    Lily’s idea of home is having loving parent/mother figures who can help guide her in life. Because of this desire, she leaves T. Ray and begins to search for her true identity. This quest for acceptance leads her to meet the Calendar Sisters. This “home” that she finds brightly displays the ideas of identity and feminine society. Though Lily could not find these attributes with T. Ray at the peach house, she eventually learns the truth behind her identity at the pink house, where she discovers the locus of identity that resides within herself and among the feminine community there. Just like in any coming-of-age story, Lily uncovers the true meaning of womanhood and her true self, allowing her to blossom among the feminine influence that surrounds her at the pink house. Lily finds acceptance among the Daughters of Mary, highlighting the larger meaning of acceptance and identity in the novel.

    Read More

  • Free Essays on Wharton's Ethan Frome: Responsibilities

    705 Words  | 2 Pages

    Several Years after their marriage, cousin Mattie Silver is asked to relieve Zeena, who is constantly ill, of her house hold duties. Ethan finds himself falling in love with Mattie, drawn to her youthful energy, as, “ The pure air, and the long summer hours in the open, gave life and elasticity to Mattie.” Ethan is attracted to Mattie because she is the opposite of Zeena, while Mattie is young, happy, healthy, and beautiful like the summer, Zeena is seven years older than Ethan, bitter, ugly and sickly cold like the winter. Zeena’s strong dominating personality undermines Ethan, while Mattie’s feminine, lively youth makes Ethan fell like a “real man.” Ethan and Mattie finally express their feeling for each other while Zeena is visiting the doctor, and are forced to face the painful reality that their dreams of being together can not come true.

    Read More

  • Australia and the Vietnam War

    1532 Words  | 4 Pages

    paper. It will be argued that the extent to which those are suffering does, in fact, vary, and that others have continued on with their lives with little to no effect at all.

    Read More

  • Theme Of Love In Salvage The Bones

    798 Words  | 2 Pages

    As we are born, we develop natural instincts that we evolve and grow over time. One of these instincts is love. Love can be full of sunshines and butterflies, but with love also comes pain and sacrifice. The book Salvage the Bones contains at least five big examples of loves as pain or sacrifice. Throughout the book, we will see examples of this theme of love as sacrifice and pain through different situations. I am going to walk through these situations. For instance, Death during childbirth, giving up a lifestyle due to teen pregnancy, sacrificing a close relationship, illness and flood.

    Read More

  • The Communist Manifeo And Freud's Civilization And Its Discontents

    1505 Words  | 4 Pages

    Thinkers and philosophers have been pondering misery since the dawn of civilization. At the dawn of humanity, humans existed to survive and reproduce; every day was a struggle. However, with the advent of civilization, humanity has moved further and further away from its original evolutionary drives, and it can be argued by secular thinkers that humans exist now to find happiness. Therefore, misery can be seen as the biggest obstacle to human happiness, yet misery itself is a mystery to many. Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto and Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents put forth the authors’ opinions on the origins of mortal misery, and suggest methods to solve the problem of misery. Although the two have differing views, both see

    Read More

  • Stereotypes and Distorted Images in Their Eyes Were Watching God. by Janie Crawford

    856 Words  | 2 Pages

    Recovering from an identity crisis that lasted most of her childhood, Janie realizes who she wants to be with the help of a pear tree, but her grandmother disapproves of her dissimilar feelings and forces her to cast away her horizon. With no parents there to raise her, Janie loses her sense of identity. She spends her childhood under the care of her grandma and the white people Nanny works for, and as a result, she spends all of her time playing with the Washburn’s four children. Janie does not realize that she is different from them until she turns six. When she sees a photograph of herself for the first time, she refuses to recognize her darker skin color. To compensate for her lack of self, she goes by the nickname “Alphabet” because she has so many different names. Both her connection to the Washburn family and her biracial ethnicity isolate her from the black and white communities. African-American children mock her for her nice clothes; vulnerable and frail, Jani...

    Read More

  • Compare Antigone And The Bible

    762 Words  | 2 Pages

    Despite its prevalence, suffering is always seen an intrusion, a personal attack on its victims. However, without its presence, there would never be anyway to differentiate between happiness and sadness, nor good and evil. It is encoded into the daily lives people lead, and cannot be avoided, much like the prophecies described in Antigone. Upon finding out that he’d murdered his father and married his mother,

    Read More

  • Holly is a Runaway

    746 Words  | 2 Pages

    Holly Janquell is a runaway. Wendelin Van Draanan creates a twelve year old character in the story, Runaway, that is stubborn and naive enough to think she can live out in the streets alone, until she is eighteen.She has been in five foster homes for the past two years. She is in foster care because her mother dies of heroin overdose. In her current foster home, she is abused, locked in the laundry room for days without food, and gets in even more trouble if she tries to fight back. Ms.Leone, her schoolteacher, could never understand her, and in Holly’s opinion, probably does not care. No one knows what she is going through, because she never opens up to any one. Ms. Leone gives Holly a journal at school one day and tells her to write poetry and express her feelings. Holly is disgusted. But one day when she is sitting in the cold laundry room, and extremely bored, she pulls out the diary, and starts to write. When Holly can take no more of her current foster home, she runs, taking the journal with her. The journal entries in her journal, are all written as if she is talking to Ms.Leone, even though she will probably never see her again. Over the course of her journey, Holly learns to face her past through writing, and discovers a love for poetry. At some point in this book, Holly stops venting to Ms. Leone and starts talking to her, almost like an imaginary friend, and finally opens up to her.

    Read More

  • Misconceptions Shown in Fever 1793

    606 Words  | 2 Pages

    Opinioned misconceptions caused a drastic amount of confusion in Philadelphia in 1793. A misconception is a mistaken idea. Philadelphia was full of cleaning crews and transportation in 1793. Some people were willing to trust that people could stop the fever while other chose to flee. They were all scared of becoming sick from the wrongly perceived causes like dead animals, dirty wharfs, refugees, etc. The novel, Fever 1793, written by Laurie Halse Anderson is about the devastation caused during Yellow Fever. The main character, Mattie Cook, is left to fend for herself and others while trying to avoid the supposed causes of the fever. The author of Fever 1793, Laurie Halse Anderson, shows the misconceptions of the time period through causes and treatments of Yellow Fever.

    Read More

  • Bhagavad Gita The Value Of Suffering

    625 Words  | 2 Pages

    The question of suffering comes up much when talking about, or practicing any religion. Many ask why people suffer, and what causes suffering? The various religions try to answer these questions in their own way. Pico Iyer’s editorial, “The Value of Suffering” addresses the questions of suffering and how it is handled. This article could be compared to the Bhagavad-Gita which also addresses and explains suffering through different stories of the interactions of humans and different Gods. One can specifically look at “The Second Teaching” in the Bhagavad-Gita, which explains the interaction between a man named Arjuna and the god Krishna. In it Arjuna is suffering because he does not want to fight in a war and with people whom he should be worshiping. Krishna says to fight because the souls of the people will forever live on, and because he needs to fulfill his Dharma. With what is known about the Bhagavad-Gita and how Iyer thinks about the subject, Iyer would agree with how the Bhagavad-Gita address suffering.

    Read More

  • A Christian View of Suffering

    1558 Words  | 4 Pages

    Trip, D. (1999), “The Christian view of suffering” [Online], Exploring Christianity. Available from: http://www.christianity.co.nz/suffer4.htm [Accessed 18 April 2008].

    Read More

  • Suffering, Key of Happiness

    723 Words  | 2 Pages

    Suffering can be defined as an experience of discomfort suffered by a person during his life. The New York Times published an article entitled what suffering does, by David Brooks (2014). In this article, Brooks explains how suffering plays an important role in our pursuit of happiness. He explains firstly that happiness is found through experiences and then, suffering can also be a motivation in our pursuit of happiness. In other words, suffering is a fearful but necessary gift to acquire happiness. This paper is related to motivation and emotion, two keys words to the pursuit of happiness (King, 2010).

    Read More

More about Suffering In Fever 1793

Open Document