Do you think you would be happy when you have a person or thing that you could love? Do you want the person whom you love to give back the same love to you? Love and loss are intimately associated. When you love someone or something, you may not be concerned that you may have lost another person or thing at the same time. As in the stories, “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “The Beast in the Jungle” by Henry James, the two authors portrayed different kinds of love of two women, but after they found their love, they also suffered to face tremendous loss in their lives. These stories seemed to be written in a same period, but the two author’s attitudes of the love were totally different. Love was a personal attitude; loss was the value which the person thought that was worth to pay the love, and that might be influenced by different cultures.
One woman gained love from her husband’s death, and the other woman devoted herself to wait for her love. In “The Story of an Hour,” Louise Mallard grieved deeply for her husband’s death by a train accident, but immediately she recognized that she gained her love which was freedom from her husband. May Bartram, the main character in “The Beast in the Jungle,” gave her whole life to wait for John Marcher whom she loved. Comparing these two women, Louise had a husband and loved each other, but she did not enjoy the love until he died. She more loved freedom than him, but if he did not died, she would continuously sacrifice her freedom to maintain their marriage. May loved John until her death, but she never received the love from him. She gave her golden time to a man, and she might know that he would never love her. However, she never regretted wasting her life to wait for and watc...
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.... If they had opportunities to tell these men what they wanted, they might have reached their loves earlier, and their cost might not have to be their death. The culture of their generation restricted their feelings and expressions of love, and made them pay the highest prices when they gained love.
In “The Story of an Hour” and “The Beast in the Jungle,” when Louise and May started to love, they also started to lose at the same time because of cultural limitations. In these two stories, the outcome of Louise might seem better than May’s because at least Louise died in joy. However, these two women just pursued different kinds of love, but paid the same cost which they thought worthy for their loves. Sometimes, when you love a person or thing, you might need to disburse and sacrifice what you already have, so how much cost do you think you will pay for your loves?
When we think about the force that holds the world together and what makes humans different from animals, one answer comes to our minds - that humans can love. Love is a state of mind that cannot be defined easily but can be experienced by everyone. Love is very complicated. In fact it is so complicated that a person in love may be misunderstood to be acting in an extremely foolish manner by other people. The complexity of love is displayed in Rostand’s masterpiece drama Cyrano de Bergerac. This is accomplished by two characters that love the same woman and in the course neither one achieves love in utter perfection.
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.
Throughout the lives of most people on the planet, there comes a time when there may be a loss of love, hope or remembrance in our lives. These troublesome times in our lives can be the hardest things we go through. Without love or hope, what is there to live for? Some see that the loss of hope and love means the end, these people being pessimistic, while others can see that even though they feel at a loss of love and hope that one day again they will feel love and have that sense of hope, these people are optimistic. These feelings that all of us had, have been around since the dawn of many. Throughout the centuries, the expression of these feelings has made their ways into literature, novels, plays, poems, and recently movies. The qualities of love, hope, and remembrance can be seen in Emily Bronte’s and Thomas Hardy’s poems of “Remembrance” “Darkling Thrush” and “Ah, Are you Digging on my Grave?”
The “Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and ‘”The Hand” by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette are similar in theme and setting. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette and Kate Chopin create the theme of obligatory love and the unhappiness it entails. Both stories illustrate the concealed emotions many women feel in their marriage yet fail to express them. The two stories take place in a sacred room of the house and both transpire in a brief amount of time. The differences between the two stories are seen through the author’s choice of characters in each story. In “The story of an Hour” Kate Chopin involves other characters in Mrs. Mallard’s life, whereas, “The Hand” deals with marriage and togetherness and only involves the husband and wife. Symbolism is seen all throughout “The Hand” not so in ‘The Story of an Hour.” The similarities in “The Story of an Hour” and “The Hand” is portrayed in theme and setting. The differences are illustrated in the choice of characters involved in each story and the amount of symbolism depicted in the different stories.
In The Story of an Hour, the main character, Mrs. Louise Mallard, is a young woman with a heart condition who learns of her husband’s untimely death in a railroad disaster. Instinctively weeping as any woman is expected to do upon learning of her husband’s death, she retires to her room to be left alone so she may collect her thoughts. However, the thoughts she collects are somewhat unexpected. Louise is conflicted with the feelings and emotions that are “approaching to possess her...” (Chopin 338). Unexpectedly, joy and happiness consume her with the epiphany she is “free, free, free!” (Chopin 338). Louise becomes more alive with the realization she will no longer be oppressed by the marriage as many women of her day were, and hopes for a long life when only the day prior, “…she had thought with a shudder that life may ...
Love and affection is an indispensable part of human life. In different culture love may appear differently. In the poem “My god my lotus” lovers responded to each other differently than in the poem “Fishhawk”. Likewise, the presentation of female sexuality, gender disparity and presentation of love were shown inversely in these two poems. Some may argue that love in the past was not as same as love in present. However, we can still find some lovers who are staying with their partners just to maintain the relationship. We may also find some lovers having relationship only because of self-interest. However, a love relationship should always be out of self-interest and must be based on mutual interest. A love usually obtains its perfectness when it develops from both partners equally and with same affection.
The Lais of Marie de France is a compilation of short stories that delineate situations where love is just. Love is presented as a complex emotion and is portrayed as positive, while at other times, it is portrayed as negative. The author varies on whether or not love is favorable as is expressed by the outcomes of the characters in the story, such as lovers dying or being banished from the city. To demonstrate, the author weaves stories that exhibit binaries of love. Two distinct types of love are described: selfish and selfless. Love is selfish when a person leaves their current partner for another due to covetous reasons. Contrarily, selfless love occurs when a lover leaves to be in a superior relationship. The stark contrast between the types of love can be analyzed to derive a universal truth about love.
freedom and independence. In the story “The Story of an Hour” Ms. Mallard experiences a moment of liberation from her marriage due to the sudden
Some may say love is just an emotion while others may say it is a living and breathing creature. Songs and poems have been written about love for hundreds and thousands of years. Love has been around since the beginning of time, whether someone believes in the Big Bang or Adam and Eve. Without love, there wouldn’t be a world like it is known today. But with love, comes pain with it. Both William Shakespeare and Max Martin know and knew this. Both ingenious poets wrote love songs of pain and suffering as well as blossoming, newfound love. The eccentric ideal is both writers were born centuries apart. How could both know that love and pain work hand in hand when they were born 407 years apart? Love must never change then. Love survives and stays its original self through the hundreds and thousands of years it has been thriving. Though centuries apart, William Shakespeare and Max Martin share the same view on love whether i...
In “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Story of an Hour”, the woman in each story imprisons in the domestic sphere. In “Hills Like White Elephants”, the woman in this story conflicts between keeping the baby or getting abortion although the relationship with her boyfriend would not improve as he said. In “The Story of an Hour”, even though Louise Mallard, an intelligent, independent woman understands that she should grieve for Brently, her husband and worry for her future, she cannot help herself from rejoice at her newfound freedom. The author of this story, Kate Chopin suggests that even with a happy marriage, the loss of freedom and the restraint are the results that cannot be avoid.
It is a common belief that a woman should love her husband at all times. However, this social norm is not always true. In the short story “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, Mrs. Mallard, a woman with known heart trouble, must be told by her sister and a dear friend of her husband’s death in a train accident. After being told the news, she retreats to her room on her own to process her thoughts. At first she sits and cries in sadness for a very long time. Then, she is overcome with happiness. She now realizes that she can live her life as a free person, only for herself. She does not need to live for her husband, she can now make all of her decisions on her own. When her sister comes to check on her, Mrs. Mallard shows her happiness
The Symposium, The Aeneid, and Confessions help demonstrate how the nature of love can be found in several places, whether it is in the mind, the body or the soul. These texts also provide with eye-opening views of love as they adjust our understanding of what love really is. By giving us reformed spectrum of love, one is able to engage in introspective thinking and determine if the things we love are truly worthy of our sentiment.
“There is no perfect relationship. The idea that there is gets us into so much trouble.”-Maggie Reyes. Kate Chopin reacts to this certain idea that relationships in a marriage during the late 1800’s were a prison for women. Through the main protagonist of her story, Mrs. Mallard, the audience clearly exemplifies with what feelings she had during the process of her husbands assumed death. Chopin demonstrates in “The Story of an Hour” the oppression that women faced in marriage through the understandings of: forbidden joy of independence, the inherent burdens of marriage between men and women and how these two points help the audience to further understand the norms of this time.
In the short story, “The Story of an Hour,” author Kate Chopin presents the character of Mrs. Louis Mallard. She is an unhappy woman trapped in her discontented marriage. Unable to assert herself or extricate herself from the relationship, she endures it. The news of the presumed death of her husband comes as a great relief to her, and for a brief moment she experiences the joys of a liberated life from the repressed relationship with her husband. The relief, however, is short lived. The shock of seeing him alive is too much for her bear and she dies. The meaning of life and death take on opposite meaning for Mrs. Mallard in her marriage because she lacked the courage to stand up for herself.
... hampers one of the most important elements needed to reach enlightenment – Reason. People in love do irrational things without considering the consequences of their actions and how they may affect not only themselves, but others too. They are more concerned with instant gratification – whether for themselves or for the person whom they love. Love can also be thought of as being another temptation that is placed before man. It is a path that a man on the road to enlightenment should not take, no matter how great the benefits may seem. The individual must realize that love ultimately leads to the destruction of enlightenment. The most dangerous thing about love is that once an individual succumbs to it, it is extremely hard to turn back. For this reason love may be the most potent out of all the temptations and tests man must overcome to reach enlightenment.