The South Sea Islands
The carefree islands of the South Sea are a most desirable locale for a vacation or honeymoon. In the play Mourning Becomes Electra, by Eugene O'Neill, the islands are a place where sex is not seen as a sin and people live life freely, as nature intended people to do so. This play was written in a setting where such actions were frowned upon. It was also these islands where escaping to them with Christine Mannon, was a goal never achieved by two men, both who met a painful, vain death. Orin Mannon and Captain Adam Brant fell to the femme fatale that was Christine Mannon. Both of them were sucked into the whirlpool of destruction as Christine sung her siren's song, lulling them to come to her and escape to the South Sea Islands. It was also here where girls became women and complete freedom was found.
Adam Brant wanted to take Christine and Lavinia to "The Blessed Isles." He had previously been there before and had resided in the land where "the natives walked around naked." He remembers them vividly as he describes them to Lavinia.
Lavinia: I your admiration for the naked native women. You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.
Brant: so you remember that, do you? Aye! And they lived in as near the Garden of
Paradise before sin was discovered as you'll fin on this earth! Unless you've seen it, you can't picture the green beauty of their land set in the blue of the sea! The clouds like down on the mountaintops, the sun drowsing in your blood, and always the surf on the barrier reef singing a croon in your ears like a lullaby! The Blessed Isles I'd call them! You can forget there all men's dirty dreams of greed and power (279)!
Adam Brant speaks of these islands like a heaven that no one can go to and find bliss. He tells Lavinia that he wants to take her there, the isles where innocence can be found. However, these picturesque islands are the places he really wants to go with Christine, for Adam loves her. This messy love triangle only proves that getting to these islands of innocence are truly beyond the scope of morality. "O'Neill re-employs in various forms the conventional image of exotic islands in order to gain a universally-conditioned response from his audience--escape from unpleasant reality--" (Ronald T.
Compare The Successes And Failures Of Patriarchy In Colonialism, In “The Tempest”, “Translations” And “Things Fall Apart”.
Setting is an important element in East of Eden. Described are beautiful, panoramical views of the surrounding landscapes of the Salinas Valley, California. "The Salinas Valley . . . is a swale between two ranges of mountains. . . . . On the wide level acres of the valley, the topsoil lays deep and fertile. . . . . Under the live oaks, shaded and dusky, the maidenhair flourished and gave a good smell, and under the mossy banks of the watercourses whole clumps of five-fingered ferns and goldy-backs hung down" (Steinbeck p. 480). Steinbeck then goes on to describe the human history of these areas. The groups of peoples that lived there are described in sweeping generalizations. "First there were Indians, an inferior breed without energy, inventiveness, or culture . . . their warfare was a weary pantomime. Then the hard, dry Spaniards came explor...
She started her book with tourism and ended it with it too. The tourists were the most important things that happen to their island. There were tourists in the island from the start. They had a big effect on the people of the island and their country. A lot of money came from them and a lot of places belonged to them. The tone of the author when she talked about tourists was filled with hates. She hated them and didn’t want them in their island. She hated them because it was her home, but she was the one that feels like a slave and unwelcome. Those people weren’t just tourists, some of them became the residents. People who stayed there and turned it to their home and acted like the island belong to them and not the original residents. They built their own buildings and then didn’t let the Antiguans to enter. They treated them unwelcome. “We Antiguans thought that the people in the Mill Reef Club had such bad manners, like pigs: they were behaving in a bad way. Like pigs. There they were, strangers in someone else’s home, and they refused to talk to their hosts or have anything human, anything intimate, to do with them” (Kincaid 27). They welcomed the tourists. They gave them a place to live and a food to eat, but they didn’t pay them back with kindness and that’s another reason that she hated
Then suddenly, as I sat there looking at the cloud, I saw my vision yonder once again-the tepee built of cloud and sewed with lightning, the flaming rainbow door and, underneath, the Six Grandfathers sitting, and all the horses thronging in their quarters; and also there was I myself upon my bay before the tepee. I looked about me and could see that what we then were doing was like a shadow cast upon the earth from yonder vision in the heavens, so bright it was and clear. I knew the real was yonder and the darkened dream of it was here. (p. 169)
...there was some sort of authority that who they had become was horrendous. They cried for the deaths of their friends, as well as the darkness inside their hearts. They cry after realization of what had happened to them while they inhabited the island. They had allowed savagery to win.
Golding illustrates mankind’s essential illness when the boy’s pillage the once beautiful Garden of Eden and render it a perverted Eden. When the boy’s first crash on the island, Golding describes it as enchanting, full of beautiful waters and tress that cover the skyline. Golding illustrates the enchanting beauty of the island when he depicts, “ This was filled with a blue flower, a rock plant of some sort, and the overflow hung down the vent and spilled lavishly among the canopy of the forest. The air was thick with butterflies, lifting, fluttering, settling” (Golding 28). Clearly, before the evils of mankind disturb the island, it is quite beautiful. However, this charming landscape does not last forever, as the boys light half the island on fire when they try to make a signal fire. Golding conveys the children are destroying the once beautiful island and turning it int...
Many readers feel the tendency to compare Aphra Behn's Oroonoko to William Shakespeare's Othello. Indeed they have many features in common, such as wives executed by husbands, conflicts between white and black characters, deceived heroes, the absolute vulnerability of women, etc. Both works stage male characters at both ends of their conflicts. In Othello, the tragic hero is Othello, and the villain is Iago. In Oroonoko, the hero is Oroonoko, the vice of the first part is the old king, and the second part white men in the colony. In contrast to their husbands, both heroines—Desdemona and Imoinda—seem more like "function characters" who are merely trapped in their husband's fates, occasionally becoming some motivation of their husbands (like Desdemona is Othello's motivation to rage, Imoinda's pregnancy drives Oroonoko restless to escape). While Shakespeare and Behn put much effort in moulding them, to many readers they are merely "perfect wives". This paper aims to argue that, Desdemona and Imoinda's perfect wifehood may be the product of compliance to male-dominated societies, where women are
rising out of the ocean, must have looked to early settlers of the new nation. Another
...nly woman he only loved and Hamlet lost Ophelia the only woman he truly loved but was foolish enough to tell her the whole truth before she passed. Interestingly enough both of our protagonists were forced to experience not only the death of their true loves but also society’s silent disdain on the fact that they committed suicide.
Disney movies may want us to believe that Greek mythology is all about heroes defeating the villains and that the Gods are the good guys. However, minimal research will reveal that this isn’t the case. In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet “I Dreamed I Moved among the Elysian Fields” she intertwines the allusions to mythological Greek woman with the speaker’s own experience to make a powerful statement on the sexual objectification and victimization of women in the 1930s. The speaker begins the poem with an ethereal tone masking the violent nature of her subject matter. The poem is set in the Elysian Fields, a paradise where the souls of the heroic and virtuous were sent (cite).
changing attitudes toward life and the other characters in the play, particularly the women; and his reflection on the
SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on East of Eden.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2003. Web. 2 Jun. 2010. .
It is widely believed that “Living life without honor is a tragedy bigger than death itself” and this holds true for Hamlet’s Ophelia. Ophelia’s death symbolizes a life spent passively tolerating Hamlet’s manipulations and the restrictions imposed by those around her, while struggling to maintain the last shred of her dignity. Ophelia’s apathetic reaction to her drowning suggests that she never had control of her own life, as she was expected to comply with the expectations of others. Allowing the water to consume her without a fight alludes to Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia as merely a device in his personal agenda. Her apparent suicide denotes a desire to take control of her life for once. Ophelia’s death is, arguably, an honorable one, characterized by her willingness to let go of her submissive, earth-bound self and leave the world no longer a victim.
Many short story writers have written about the gender and role of woman in society. Some of these stories express what Barbara Walter calls, “The Cult of True Womanhood” meaning the separation of both man and woman in social, political and economic spheres. In order to be considered a “true woman” woman were to abide by the set of standards that were given to her. Women were expected to live by the four main principal virtues - piety, purity, submissiveness, and domestication. In Kate Chopin’s short story, “The Storm,” Calixta the main female character breaks away from “The Cult of True Womanhood” when she has a sexual encounter with her past lover Alcée. The storm goes through many twists and turns that tie with their adulterous actions. Although she breaks away from the four main principal virtues, she in the end is considered to be pure innocent of heart because the action in which occurred happened instantly, and as white as she was, she was taken away from her innocence.
to the suicide of a girl called Eva Smith and how everyone in the play