“The Duchess and the Jeweller” by Virginia Woolf is a short story about Oliver, a poor man who has become a successful jeweler, and his interaction with a Duchess. In the story, Oliver struggles with the Duchess over social power, where she has the ability to cheat him by selling him fake pearls in exchange for a weekend spent with her daughter whom he is in love with – a classic battle of the sexes. While the conflict between man and woman is evident, Virginia Woolf uses flashback, point of view and imagery to also convey the dispute between the rich and the poor.
Oliver is first introduced as a man who lives very well “with the right brandies, whiskeys and liqueurs” (Woolf 90), in a house where “a more central position could not be imagined” (90). He is a man of power who has “his breakfast brought in on a try by a manservant” (90) and receives invitations from “duchesses, countesses, viscountesses and Honourable Ladies” (90). When the Duchess first arrives to see him, he has her wait for ten minutes, displaying that he, a jeweller, has the authority to make her wait. However, Woolf uses flashback to display the underlying battle of the rich and the poor. The reader sees that Oliver came from less fortunate roots where he sold stolen dogs and cheap watches. While superficially it may seem that he has the “Duchess of Lambourne, daughter of a hundred Earls” ( 93) wait because he has the masculine power to have her wait to see him, Woolf introduces the idea that Oliver, the impecunious boy who earned his wealth, has the Duchess, a woman whose wealth was inherited, wait for his pleasure.
While we see the struggle of control between Oliver and the Duchess, the reader also observes Oliver’s mother’s dominance over him. Using flashback, Woolf shows that as a child when he was swindled while selling stolen dogs, his mother disapprovingly wails, “Oh, Oliver! When will you have sense, my son?” (90). Later, Oliver talks to a picture of his mother saying, “I have won my bet” (91) while reminiscing about his past as a indigent boy “in a filthy little alley” (90) and reflecting on his success. This shows that he has something to prove to his mother, that he is still constrained by her and her thoughts of him.
Oliver would write this poem because she did not conform to societies wishes. According to the Poetry Foundation, Oliver has never actually received a degree despite attending The Ohio State University and Vassar College. By not completing college, she had stepped out of the normal procedure of American life of growing up, going to college, then working. She also “met her long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook” while helping organize Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry. This choice is not a normal decision for people to make; however, she is still successful and has been presented many awards, including Honorary Doctorates (Beacon). Despite living the way she wants to, Oliver still manages to have success and happiness.
It appears that Deborah’s mother is the one responsible for hiring the gang members to go see Oliver. The mother thought Oliver was a nice young man introduced him to Deborah. If nothing else, this should teach parents a lesson not to meddle in their child’s life. The mother suggested getting the local gang to help Deborah to end Oliver’s abuse, which resulted in his death. Although it is tragic that Deborah put in this situation, she is not the first, or the last.
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
“The Gilded Six Bits” by Zora Neale Hurston centers on the views of capitalism and patriarchy. This short story is not only about love, betrayal, and reconciliation. “The Gilded Six Bits” conveys a deeper message about race, class status, power, and money. These messages all tie in together with the capitalistic-patriarchy that distorts Missie May and Joe marriage. Although Joe does not leave Missie May the reconciliation between the two is left unassured causing Joe to still have dominance over his wife Missie May.
rich and noble and Prejudice were the issues of the time. This is a classical love story from the eighteenth
The novel ‘Great Expectations’, by Charles Dickens, follows a young, socially inexperienced orphaned boy called Pip, through his journey, emphasizing his inability to adapt to life and relationships around him. His story is told through the eyes of the older Pip and highlights the aspects of society which Dickens disapproves of. His techniques throughout the novel help to give a better understanding of Pip's life. When Pip first encounters the escaped convict in the graveyard, the tense relationship between them is obvious to the reader, but all is revealed in chapter 39, where the readers meet both Pip and the convict again, and witness a role-reversal between them. The weather in the novel is significant; Dickens describes it in such a way that it creates an atmosphere using foreboding ominous imagery. This story of a lonely orphan in a mixed up world provides plenty of opportunities to consider the difficultly of an impoverished childhood in the nineteenth century and how hard it might have been for such a naïve and gullible young boy to survive in this time, especially with such harsh family circumstances. The theme of injustice, which is inherent throughout, explains some of the reasons why he has so many ‘great expectations.’
Charles Dickens’ (1812-1970) father had great financial difficulties. The boy had a rather miserable childhood, and the lad spent much of his time in poorhouses and workhouses. Did poverty overwhelm Charles Dickens? Was his negative environment to blame for an unproductive and fruitless life? No it wasn’t. Dickens retreated into his imaginary world and incisively wrote about the need for social reform in what later became such literary classics such as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.
“Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise” (Carroll 105). This and advice of this kind are often dispensed by the Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Alice, and like the transition from child to adult, the advice is generally rarely fully understood if not confusingly difficult to wrap logic around. Many illustrators have undertaken the task of conveying a clear picture of the struggle that Alice goes through in order to triumph over childhood and nonsense into the realm of adults and logic. Angel Dominguez shows Alice’s struggle to grow up and out of childhood, a major theme of the text, in such a way that the audience can almost feel her anxiety. The use of the body language of Alice, the Duchess and the supporting animals, in addition to compositional elements such as proximity and framing, is a principal mechanism of Dominguez in evoking Alice’s anxiety and emphasizing the uncomfortable passage into maturity on one’s own while dealing with the pressures and advances of an adult world.
Katherine Mansfield belongs to a group of female authors that have used their financial resources and social standing to critique the patriarchal status quo. Like Virginia Woolf, Mansfield was socioeconomically privileged enough to write influential texts that have been deemed as ‘proto-feminist’ before the initial feminist movements. The progressive era in which Mansfield writes proves to be especially problematic because, “[w]hile the Modernist tradition typically undermined middle-class values, women … did not have the recognized rights necessary to fully embrace the liberation from the[se] values” (Martin 69). Her short stories emphasized particular facets of female oppression, ranging from gendered social inequality to economic classism, and it is apparent that “[p]oor or rich, single or married, Mansfield’s women characters are all victims of their society” (Aihong 101). Mansfield’s short stories, “The Garden Party” and “Miss Brill”, represent the feminist struggle to identify traditional patriarchy as an inherent caste system in modernity. This notion is exemplified through the social bonds women create, the naïve innocence associated with the upper classes, and the purposeful dehumanization of women through oppressive patriarchal methods. By examining the female characters in “The Garden Party” and “Miss Brill”, it is evident that their relationships with other characters and themselves notify the reader of their encultured classist preconceptions, which is beneficial to analyze before discussing the sources of oppression.
Oliver Twist mainly revolves around the mistreatment of orphans and how they were ranked low in society. The story teaches us a lot about how growing up in poverty and being ranked lowly in society makes people do things to harm others when they grow up by becoming thieves, pick-pocketers, or murderers. Oliver Twist takes us to England and while telling us the story of the fictional character Oliver Twist, who was an orphan, Charles Dickens also shows us the hard life for the people who faced poverty in old England. England,...
Values are spread all around the world, and many people’s values differ. These can lead to people being judged, or indirectly characterized by other people. In “The Necklace” Mme. Loisel is a beautiful woman with a decent life, and a husband that loves her, and only wants to make her happy. She is not rich but she makes it along, she insists of a better, wealthier life. When her husband gets her invited to a ball, she feels the need for a brand new fancy dress and tons of jewelry. When the couple realizes they cannot afford jewelry as well, they search out to borrow her friend, Mme. Forestiers’ necklace. She comes to notice she no longer has the necklace on when she leaves the ball. This later troubles her, as she has to work for a long time to collect enough money to buy a new necklace. This story describes the relationship between a couple, who have different dreams, and how desires can revamp your life. Guy de Maupassant, the author of “The Necklace” uses literary devices to prove people come before materialistic items.
In Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace" and Toni Morrison's "Recitatif," materialism and the desire to be envied are vital ingredients in the themes of the stories. Both authors enhance their themes through the manipulation of plot and the use of women as their central characters. Maupassant and Morrison prove the notion that women are effective characters in depicting themes that deal with the social issue of craving material wealth.
“The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant is about a girl who lives a poor and unfortunate life. She dreams of living in a high class society with many riches and jewels. She sees herself as something important and a person that everyone should respect as a valuable person. The only way Mathilde Loisel can be satisfied with herself and be content is by having expensive objects in her possession. Unfortunately for her she does not have the opportunity or the availability to buy luxurious items for self and becomes frustrated. Without the things that she desires she can not feel happy about how she is living and can not appreciate what she has. Her strong need for the expensive things makes her sad and sorrowful because she lives a normal life with her husband. Attending to typical housewife duties like cooking and cleaning, when she rather be wearing lavish clothes and fancy jewelry.
Mathilde Loisel lived the life of a painfully distressed woman, who always believed herself worthy of living in the upper class. Although Mathilde was born into the average middle class family, she spent her time daydreaming of her destiny for more in life... especially when it came to her financial status. Guy de Maupassant’s short story, “The Necklace”, tells a tale of a vain, narcissistic housewife who longed for the aristocratic lifestyle that she believed she was creditable for. In describing Mathilde’s self-serving, unappreciative, broken and fake human behaviors, de Maupassant incorporates the tragic irony that ultimately concludes in ruining her.
Knowing how she feels he surprises her with a ticket to the ball. He gives her his savings in order for her to buy a new gown. Though he was unable to get her any jewels he suggests her to tell her rich friend to let her borrow a necklaces in order to see his wife happy. On the contrary, the husband from "The Jewel" does not fully satisfy his wife in the way that she wanted. He dreads going out to the opera while his wife loves it. He was also unable to buy her luxurious jewels so she pleases herself with false jewels and ornaments. Though both men adore and love their wife, one tries harder than the other, even though neither one can afford paying the objects the ladies truly desire.