A CRITIQUE OF THE SNOW CHILD, TAKEN FROM ANGELA CARTER’S THE BLOODY CHAMBER.
Throughout ’The Bloody Chamber’, Angela Carter takes the highly
successful conventions that belong to once innocent fairy tales, and
rips them unremorsefully from their seemingly sound foundations to
create a variety of dark, seductive, sensual stories, altering the
landscapes beyond all recognition and rewarding the heroines with the
freedom of speech thus giving them license to grab hold of the reigns
of the story.
The Snow Child is one such story by Carter, where connotations seen in
fairytales such as ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ are
in evidence and are fused together accompanied by the emergence of
feminism to the foreground of the story, numerous examples of rich and
highly effective and evocative symbolism and a certain element of
sexuality.
In essence, The Snow Child tells of a Count and his Countess who are
riding on horseback when the Count suddenly expresses his desire for a
girl with ‘skin as white as snow’, ‘lips as red as blood’ and ‘hair as
black as a raven’. She then materialises before their very eyes, after
which, the Count lifts her up, and sits her in front of him on his
saddle. The jealousy oozes from the Countess, who after seeing this,
has only one train of thought - how can she rid herself of The Snow
Child? The Countess’s place is usurped by the child as is symbolised
by the transfer of the Countess's clothes onto her, leaving the
Countess naked. Eventually the child dies and the Count gets off his
horse and rapes her before the dead body of the girl melts away and
consequently, the Countess is re-clothed. This narrative clearly
exposes how the heroines of fairy tales are the const...
... middle of paper ...
...s she who demands the girl to ‘Pick me
one’ when passing a ‘bush of roses’ - the rose that she picks
eventually kills her as she ‘pricks her finger on the thorn’. As a
result she ‘bleeds; screams; falls.’ Bizarrely, the ‘weeping’ Count
gets off his horse and proceeds to rape the corpse in a horrific act
of necrophilia - all the while, the Countess ‘watched him narrowly’,
hinting at a spiteful evil glare.
‘He was soon finished’.
In my opinion, it is at this point where the Count loses the little
respect the reader would have had for him and suggests a certain
degree of incapability on his part.
Finally, the Countess ‘stroked her fur’ with ‘her long hands’ whilst
the Count ‘picked up the rose, bowed and handed it to his wife’,
suggesting a transfer of power at this late stage in the story. She
drops the rose after touching it, declaring, ‘It bites!’.
his sword and seizes her by one mighty shoulder, and forces her to the ground.
Throughout life, individuals are faced with decisions and obstacles that must be overcome. These decisions and actions are easily influenced by outside forces and motivations and the outcomes of our actions can have a drastic effect on one's destiny. The act of deciding a course of action is not always simple, but it is made even more difficult when we are faced with a time period and a negative outcome if we chose not to continue on our journey. In the short story “Winter’s Bone,” written by Daniel Woodrell, we are taught that throughout life people make choices between what they want to do and what they need to do. Sometimes those choices lead to unfavourable outcomes,
Olivia Butler writes in the afterword of “Bloodchild” that it’s not a story of slavery, and evidence from close reading can be used to support this statement. Butler uses the human form as a vehicle for defamiliarization to show the mechanical functions readers serve themselves and others. Furthermore, this process is able to reveal their passive nature and ultimately highlight the human allowance for manipulation. She brings light to these behaviors by showing a lack of respect for human life, an unbalanced power relationship between the Tlic and the humans, and Gan’s stripped cognitive process.
Does the American Dream belong to every one or does it exclude some individuals? The American Dream is a very powerful force that molds America. It has existed for many generations but has it changed over time? The foundation of the Dream tends to stay the same that is the pursuit of happiness, hope, freedom, justice and equality. The concepts within the American Dream should alter to fit the changes of society. The breakthroughs and obstacles that America overcomes should shift the American Dream. Society may see the American Dream as a dangerous power causing them to be scared to challenge the concepts of the traditional American Dream. Will society become dysfunctional if someone challenges the American Dream or will it make our country stronger and more diverse?
The short story Hunters in the Snow by Tobias Wolff depicts three men that go on a hunting trip that changes the course of their lives. Each character lies to himself to accept his actions in his life. Kenny, Frank, and Tub need to successfully fool themselves before they can deceive anyone else. Each of the men are immature and selfish. They don't realize how their decisions impact other people's lives. They justify their lies with their own insecurities about their lifestyles. Their lies impact the situations they encounter and change their lives forever.
In recent years many novels have been published to highlight the hardships and harsh reality of those suffering from mental disorders. While our knowledge on this issue has increased vastly, strong connections can be draw between classic and modern literature in regards to characters who suffer from these disorders. The novel “Compulsion” by Heidi Ayarbe, tells the story of a teenage boy with severe OCD. This novel authenticates the many sickening facets of OCD, and sheds a realistic and much needed light on what it is actually like to suffer from a mental illness. In a similar vein, the tragic play, “Hamlet”, shows how illness can be bred from traumatic events, and how it can lead to pain and loss for not only those suffering from an illness,
The fifth child is the story of David and Harriet Lovatt, a couple who met at an office party neither of them wanted to be at, where they soon found each other. Both of them have a rather traditional mindset and believe that marriage, fidelity and a large family is more important than a successful career or sexual liberation which was the norm at the time. It didn’t take long before they started talking about having children, but decided to wait until Harriet could quit her job in two years so they could afford the mortgage of their victorian house that they decided to buy. Although in a moment of passion they ignored their plans and Harriet got pregnant with their first child, Luke. Eventually they came to have more children until they had 4 in total and both of them couldn’t be happier. Their dinner table was always crowded with relatives and friends. And they decided that they didn’t want more children.
In June Robison’s article,”Frosty’s story illustrates scope of animal cruelty”, she argues that animal cruelty is wrong and attempts to persuade the reader to feel sympathy for animals. Animal cruelty is indeed wrong and it must stop. The author made some strong points in her editorial; however, she left out several substantial sources. This evaluation will review Robison’s article and state the main points.
In the short stories, Boys and Girls by, Alice Munro and The Birth Mark by Nathaniel Hawthorne, each author has shown similarities of two young women who seem to change their appearance or personality to conform to the desires of strong male figures in their lives.
In the past all of Disney’s Princess movies tend to follow a similar plot line. It was always the same formula, the princess falls in love with the first man she meets and relies on him for comfort and guidance as they go off to live happily ever after. This formula has worked commercially and financially for Disney with movies like, Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), and Pocahontas (1995). While these movies have turned Disney a huge profit they have never given young girls a strong, independent role model to look up to. These films, while entertaining and visually appealing, have taught young girls nothing but to find the person that they will spend the rest of their life with as soon as possible. Not one of the princess movies allows the princess to be anything more than something of a housewife. These women did not pursue any type of dream or career, they just fell in love with the first man they saw. Now while the Disney princess movies of the past have only been about finding love and riding off into the sunset, there was a Disney release last year that broke the cycle. Frozen, released in November of 2013, was a box office hit grossing over $400 million domestically and $700 million internationally. It did not focus on finding love for the main female character. Instead it built two strong female lead characters while focusing on the importance of sisterhood.
Children develop normally by stimulation and from the experiences around them. Usually when a child is shut out from the world they will become developmentally delayed, but that is not the case with Jack. In the novel Room by Emma Donoghue, Jacks mother, Ma, has been kidnapped and held prisoner in a shed for seven years and five year old Jack was born there. This room is the only world he knows. But, despite being locked in a room for the first five years of his life, according to the four main points of development, Jack has developed normally intellectually, physically, socially, and emotionally.
Chapter 2: Review and Analysis of ‘The Snow Child’ The Snow Child is a darker version of the famous fairy tale Snow White in which incest was shown to be the main aspect of the story. This fable of incest portrays a count’s wish to have a daughter only to abandon her from the conspicuous strategies of her ill-natured mother (Katsavos, pp. 190-213). See the. It was represented that all the versions of Snow White are basically oedipal conflicts applicable to mother-daughter relationship thus, heightening the tension of the conflict.
Lewis Carroll's use of puns and riddles in Alice in Wonderland help set the theme and tone. He uses word play in the book to show a world of warped reality and massive confusion. He uses such play on words to reveal the underlying theme of growing up', but with such an unusual setting and ridiculous characters, there is need for some deep analyzing to show this theme. The book contains many examples of assonance and alliteration to add humor. Carroll also adds strange diction and extraordinary syntax to support the theme.
place. These three acts can be broken down into five acts, as suggested by Bill,
Alice in Wonderland belongs to the nonsense genre, and even if most of what happens to Alice is quite illogical, the main character is not. “The Alice books are, above all, about growing up” (Kincaid, page 93); indeed, Alice starts her journey as a scared little girl, however, at the end of what we discover to be just a dream, she has entered the adolescence phase with a new way to approach the mentally exhausting and queer Wonderland. It is important to consider the whole story when analyzing the growth of the character, because the meaning of an event or a sentence is more likely to mean what it truly looks like rather than an explanation regarding subconscious and Freudian interpretations. Morton states “that the books should possess any unity of purpose seems on the surface unlikely” (Morton, page 509), but it’s better to consider the disconnected narrative and the main character separately, since the girl doesn’t belong to Wonderland, which is, as Morton says, with no intrinsic unity. Whereas, there are a few key turning points where it is possible to see how Alice is changing, something that is visible throughout her journey. Carroll wants to tell the story of a girl who has to become braver in order to contend with challenges like the pool made by her own tears, or assertive characters, like the Queen.