Comparing Maturation in Sons and Lovers by D.H Lawrence, Out Of The Shelter by David Lodge and The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis
Each of these three novels Sons and Lovers by D.H Lawrence, Out Of The Shelter by David Lodge and The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis, examine the transition between childhood and adulthood of the three main characters in each of the texts. Each author represents this transition by showing how all the characters deal with significant stages or events in their lives. The problems which they encounter lead to the maturation of each character which finally leads to the process of growing up taking place. Although each book is set in a different era, where social conventions are very different, many of the problems which each of the characters face remain the same. Sons and Lovers by D.H.Lawrence is set in a working class, coal-mining community in pre-war England. It is against this setting that Paul Morel grows up. For Paul, the process of growing up means how his relationships with various groups of people and individuals develop and how he himself sees these relationships. The mostsignificant relationships Paul has are those with his parents, the opposite sex and the outside world. Paul's childhood is similar to other children in that area of Nottingham in the 1930s. His father spends most evenings drinking, squandering most of the family's income. Paul resents his father for making his mother suffer because of this and never questions the fact that it is his mother who drives Mr Morel to drink. Paul is the second of four children and has an unusually close relationship with his mother which intensifies after the death of his elder brother, William. This relationship that Paul has with his mother pre...
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...urney which is made by the main character takes place over a relatavely short period of time. The way in which adolescents' rites of passage are represented in all three of my novels conforms to the idea that "The subject is the development of the protagonist's mind and character, as he passes from childhood through varied experiences - and usually through spiritual crisis - into maturity and the recognition of his identity and role in the world."
Works Cited
Amis, Martin. The Rachel Papers. New York: Vintage International, 1992.
Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996
Lodge, David. Out of the Shelter. New York: 1985.
Powell, Neil. "What Life Is: The Novels of Martin Amis." PN Review, June 1981: 42-45.
Spilka, Mark. The Love Ethic of D.H. Lawrence. (1955): 244. Rpt. In TCLC. Ed. Dennis Poupard. Vol. 16. Detroit: Gale, 1985.
Bensick, Carol. "Jonathan Edwards." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed.Paul Lauter. Canada: DC Heath and Company, 1990. 561-564.
The book Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life published in 2003, takes a close look into the lives of different families in the United States and how they are affected by race and social class and how their family lives differ. The Author, Annette Lareau, discusses how social class affects the parenting styles and how these parenting styles are affecting the children. Although Lareau’s book could use a few changes, it is well written and it is a good read to help better understand how social class and parenting styles can affect the lives of different children on a personal level. In
Many hearts are drawn to history's greatest love stories, such as Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde, and Helen and Paris to name a few. One could argue that humanity’s way of finding happiness is to seek love. Pure, unadulterated love is one of the hardest feelings to acquire, but when one does, they’d do anything to keep it. Through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and his characters, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, readers discover that this innate desire to be accepted and loved is both our most fatal flaw and our greatest virtue.
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.
“The Perils of Indifference” is a speech that Elie Wiesel delivered in Washington D.C. on April 12, 1999, exactly 54 years after his release from the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald by American troops. Both Congress along with President Clinton and Mrs. Clinton were present to hear the speech. Wiesel spoke briefly about what it was like in the concentration camps, but he focused mostly on the topic of Indifference. His speech was effective in its use of rhetoric to convince the audience that as individuals and as a world culture we cannot afford to become indifferent to the suffering around us.
Booth, Alison, and Kelly J. Mays. The Norton Introduction to Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Print.
Before slavery was abolished, plantations and farms had patrols that rode on horses, making sure that if a slave had tried to escape, they would hunt he or she down and torture or kill the escaping slave worker. In the absence of slavery the KKK were the new “patrols.” The first Ku Klux Klan was founded by a group of Confederate veterans in Pulaski Tennessee in 1865, coincidental the same year when slavery was abolished in the U.S. The KKK was not connected with the law because slavery
The critical time periods in the Ku Klux Klan’s history can be simply broken down into separate “Klans.” Former Confederate soldiers in Pulaski, Tennessee formed the first Klan around a year after the end of the Civil War. Soon after, Nathan Forrest, a former Confederate lieutenant general, was named the “Grand Wizard” of the organization. The “main objective of white supremacy organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, the White Brotherhood, the Men of Justice, the Constitutional Union Guards and the Knights of the White Camelia was to stop black people from voting” and restore the white supremacy the South saw prior to the Civil War ("Effects of the Klu Klux Klan"). At this point, Klansmen would ride at night through towns brutally intimidating, blacks and radical Republicans. These tactics got so bad that in 1870, Congress began passing the first of three...
Barnet, Sylvan, William Burto, and William E. Cain. An Introduction to Literature. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006
For most everyone maturation is a process we must all undergo. For a girl at the young age of eleven, it seemed so far ahead in the future, but soon enough her mud throwing days were over. This was the life of Lyra Belacqua. Even though she didn’t get to have quality time with her family, having mud wars and making friendships with kitchen boys was the origin of Lyra’s childhood, that created the mischievous girl raised in Jordan Collage. The novel The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman, tells of a young orphan girl that gets sent away with a female scholar named Mrs. Coulter to be taken care of instead of staying in a college filled with men. After she has been with Mrs. Coulter for some time Lyra realizes that her new caretaker has been
Acceptance of who we are plays a large part in the overall theme of “rite of passage” in the story. The young girl is opposed to the thought of working for her mother at the beginning, but eventually comes to a realization that it is her pre-determined fate to fit the mould of the gender stereotype. Through the girl’s hardships, she accepts the fact that her younger brother, Laird, is now the man that his father needs for help, and she takes her place in womanhood. The story embodies gender identity and stereotypes, as a young child moves into adulthood. The fact that our rite of passage is unavoidable proves that we must all go through our own journeys to find our own true identity.
Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996.
Abrams, M.H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 1993.
Spilka, Mark. The Love Ethic of D.H. Lawrence. (1955): 244. Rpt. In TCLC. Ed. Dennis Poupard. Vol. 16. Detroit: Gale, 1985. 289-293.