...dia's position on the outside of everything forces her into a position of greater strength. Although hurt, the observations she makes mold her into being able to handle difficulties more easily. The loss of innocence which Claudia faces unintentionally is vital to the role she plays in society and in her life. Her thoughts hold a more realistic view of life and human behavior. She sees the pains and sorrows that life truly is constructed of. Claudia feels that she has missed out on so many opportunities and is not included the way others are. Her strong character generates a feeling of both isolation and separation, but, in reality, she tastes life more closely than most people are able to in a lifetime. Although Claudia's passion to be included is unrequited, she is filled with the strength, character, and pain that make her a more knowledgeable and resilient person.
Both the essays have the similarity that they discuss about the weaknesses in the protagonists life. They describe the social stigmas and the fear of being objected or feel guilty about wh...
“Who am I” is a question that most teens find themselves asking at some point during their adolescence. A person’s identity is not made up of just one thing it includes their religion, ethnicity, occupation, physicality, gender, and sexuality. Understanding one’s identity means to fully understand all of these completely different aspects of one self. In The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, Stephen Gordon struggles with understanding her identity and her inversion. Her physical appearance clearly has an extremely strong effect on the way she views herself. “A Curious Double Insight: ‘The Well of Loneliness’ and Native American Alternative Gender Traditions” by Tara Prince-Hughes explains that identifying as a lesbian and an invert means two completely different things. Through Native American traditions Hughes explains that Stephen’s definition of her identity resembles their two-spirit emphasis on gender rather than the lesbian emphasis on sexual desire. The article “Hall of Mirrors: Radclyffe Hall's ‘The Well of Loneliness’ and Modernist Fictions of Identity” by Laura Green discusses the struggles that Stephen faced with her inversion and how it reflected on her identity throughout the book.
Throughout history, women have often been portrayed as inferior to men or considered the "weaker sex." As a result of these social assumptions, women have been fighting to dissociate themselves from this stereotype and gain their independence. John Steinbeck's "The Chrysanthemums" is a classic illustration of the frustration felt by a woman before she was observed as being more than just her sex.
The setting of these two stories emphasize, on visually showing us how the main characters are based around trying to find freedom despite the physical, mental and emotional effects of living in confinement. While on the other hand, dealing with Psychology’s ugly present day behavior showing dystopia of societies views of women during the time period they lived.
As we grow older, we start to construct and develop ourselves. The way we dress, talk and act in public, to what we do at home. All of this is determined by a term called identity, which helps us shape who we are as people. This is decided based on our surrounding such as family, friends, society, all the way to the internal chances, like our behavior which help shape out personality. Some people might not know who they are, they could still be finding themselves, but might not know if being themselves is something they can do. Moreover, they could be trying to fit into someone elses shoes trying to be something they are not. Which is why we try hardest to shape our identity but in the end, it is hard to find out who we are because all we want to do is just fit into what society tells us we should be.
Mrs. Ames from “The Astronomer’s Wife” and Elisa Allen from “The Chrysanthemums”, two women in their best ages, did share similar lives. They were loyal wives, of decent beauty and good manners. They were married for some time, without any children and they were fighting the dullness of their marriages. At first, it looked like they were just caught in marriage monotony, but after the surface has been scratched deeper, it was clear that these two women were crying for attention: but they had different reasons.
Identity is not created based on perfection; it created based one’s qualities and unique choices. If a young woman follows and tries to create an identical identity for themselves to make an ideal identity themselves, it take away their chance of creating their own unique identity. Sometimes the desire of an ideal identity comes from the lack of good and stable family background. Alicia, a twenty-eight-year-old Hispanic woman interviewed by Bell, whose desire to have an ideal family stopped her from expressing her sexual desire. Bell discusses the reason of Alicia 's choices of an ideal identity, which is “the stability, structure, and love of a traditional family seems to afford all of the experience Alicia herself lacked in her upbringing. A traditional family became the solution to the problem of instability in Alicia’s mind. And being a good girl was the strategy Alicia adopted to enable her to have a traditional family” (39). Alicia despite her not so good family background wanted to have a traditional family life. She adopted the idea of being a good girl in order to achieve her goal of family life. She wasn’t anymore making choices; it was her will of having that future identity was making all her decision. The idea of a perfect identity and future eventually takes away the freedom of choices, which results in the creation of a fake identity. Bell writes that “Nor did being a good girl ensure that Alicia had satisfying and committed relationships. Alicia was frustrated that she’d ostensibly done the right thing but still ended up with two STDs and without a lasting relationship” (37). Trying to make an ideal identity creates the pressures of how people around see them. It also creates humongous pressure of taking a wrong step and thought of losing their ideal identity. This kind of
parents that among others things taught me to be true to my feelings and to
That is the ultimate question of life. “What makes you, you?” could possible be the scariest question we can ask yourself. One that could potentially make our heads hurt or makes us panic. With over 7 billion people on this earth, not one person looks exactly the same. Different eye color, different DNA, different facial features, everything different. However, is eye color, or DNA part of the question that we are always wondering? We don’t answer the question of what defines our identity by going over our different physical features, that is the last things on our mind, but rather we challenge to understand ourselves by having a different. But how did we get to this point? It’s simple really; the answer to our question about what goes into the development of our identity is one word, socialization. If you are raised a certain way, you are put into that lifestyle.
This is idea is re-enforced as Melanie is also shown to experience a loss of identity as ‘she felt herself not herself, wrenched from her own personality’. This dehumanization and disempowerment shows the objectification of her ch...
In Steinbeck’s short story The Chrysanthemums Elisa, the main character, undergoes several stages of transformation. She begins the story as, what appears to be, a hard women that has been tempered by her years of work and toil on the ranch that she shares with her husband. Still with all of the outward appearance of strength, Elisa has a softness at her core that is symbolized by her prized chrysanthemums. Each stage of her transformation brings us closer to her true form.
Character Analysis of Elisa Allen in "The Chrysanthemum" by John Steinbeck. "The Chrysanthemums," written by John Steinbeck, captures one day in the life of a woman who yearns for a more fulfilling life. Elisa is first portrayed as a woman whose tasks are exceeded by her abilities. As the day continues, a stranger briefly enters her life and, through manipulative words, fills her heart with hopes of change and excitement. We learn that these newly-found hopes are crushed when Elisa eventually realizes that she has been used.
In this society, many people live through life having to overcome many obstacles, living a difficult life or not. Life seems uneasy, but in this world, every person must go through hard situations, one way or another. In the short story “Anna,” author Niccolo Ammaniti, exposes the psychological distress Anna experiences because of living in a chaotic world on her own. In the short story, Ammaniti creates vivid scenes through imagery to reflect the conflict that occurred between Anna and the world around her as she begins to feel loneliness as well as feeling out of place.
The difficulties of not understanding the situation is taken into the consideration by the narration of this film because the majority of the audience can engage in the feeling of struggles between wanting to change one’s self image for the purpose of earning the social acceptance an not feeling comfortable with choosing to transform into something they are not. The director clearly stated the struggles she had to go through during her years in Paris, as she could never completely fit in with any social circles in particular. The author moved to France in a very early stage of her life therefore she has very little sense of belonging to France or Iran regardless of how long the period of time she spend in either of the countries. The progress that the author made toward making sure of the balancing her life from living in the Iranian community that heavily focused