In Joyce Carol Oates’s short story, “Heat”, the author is showing the reality of violence through the time period of the story. The story is two girls, Rhea and Rhoda, who torment the other children in their county in various ways and eventually end up getting hurt. I will look at the theme of power, the theme of revenge, and the theme of fate to prove that the author is showing the reality of violence.
The theme of power plays a significant role throughout the short story. In the case with Rhea and Rhoda, power is shown through the ways that the twins had power over everybody around them, as in the quote “They were eleven years old; they were identical twins; they basked in their power” (Oates 213). Rhea and Rhoda were inseparable, and together,
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“…then Roger Whipple was saying he had some secret things that belonged to his brother… Roger Whipple said he could only take one of them upstairs to his room at a time…” (Oates 220). They loved having power and they could not be separated at all until one person got them alone and separated them, which is when they lost their power and paid a deadly consequence. “If one didn’t know exactly where the other was that one could die. Or the other could die. Or both” (Oates 219). This is significant to the author’s main point throughout the story because the reality of violence is that powerful things must come to an end.
The theme of revenge also plays a very important role throughout the short story because many times people want to get back at the ones who hurt them. Revenge was an ongoing subject within the story for many reasons, one being that they stole from their grandmother and it may not necessarily be their grandmother getting revenge on them, but it could be the world around them getting its revenge. “Death was coming for them, but they didn’t know” (Oates 214). Even though nobody knew that their deaths were going to happen, they eventually were going to die because of how mean and powerful they
When an author romanticizes a piece of literature, he or she has the power to convey any message he or she wishes to send to the reader. Authors can make even the most horrible actions, such as Dustan murdering ten savages in their sleep and justify it; somehow, from both the type of mood/tone set in this piece of literature, along with the powerful word choice he used, Whittier had the ability to actually turn the tables on to the victim (i.e. the ten “savages” who were murdered in their sleep). “A Mother’s Revenge” by John Greenleaf Whittier, is a prime example of how authors can romanticize any situation into how they want to convey their message.
Violent scenes always have an important meaning in literary works. They could serve different purposes that either benefit or harm the characters. Often times it serves as both as it usually benefit the good ones and harms the enemy. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, shows various scenes of violence from McMurphy toward Nurse Ratched, depicting how McMurphy often breaks her control and gives the other inmates a sense of freedom.
The theme that has been attached to this story is directly relevant to it as depicted by the anonymous letters which the main character is busy writing secretly based on gossip and distributing them to the different houses. Considering that people have an impression of her being a good woman who is quiet and peaceful, it becomes completely unbecoming that she instead engages in very abnormal behavior. What makes it even more terrible is the fact that she uses gossip as the premise for her to propagate her hate messages not only in a single household but across the many different households in the estate where she stays.
Revenge is a reoccurring theme throughout the Odyssey. Nearly every motivation for conflict within the Odyssey is because one of the characters is craving revenge. The three main areas of revenge in the first twelve books are as follows. Initially, Zeus prevents Odysseus and his men from returning home. Poseidon also continually chastises Odysseus throughout the entire story. Finally, the key account of revenge the reader sees in the story is from Telemachus in that he feels the need to make the suitors compensate for their impudence to his house as well as his mother. Therefore, each of the characters in the story is put through many hardships which pushes them to seek revenge.
Power, especially in the hands of females, can be a force for immense societal changes. Director Sciamma plays with the role of power in the lives of the four girls, predominantly in the character of Lady. Lady’s sense of control, stems from winning hand on hand fights, but the opinion of the men around her lays the foundation of this empowerment. The more fights Lady wins, the more the men appear to respect her, yet as feminist Simone de Beauvoir explains “[n]o matter how kindly, how equally men treated me when I tried to participate in politics, when it came right down to it, they had more rights, so they had more power than I did (Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex- ix),” the “power” Lady obtained was provisional. Lady’s power was directly tied to the opinion of the men around her, in this scene, a portion of the boys sits on stairs physically higher than Lady, invoking a sense of power hierarchy and control. The boys only valued Lady when she successfully participated in the their world of violence, but this participation came with boundaries as “[w]omen can never become fully socialized into patriarchy- which in turn causes man to fear women and leads then, on the one hand, to establish very strict boundaries between their own sex and the female sex (Feminist theory 142).” The men had never truly incorporated Lady into their group, she had just
Traditions demonstrate a set of social norms that have been followed and adapted to for an elongated amount of time. In each of the plots, Medea, The Piano, and The Age of Innocence, the standard set by society was broken and the consequences imposed took form in varying degrees and shapes of violence. Whether it was outright murder as in Medea, or a more subtle but intense struggle as in The Age of Innocence, these consequences serve as the community's opinion of this breach of its expectations for its members.
Vengeance is considered to be an eye for an eye. One man takes another man’s father’s life, and then it only seems in reason that they should repay them back by killing their father’s murderer. Each son had killed in anger and emotion that was left unsolved and leaving all but one character Prince of Norway dead. The characters acted out blindly throughout the play and it ended in tragedy. After the death of multiple characters the readers will have a lesson learned that vengeance does not end in triumph.
While reading and analyzing the play of Hamlet it is very clear all of the different themes and lessons Shakespeare is trying to develop. Throughout the story many themes stand out but the biggest one is that revengeful actions never have the best outcome. Shakespeare builds and works on that theme for the duration of the play and that makes this play a revenge tragedy. It is a revenge tragedy because revenge is the most established theme in Hamlet and most of the characters are involved with some type of revenge. Shakespeare enforces this idea by having Hamlet deal with three different revenge stories, all having to do with a son avenging his father. First there is hamlet wanting revenge on Claudius, then Laertes wants revenge on hamlet and last Fortinbras wants revenge on all of Denmark. These three stories all develop and produce the major theme of revengeful actions never having the best outcomes.
Oates surprised many readers when she wrote from a man’s perspective, but she still wrote a great story. In What I Lived For her main focus was conflict. The reader was hooked from the beginning and kept interest as the scandalous story developed. These conflicts contributed to, not only the reader’s interest, but also the novel’s plot and theme.
Ugur, Neslihan Guler. "Self-destructive forces in Oates' women." Studies in Literature and Language 4.3 (2012): 35+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.
The theme of revenge is found in both the novel The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and the play The Crucible written by Arthur Miller. Abigail Williams is seeking revenge on Elizabeth Proctor, and Roger Chillingworth wants the blood of the person that has been with Hester Prynne. These Characters do evil things to people in order to get what they want. Both characters end up losing and neither of them get what they want.
Enmity towards one another often results in brutality and, conclusively, homicide. This issue is depicted several times in literature and in real life. The brutality in fiction and reality demonstrates that violence and bloodshed never culminate into virtuous outcomes. This recurring theme is prominent within the works of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, and To Kill a Mockingbird; it is even prevalent in real life circumstances, under the recent Charlottesville flash mob. These situations, fictitious or not, all contain violent acts that do not end in morally good results.
The story “Royal Beatings” is a beautiful representation of a young girl’s view of the world around her. Munro uses vivid details to create a story and characters that feel real. She draws the reader in and allows the reader to understand Rose through her poignant words about her life. Then, in the end, enables the reader to make the connections that Rose perhaps misses. “Royal Beatings” is not about any particular moment in Rose’s life or any certain action related to the reader. The story is, in fact, not about plot at all. It is instead about creating characters with a sense of verisimilitude and humanity while revealing “all their helplessness and rage and rancor.”
be a young woman. Most importantly Oates shows the human tendency to be independent at times and at others dependent. Each character won and lost a battle, expressing the human complexity of sometimes being able to be strong but then at other times weak. This shows that in a mother and daughter relationship each is needed for the other person because each person needs someone to be strong.
The author I choose for my first journal entry is Joyce Carol Oates. After the several short stories and poems I have read over the last couple of weeks, Oates’s work has stood out and stuck with me. Oates biography connects to her work in several ways. She has published more than one hundred works, and her stories cover a multitude of topics such as domestic violence and daily life. ( 792-793; vol 2) After numerous inquiries as to why Oates’s work is so violent, Oates’s published an article in The New York Times in 1981 stating, “When I point out that, in fact, my writing isn’t usually explicitly violent but deals, most of the time, with the phenomenon of violence and its aftermath, in ways not unlike those of the Greek Dramatists; when I point out that, in any case, writing is language and, in a very important sense, is more “about” language than “about” a subject- the interviewer will not nod, and take notes, and inquire about my childhood: Was it tragic? Have you been frightened by life?” (Oates, “Why Is Your Writing So Violent).