The Power of Choice

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Recommended: Supernaturalism in English literature

People make choices everyday; in the space of a single day we can make hundreds of choices without even realizing it. Some of theses choices are made for the better and some for the worse. But in reality many of theses choices are small and insignificant like what to eat for breakfast or what shoes to wear that day. These menial choices, for the most part, do not have a large effect on our day-to-day lives. However, every so often we are faced with a choice that places us at a cross roads of our lives. These choices forces us to consider who we are as a person and who we might grow to be, they represent the boarder between the safe and comfortable world we have always known and the unknown adventure that lies ahead. The making of this life defining choice was a very prominent theme of Victorian poetry and remains to this day a constant theme of many young adult novels. By following the journey of the hero as defined in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces it can be shown that the choice made by the protagonist can set them on a path to begin their own heroic journey. The result of which is the freedom to become the master of his or her own identity and future. The choice that is made by the protagonist is one of reformation, to become a different person by moving into the realm of the unknown. In the case of Victorian era works this choice can be seen in the breaking down of the traditional gender roles of women in which they are controlled by the pressures of society to be submissive to the masculine presence in their lives. By comparing the choice made by the Lady of Shalott in Alfred Tennyson’s Victorian poem “The Lady of Shalott” with the one made by the character of Pippa from the 2003 Victorian era young adult ...

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... acceptance of the call is also from the shattering of a supernatural object; in this case it is the power of the Realms. However, in this case Pippa’s defeat of the threshold guardian does not prompt Pippa to make the chois choice to leave the confining and isolated gendered world but rather it causes her refusal to return to it. When the power of the Realms become to much for the girls to handle, because they lack the knowledge of the nature of the Realms, they accidently let loose the evil of the Realm and almost allow it to escape into the real world. With the Realm shattering around her and her friends, Pippa is separated form the group and during the time she waits for them she comes to the realization that if she return to the real world all that she has to look forward to is becoming “Mrs. Bartley Bumble” (Bray 395). The unending possibilities of the Realm

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