The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty's first novel, The Robber Bridegroom, is a combination of fantasy and reality while exploring the duality of human nature, time, and the word man lives in. The union of legend, Mississippi history and Grimms' fairy tales create an adult dream world. Every character in the story has little insight to themselves and how they relate to the world around them. The antics of Mike Fink, the Harps, the bandits, and the Indians closely relate to Mississippi folklore. The blending of actual history and pure fantasy create a much richer form of entertainment. Mike Fink was an American frontiersman who is said to have beaten Davy Crockett in a shooting contest. The Harpe brothers were notorious rustlers and killers in the South. "After being felled by a bullet that paralyzed him, Big Harpe was decapitated; as the decapitation began, Big Harpe is reported to have said, "You're a God Damned rough butcher, but cut on and be damned" (Appel 70). The head was put on a post to warn other outlaws. The duality in man himself is a strong theme in the story. The men who fail to realize that man is a combination of good and evil are unable to succeed in the world around them. The Harps and to a lesser extent Mike Fink follow their most basic instincts to be frontiersmen. They are immersed completely in the lives they led and there is no other way to live. This inability to change is there downfall. The Harps are killed and Mike Fink is relegated to a lowly mail rider. This symbolizes the end of the lawless frontier. Unlike the Harps and Mike Fink, Jamie Lockhart, Clemet and Rosamond Musgrove are torn between two different personas in themselves. Jamie must separate the bandit in hims...
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...Jamie Lockhart and hundreds of people would watch. When he could carry a "dozen oxen" and "laugh at the Indians" (Welty 9). Clement and Mike feel out of place in the new situations they were placed in. The ones that long for the past are the ones that are afraid of the present and future. Clement has a change of attitude the end of the story. After the death of his heartless and ugly wife and he knows his daughter is safe and happy, he looks forward to the future. The characters that succeed in the story are the ones that are able to adjust to there new surroundings and not wholly in a glorious past.
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Graham, Catherine Clark. Southern Accents : The Fiction of Peter Taylor. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.
Taylor, Peter. The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.
Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough traces the early life of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. McCullough examines Theodore's love of the outdoors, his health problems, and his family relations. He also discusses Theodore's time at Harvard University, his first marriage, and his entrance into politics. These experiences helped shape and influence Roosevelt's later years, as President of the United States and other political positions.
Ann Rinaldi has written many books for young teenagers, she is an Award winning author who writes stories of American history and makes them become real to the readers. She has written many other books such as A Break with Charity, A Ride into Morning, and Cast two Shadows, etc. She was born in New York City on August 27, 1934. In 1979, at the age of 45, she finished her first book.
Robinson, Daniel. "Getting It Right: The Short Fiction of Tim O'Brien." Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 40.3 (1999): 257. Expanded Academic ASAP.
The times are changing and he's unwilling to give up the past. The world is becoming modernized and people like him, cowboys and ranchers, are slowly disappearing. He runs away from home because he desires to find peace within himself as well as a place where he can feel he belongs. Here begins the adventure of John Grady and his best friend Lacey Rawlins. It is important to note here the means of travel. The story is taking place after World War II, a time when cars are fairly common, yet these boys decide to go on horseback, like in the fading old days. This is just another concept of how they are unwilling to give up a fading past. When they first begin their journey, the boys are having a good time. In a sense they?re two buddies on a road trip with no real motive. Rawlins even mentions, ?You know what?I could get used to this life.? Then they meet Blevins, the foil in the plot that veers the two boys of their course and also has plays a role in the lasting change of their personality. Their meeting with him gives an insight into Grady?s character. Rawlins is against letting Blevins come along with them, but because of John?s kind nature he ends up allowing Blevins to come. It?s because of this kindness and sense of morality, he gets into trouble later on.
Charters, A. (2011). The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction (8th ed.). Boston: Bedfor/St. Martin's.
Bausch, Richard, and R. V. Cassill. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. 7th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Print.
In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding. (Twain 2)
Memories are a stockpile of good and bad experiences that are retained of a people, places. How do you remember your childhood memories? Do certain people, places or things trigger these memories to the past? Does the knowledge of these experience still affect your life today? Throughout the novel My Antonia, Jim's nostalgia for the past is represented by nature, symbolic elements, and above all Antonia.
Robinson, Daniel. "Getting It Right: The Short Fiction of Tim O'Brien." Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 40.3 (1999): 257. Expanded Academic ASAP.
Phoenix’s journey is a little long just by walking alone in the middle of the
Cather, Willa. “Paul’s Case.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Eds. R.V. Cassill and Richard Bausch. Shorter 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2000. 198-207.
Updike, John. “A&P”. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Eds. R.V. Cassill and Richard Bausch. Shorter Sixth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. 864 - 869.
Mrs. Marian Forrester strikes readers as an appealing character with the way she shifts as a person from the start of the novel, A Lost Lady, to the end of it. She signifies just more than a women that is married to an old man who has worked in the train business. She innovated a new type of women that has transitioned from the old world to new world. She is sought out to be a caring, vibrant, graceful, and kind young lady but then shifts into a gold-digging, adulterous, deceitful lady from the way she is interpreted throughout the book through the eyes of Niel Herbert. The way that the reader is able to construe the Willa Cather on how Mr. and Mrs. Forrester fell in love is a concept that leads the reader to believe that it is merely psychological based. As Mrs. Forrester goes through her experiences such as the death of her husband, the affairs that she took part in with Frank Ellinger, and so on, the reader witnesses a shift in her mentally and internally. Mrs. Forrester becomes a much more complicated women to the extent in which she struggles to find who really is and that is a women that wants to find love and be fructuous in wealth. A women of a multitude of blemishes, as a leading character it can be argued that Mrs. Forrester signifies a lady that is ultimately lost in her path of personal transitioning. She becomes lost because she cannot withstand herself unless she is treated well by a wealthy male in which causes her to act unalike the person she truly is.
Through attention to detail, repeated comparison, shifting tone, and dialogue that gives the characters an opportunity to voice their feelings, Elizabeth Gaskell creates a divide between the poor working class and the rich higher class in Mary Barton. Gaskell places emphasis on the differences that separate both classes by describing the lavish, comfortable, and extravagant life that the wealthy enjoy and compares it to the impoverished and miserable life that the poor have to survive through. Though Gaskell displays the inequality that is present between both social classes, she also shows that there are similarities between them. The tone and diction change halfway through the novel to highlight the factors that unify the poor and rich. In the beginning of the story John Barton exclaims that, “The rich know nothing of the trials of the poor…” (11), showing that besides the amount of material possessions that one owns, what divides the two social classes is ability to feel and experience hardship. John Barton views those of the upper class as cold individuals incapable of experiencing pain and sorrow. Gaskell, however proves Barton wrong and demonstrates that though there are various differences that divide the two social classes, they are unified through their ability to feel emotions and to go through times of hardship. Gaskell’s novel reveals the problematic tension between the two social classes, but also offers a solution to this problem in the form of communication, which would allow both sides to speak of their concerns and worries as well as eliminate misunderstandings.
One of Virginia Woolf’s best-known novels, Mrs. Dalloway features a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman of the post-World War I English society. While most of the novel is primarily centered on Clarissa Dalloway and her preparations for a party that evening as her “offering to the society”, Virginia Woolf also uses the novel to comment on the consequences of World War I on its veterans. Through Septimus Smith, a character who is an ill World War I veteran and suffers from posttraumatic stress, Woolf critically comments on the detrimental effects of World War I.