III The Residential Quarter was the official name given to a large sliver of the city of Renna. It was by no means the most beautiful part, nor the most mathematically correct; throughout Renna there were six labelled quarters, so, clearly, whoever the architect had hired to count the districts for him warranted a refund. Amongst the unofficial nicknames for Residential Quarter were “The Warrens”, which seemed to sum both the sector and its inhabitants up perfectly. Like grubby little rodents they seemed to scrabble around its streets without much care for hygiene. Parts of the Residential Quarter were a veritable inner-city suburbia, but for the most part, it was home to the working-class, the unemployed, and the criminals, and a large area of it held a particularly suffocating aroma thanks to the fact that the unsealed main entrance to the Underworks was located just beneath its surface. The Residential Quarter was also the place that, when it came to his occupation, Eldridge Carter found himself most frequently travelling to of all the districts in the city. Once you got used to the smell, the pickpockets, the urchins, the occasional street muggings, the working girls – who ranged from dirty to disfigured – and the “business propositions” certain unscrupulous individuals approached you with, the conclusion to be drawn was that it had character. Learn to survive on the streets and you’ll learn to love them. Most of his targets felt the uncontrollable urge to hide in plain sight. Most of them had an urge on top of that to drink their troubles away after whatever revelation of their true nature. And it was for that exact reason, deep within the slums and hovels of the Residential Quarter, amongst Renna’s dirtiest and worst, that... ... middle of paper ... ...might be an attack dog,” The Duke’s son stood up and sighed, pushing his leather duster open and fully exposing both the underarm holsters for his weapons, and the row upon row of laboriously-placed derringers in their half-holsters around his waist. They had dispensed with the pretense that neither of them was particularly dangerous. Eldridge finished his sentence sharply, his brow furrowing, his face hardening, and his cold glare boring into Gruber’s grubby features. “But at least I’m going to live to see the morning.” There was one moment, one single solitary glimpse of a second where everything paused, everything stopped, and the atmosphere almost had the cool mirage of non-violence laid over the top of them; it was a calm before the storm, a split-second silence, and as soon as either party recognised its presence, fleetingly, it vanished, and the inn exploded.
The author illustrates the “dim, rundown apartment complex,” she walks in, hand and hand with her girlfriend. Using the terms “dim,” and “rundown” portrays the apartment complex as an unsafe, unclean environment; such an environment augments the violence the author anticipates. Continuing to develop a perilous backdrop for the narrative, the author describes the night sky “as the perfect glow that surrounded [them] moments before faded into dark blues and blacks, silently watching.” Descriptions of the dark, watching sky expand upon the eerie setting of the apartment complex by using personification to give the sky a looming, ominous quality. Such a foreboding sky, as well as the dingy apartment complex portrayed by the author, amplify the narrator’s fear of violence due to her sexuality and drive her terror throughout the climax of the
Roberts, Robert. The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1971.
From the mid to late nineteenth century, and into the early twentieth century, American short story writer Sarah Orne Jewett earned her part in the local color literary movement. In doing so, Jewett writes with a unique style: creating larger-than-life characters, naive narrators, tiny details, and oddities of all sorts. The culmination of these features are used by Jewett to expose busy and primarily middle-class readers to the lives of two young women in the short story “Deephaven Cronies”. Going deeper than the text, Jewett delineates the structure of social class, gender norms, and locality.
The tenement was the biggest hindrance to achieving the American myth of rags to riches. It becomes impossible for one to rise up in the social structure when it can be considered a miracle to live passed the age of five. Children under the age of five living in tenements had a death rate of 139.83 compared to the city’s overall death rate of 26.67. Even if one did live past the age of five it was highly probable he’d become a criminal, since virtually all of them originate from the tenements. They are forced to steal and murder, they’ll do anything to survive, Riis appropriately calls it the “survival of the unfittest”. (Pg.
The woman I met spoke pragmatically about avoiding crime in the city and this, more than anything else, depicted the prevalence of crime that, having grown up in a much smaller town, I had never experienced. The unbreakable grips that New York City’s denizens maintained on their belongings while engulfed in throngs of people suddenly made absolute sense in a way that I felt almost uncomfortable with. “Young Lions” also illuminates the frequency of crime in cities and, perhaps more disturbingly, the forethought individuals devote to stealing from others. While following Anna, Caesar explains that “for two months he had secretly placed himself in her life, doing all the scoping out, the drudgery that had once been up to Sherman” (Jones 63). This passage depicts the effort Caesar commits to stealing from a woman attempting to simply get through her
In the Late nineteenth century the population was growing at a rapid pace. The country had people flooding the biggest cities in the country such as New York City and Chicago. These populations were gaining more and more people every single year and the country has to do something to make places for these people to live. The government would go on to create urban housing programs. These programs were created to make homes for these people to live in. At the time it provided a place for people to live but as the populations grew it became a more cramped and rundown area because of the large populations in one place. These reforms eventually led to these areas becoming dangerous, they were rundown, and it created a hole that was difficult for people to get out of.
Michael MacDonald’S All Souls is a heart wrenching insider account of growing up in Old Country housing projects located in the south of Boston, also known as Southie to the locals. The memoir takes the reader deep inside the world of Southie through the eyes of MacDonald. MacDonald was one of 11 children to grow up and deal with the many tribulations of Southie, Boston. Southie is characterized by high levels of crime, racism, and violence; all things that fall under the category of social problem. Social problems can be defined as “societal induced conditions that harms any segment of the population. Social problems are also related to acts and conditions that violate the norms and values found in society” (Long). The social problems that are present in Southie are the very reasons why the living conditions are so bad as well as why Southie is considered one of the poorest towns in Boston. Macdonald’s along with his family have to overcome the presence of crime, racism, and violence in order to survive in the town they consider the best place in the world.
Ann Petry’s The Street is more than a story of racism and poverty in America. This novel is about how the intersectionality of identities limit African-Americans from achieving equality in the dominant race’s society. The protagonist, Lutie Johnson has three barriers dragging her down. She is not only a woman, but a black woman that is also a lower class single mother. In the novel Lutie faces the realities of the American Dream, which for African- Americans is literally just a dream. Lutie also experiences the harsh effects of poverty and how it shapes one’s life.
Jim Daniels may not write poetry as eloquently as one would expect, but his style matches the subject matter he writes about perfectly. Indeed, it is this unrefined colloquial style, which allows Mr. Daniels to capture the essence of working class Detroit and relay it to the reader. His words may be somewhat coarse and he does not hesitate to use profanity, but one is still able to find beauty in his writing. The same can be said about the working class society, in which Jim Daniels was born and raised.
Stephen Crane’s novella, “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” deals with many difficult concepts and situations. However, the most prevalent seems to be the people that find themselves caught in a vicious cycle of violence. Although some claim that a literary label cannot possibly contain Crane’s work, his ideas certainly have much in common with other naturalistic writers of his time. He portrays poor Irish immigrants, the dregs of humanity, struggling for survival during the Industrial Revolution. Even while relating terrible events, Crane remains detached in the typical naturalistic style, seeming to view the world as a broad social experiment. As the story opens, we are instantly drawn into a heart-wrenching arena where people behave like animals, tearing each other apart if it will help them to reach the zenith of the food chain. Yet in this cycle of violence, Crane definitively incriminates the environment over every other malevolent influence acting upon his victims; using a theme of violence, a tone lacking in emotion, rich imagery, and strong personification of the environment, Crane fashions a wild Darwinian view of society that leaves all of the blame resting on a person’s surroundings rather than his choices.
To appreciate a row house neighborhood, one must first look at the plan as a whole before looking at the individual blocks and houses. The city’s goal to build a neighborhood that can be seen as a singular unit is made clear in plan, at both a larger scale (the entire urban plan) and a smaller scale (the scheme of the individual houses). Around 1850, the city began to carve out blocks and streets, with the idea of orienting them around squares and small residential parks. This Victorian style plan organized rectangular blocks around rounded gardens and squares that separated the row houses from major streets. The emphasis on public spaces and gardens to provide relief from the ene...
Stephen Crane, a man of the upper class during the late eighteen hundreds, sends a message to the people of America through his novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, about "the destructive nature of urban life in the 1890s Bowery," (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Bloom's Guides.) He witnessed with bitter cynicism that there was no hope for millions of people who lived lives of barren cruelty in the tenements and slums of American cities. One hundred and twenty one years later no obvious solutions to multi-generational poverty exist.
Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, written by Paul Schrader, both tell the same story about a man who is lonely and blames the world around him for his loneliness. The characters of Underground Man and Travis Bickle mirror each other; they both live in the underground, narrating their respective stories, experiencing aches and maladies which they leave unchecked, seeing the city they live in as a modern-day hell filled with the fake and corrupt. However, time and again both Travis and the Underground Man contradict themselves. While the underground character preaches his contempt for civilization—the ‘aboveground’—and the people within it, he constantly displays a deep-seeded longing to be a part of it. Both characters believe in a strong ideal that challenges that of the city’s, an ideal that is personified by the character of the prostitute.
The City of Dreadful Delight starts with some cultural analysis of the historical background that helped to produce the social landscape of Victorian London. In discussing the transformation of London, Walkowitz argues for seeing more than merely a shift from one type of city to another but rather a conflicted layering of elite male spectatorship, the “scientific” social reform, and W. T. Stead's New Journalism. Here Walkowitz investigates the “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The “Maiden Tribute” consisted of a series of articles, authored by Stead and presented in the penny press, which exposed the sale of girls into prostitution. According to Walkowitz, these stories relied on the new scientific methods of social investigation, but the...
For this assignment I decided to read the book Code of the Street: decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city by Elijah Anderson. This book is about how inner city people live and try and survive by living with the code of the streets. The code of the streets is basically morals and values that these people have. Most of the time it is the way they need to act to survive. Continuing on within this book review I am going to discuss the main points and arguments that Anderson portrays within the book. The main points that the book has, goes along with the chapters. These points consist of Street and decent families, respect, drugs violence, street crime, decent daddy, the mating game, black inner city grandmother. Now within these points there are a few main arguments that I would like to point out. The first argument is the belief that you will need to accept the street code to get through life. The other one is the belief that people on the street need “juice”. For the rest of this paper we will be looking at each one of main points and arguments by going through each chapter and discussing it.