Ambivalence Essays

  • Hester's Ambivalence in The Scarlet Letter

    940 Words  | 2 Pages

    Hester's Ambivalence in The Scarlet Letter Throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne's book The Scarlet Letter, Hester's attitudes toward her adultery are ambivalent.  This ambivalence is shown by breaking the book into three different parts.  In each part her attitudes change significantly. Hester starts by seeing her act as a sin that she is sorry for committing.  She changes and no longer feels sorry for the sin.  Finally, Hester sees the act as not sinful, but she regrets committing

  • Icons of Ambivalence in Bless Me Ultima

    2217 Words  | 5 Pages

    Icons of Ambivalence in Bless Me Ultima The portrait of Mexican Americans is layered in shades of ambivalence. Aside from the fact there is evidence that they can not really be classified as a migratory culture in that the land where they tend to migrate once belonged to Mexico, they can also lay an earlier claim to the land as Native Americans. The Spanish Europeans who settled in the area that became Mexico evolved as the dominant culture over the oral culture of the Native Americans. Nevertheless

  • Voice and Ambivalence in Bless Me Ultima and Baby of the Family

    1874 Words  | 4 Pages

    Voice and Ambivalence in Bless Me Ultima and Baby of the Family Bless Me Ultima and Baby of the Family serve as the 'coming of age' stories of two minority children. Rudolfo Anaya and Tina McElory Ansa skillfully reveal the richness, diversity, and conflicts that can exist within the Hispanic-American and African-American cultures primarily through the dream sequences in each novel. Dreams are the mechanism used in each work to magnify the individual experiences and conflicts Tony and Lena encounter

  • Assessment of Postmodernism

    1618 Words  | 4 Pages

    is summarised in the Boyne and Rattansi (1990) quote; postmodernists on the other hand do not seek to fully understand society with one direct answer and methodology but attempt to question what is happening in society with reflexivity and ambivalence; understanding how relativism shapes all sociological thought. Hassard and Parker (1993) illustrate this point with the imagery of strong ‘philosophical pillars’ being brought down to be questioned, re-examined and perhaps even destroyed with

  • Djuna Barnes's The Diary of a Dangerous Child

    7477 Words  | 15 Pages

    into this figure in Barnes's early works. In its mixture of the domestic (baby/child/adolescent) and the sensual (vampire) and the dangerous appeal that fusion entails, the child vampire in Barnes's writings and illustrations symbolizes the ambivalence that American society of the Modernist period had about newly acquired freedoms for women. This paper explores a kind of perilous yet unwavering attraction that the child vampire epitomizes. In pursuing a contextual, interpretive framework that

  • Post-Modern Art and Obscenity

    2619 Words  | 6 Pages

    swirling, sequined green and blue patterns and one exposed breast composed of dried elephant dung. Cutouts of photographs of women's buttocks and genitals dot the background of the canvas. The disturbing elements of this piece are all based in ambivalence-the audience is not sure how to react. To begin with, the multiplicity of media, some of them quite unusual-sequins, oil, collage, and elephant dung-makes the piece a bit different from "traditional" visual works and thwarts our desire to categorize

  • Masculinity, Violence, and the American Sports Culture

    5124 Words  | 11 Pages

    Society defines the essence of masculinity in part through sport. Athletics encourage or reinforce the courageous, strong, superior, and competitive male sex role (Messner, 20). Boys grow up being judged by their ability, inability, interest in, or ambivalence toward sport. They equate their successes and failures with self-worth, sometimes producing a self-image wherein they value themselves more or less depending on these achievements (Messner, 24). Young boys can learn priceless lessons and acquire

  • Bruce Stovel’s A Contrariety of Emotion’: Jane Austen’s Ambivalent Lovers in Pride and Prejudice

    1305 Words  | 3 Pages

    love-at-first-sight nor hate-at-first-sight. Instead, he firmly believes that since Pride and Prejudice is comic, it has a “both/and rather than an either/or vision” (28). Drawing the definition of “ambivalence” from the Oxford English Dictionary, Stovel clarifies that what Elizabeth and Darcy feel toward each other is ambivalence – “the coexistence in one person of the emotional attitudes of love and hate, or other opposite feelings, towards the same object or situation” (27). Sandwiching his analyses of the

  • The invention of the Human

    2074 Words  | 5 Pages

    with Shakespeare. Bloom argues that Shakespeare so interpenetrates our consciousness and our cultural existence that we do not know the boundary between him and us. One suspects that we are receptive to Bloom’s idea because of the mysterious ambivalence of Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare’s elusive self, the stuff of Keats’s Negative Capability, may indeed be found in his 100 major characters and hundreds of minor personages dispersed through his histories, comedies, and tragedies. Bloom, however

  • Thoughts on a Possible Rational Reconstruction of the Method of

    3264 Words  | 7 Pages

    Nevertheless, we encounter-even if only in a very few specific publications-a vague image of it. This is due on the one hand to the problem of the intentions of application, i.e., of the normativity of rational reconstruction (descriptive/prescriptive-ambivalence). It is also due on the other hand to the problem of the significance of the method in the field of history of philosophy (systematic/historical-dichotomy). The varied usage within analytic philosophy, as well as the increasingly inflationary and

  • The Turn of the Screw: An Ambivalent Text?

    1141 Words  | 3 Pages

    gentleman’s seemingly innocent nephew and niece. As the Tale progresses we learn that the governess begins seeing ghosts one of which being he predecessor Miss Jessel. In an attempt to make sense of the ambivalence within The Turn of the Screw it is vital to first illustrate such ambivalence within the text itself. The first example being whether or not the governess actually sees ghosts and if not are they are a mere figment of her imagination. Important to note here is the fact that the governess

  • The Woman Warrior

    1116 Words  | 3 Pages

    that they act towards others and themselves exemplifies their similarities at a deeper level. Kingston gains many things from her mother and becomes who she is because of Brave Orchid, "Rather than denying or suppressing the deeply embedded ambivalence her mother arouses in her, Kingston unrelentingly evokes the powerful presence of her mother, arduously and often painfully exploring her difficulties in identifying with and yet separating from her" (Quinby, 136). Throughout Maxine Hong Kingston's

  • The Truth about Single- Sex Schooling

    2194 Words  | 5 Pages

    Single-Sex Schooling Single-Sex Schools have been looked down upon by many due to the belief that students will not be able to function comfortably with the opposite sex when leaving to go to a coeducational College or University. This belief is usually also partnered with the thought that single-sex schools represent segregation, many people do believe that these types of schools promote the separation of males and females. Some also may believe that all single-sex schools are in fact private

  • Supremacist Ideologies in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

    1193 Words  | 3 Pages

    capacities" but also for restraint, a value that he champions throughout the retelling of his story. When he can't find it, he remarks "Restraint? What possible restraint?" Marlow's first encounter with the natives is at the Outer Station, where his ambivalence towards them is foregrounded by his obsession with the miraculously efficient first-class agent. The natives are effectively dehumanised because they are presented as nothing more than "black shadows" and "acute angles"; and Marlow is far more interested

  • Frank O’Hara as Modernist for the People

    3014 Words  | 7 Pages

    The poetry of Frank O'Hara is intimately connected to New York City.  He explores the role of the individual subject in the city and the mechanics of the city itself; yet because he engages the urban landscape in an urbane manner many readers of Frank O'Hara view him as the prankish patron of the New York art scene who occasionally took pen to paper.  Take this review by Herbert Leibowitz as an example: A fascinating amalgam of fan, connoisseur, and propagandist, he was considered by his friends

  • Testing the Theory of the Oedipus Complex

    2236 Words  | 5 Pages

    positive libidinal feelings of a child to the parent of the opposite sex and hostile or jealous feelings toward the parent of the same sex that may be a source of adult personality disorder when unresolved. It is a pattern of profound emotional ambivalence, a troublesome mixture of love and hate. The Oedipus Complex occurs during the phallic stage, from roughly ages 3-6 years. Freud believed that during this stage boys seek genital stimulation and develop both unconscious desires for their mother

  • Nietzsche Contra Schopenhauer: The Construel of Eternal Recurrence

    3985 Words  | 8 Pages

    influenced by one of his idols and at the same time one of his greatest philosophical enemies: that philosopher of the "denial of life," Schopenhauer. It is clear that Schopenhauer remained for Nietzsche a lasting object of admiration and profound ambivalence. The theory of art propounded in The Birth of Tragedy was obviously, as Nietzsche himself conceded, built on Schopenhauer's aesthetics, although it parted company with the latter on its idea of the ultimate function of art. He dedicated one of his

  • Community Ambivalence Towards Gangs

    653 Words  | 2 Pages

    Ambivalence Towards Gangs A gang or gangs can cause many problems in a community. For instance, if there is more than one gang in an area the two gangs may fight over territory. By doing so, violence towards the rival gang can cause possible deadly harm to anyone that gets caught in between these two gangs. In fact, gang wars can also threaten public spaces as a result of individuals not feeling safe just walking around the community (Venkatesh, 1999). Burglaries, property damage, graffiti, which

  • Holden's Ambivalence In The Catcher In The Rye

    946 Words  | 2 Pages

    In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden’s ambivalence is the most impressive thing. He has ambivalence between his external expression and his wish in inner heart. For example, he says countless rude words himself, but when he finds the rude words on the wall of his sister’s school, he is angry because he thinks it is a bad thing. In fact, as a teenager who is superficially irresponsible, rebellious and hates everything, he still longs for love, being understood and tries to help others. Various of contradictions

  • Ambivalence and Death in Shakespeare's Hamlet

    1213 Words  | 3 Pages

    In act IV, scene III, Shakespeare addresses the play’s themes and messages; those being ambivalence and how people are one and the same in the end of life. Hamlet speaks in an eccentric riddle form but there are underlying messages communicated through Hamlet’s craziness and Claudius’ confusion. The ideas are conversed through Claudius and Hamlet and convey the morals of the drama, Hamlet. Shakespeare also takes the liberty in this section to show how diverse and opposite the characters of Claudius