Why is Connie so unlikable: what function does that play in the text?
In Woman on the edge of time the main character Connie is a downtrodden mexican-american woman who has struggled against economic hardship to make something of herself only to end up in a mental institution. She is very cynical and not very likeable. When she first arrives in the future world she is shocked by how backwards everyone is living, how her grandparents did when she was a child. She doesn’t understand there values because they are so different from everything that connie grew up knowing. Connie is unlikeable because the intent of the novel is to win you over the way that connie her self is won over by luciente wether she is a figment of Connies imagination or a person from the future of society. We are Connie, Marge Piercy wants to win you over to her way of thinking about the world. Being a revolutionary at heart Marge Piercy encourages you to question anything and everything. She attempts to undo through Luciente the way of thinking society has instilled in connie from the beginning. Since we are connie she wants to encourage us to question any type of authority that attempts to influence the way you see the world.
Find an example that ether proves or disproves marx concept of alienated labor in woman on the edge of time.
Karl Marx sums up the basics of his thoughts on alienated labour well in the first paragraph in the last section of the first Manuscript. “On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and propertyless workers.” This is how our society today really does work, and it is much more evident then in 1844 when karl marx was writing about this.
Marx, discusses a certain concept of alienated labor as an unavoidable result of a capitalist system. The framework that he tries to draw in the book is that capitalist system should be blamed for class strafication and alienated labor in the society. In a capitalist society, people suffer from class conflict and property ownership of bourgeoisie. Bourgeoisie owns the big factories and businesses, so then, small manufacturers have to shut down and basically have to join the labors in the big businesses. Workers in the capitalist system are obligated to work for long hours under unhealthy conditions for really low salaries.
With the emergence of an industrial working class that arrived from the farms and countryside new theories and ideologies about the political economy began to appear. Karl Marx, a political philosopher during this time, introduced the idea of "alienation of labor". His theory proposed that labor has the ability to create a loss of reality in the laborer because the laborer himself becomes a commodity or object due to the nature of work. In terms of the roles of women it can be argued that the effect is even greater due to the limited choices of work available. This theme is expressed in literature through the writings of Gilman and Alcott.
The world is filled with many different types of societies and cultures. This is due to the fact that many people share dissimilar beliefs and ideas, as well as diverse ways of life. People lived under different circumstances and stipulations, therefore forming cultures and societies with ideas they formulated, themselves. These two factors, society and culture, are what motivate people to execute the things that they do. Many times, however, society and culture can cause downgrading effects to an assemblage if ever it is corrupt or prejudiced. Society and culture not only influences the emotions individuals have toward things like age differences, religion, power, and equality but also the actions they perform as a result.
Connie's character plays a big role in what ultimately happens to her. Connie is a vain girl that thinks the way you look is everything. She plays the stereotypical part for girls in today's society. She thinks that as long as you are pretty and dress a certain way then you are everything. This comes across when Oates writes "Connie thought that her mother preferred her to June because she was prettier" (980). By flaunting her looks she could easily give a guy like Arnold Friend perverted ideas about her. It could make them see her as easy, which he did.
In her novel The Daughter of Time Josephine Tey looks at how history can be misconstrued through the more convenient reinterpretation of the person in power, and as such, can become part of our common understanding, not being true knowledge at all, but simply hearsay. In The Daughter of Time Josephine claims that 40 million school books can’t be wrong but then goes on to argue that the traditional view of Richard III as a power obsessed, blood thirsty monster is fiction made credible by Thomas More and given authenticity by William Shakespeare. Inspector Alan Grant looks into the murder of the princes in the tower out of boredom. Tey uses Grant to critique the way history is delivered to the public and the ability of historians to shape facts to present the argument they believe.
Marriage can be defined as an everlasting bond between two people. Two souls joining to form one. However, sometimes this bond can fade and the love that each person felt for one-another can dissipate and manifest into something uglier and darker than the warmth of love. In Elizabeth Stoddard’s poem The Wife Speaks, the speaker ponders her relationship and wonders what could be done to mend the void in her marriage to make it as it once was. Although the speaker’s current relationship is posing it be a challenge, though the use of a non-traditional structure, vivid imagery, and the emotional tone in this poem, the speaker coveys to the reader that though the sacrifices for marriage, the strive for perfection and the hope that things can get better, love will overcome and the unity with her husband will return.
"A Woman’s Place", the name of the commencement speech given by Naomi Wolf at the Scripps College graduation in 1992; contrasts the independent and the dependent woman. In today’s society, there are two different types of women: the woman who has a good head on her shoulders and knows where she is going in the world, and the woman who seeks dependence within the masculine world. Just as they were thirty years ago, women are still not considered to be equal to men. They are more or less looked at as being second to men.
The human being is an analytical creature. From scientists to philosophers to star-crossed teenaged lovers, the human is internally motivated to understand the world around him. That world provides countless puzzles for the human to solve, whether these puzzles lie in the forests of the heart, the laws of mathematics or the annals of history. However, some of the most unfathomable aspects of this world have been entirely created by humans. The Holocaust is one of the most unfathomable events in human history. Countless documentaries, pieces of literature, psychological analyses and films have explored the topic in an attempt to understand exactly how humans could commit such terrible atrocities against one another. Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis, initially attempts to answer this question by exploring the life of a Nazi doctor. To do this, he separates the narrator’s consciousness from his mind, re-living his life backwards. In doing so, Amis tries to reverse the laws of entropy, to heal by un-creating human destruction. However, as the narrator (the doctor’s consciousness) eventually finds, reversing time’s arrow does not make the Holocaust fathomable. Therefore, in Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis suggests that humans will always manage to increase entropy, despite the reversal of time and the laws of the physical world.
Life is no bowl of cherries. Sometimes you can't explain everything. You just can't, and Martin Amis knows this. Time's Arrow is a book on the holocaust. There is nothing new about its material, and it makes no attempt at explaining anything. So why bother reading (or writing) it? What separates this book from your average "holocaust book" is that this really will, as it says on the backcover, present you with a "different" perspective. Time's Arrow is not your typical holocaust book. It does more than just make your head think - it takes you through the whole ordeal backwards.
Marx’s theory of alienation describes the separation of things that naturally belong together. For Marx, alienation is experienced in four forms. These include alienation from ones self, alienation from the work process, alienation from the product and alienation from other people. Workers are alienated from themselves because they are forced to sell their labor for a wage. Workers are alienated from the process because they don’t own the means of production. Workers are alienated from the product because the product of labor belongs to the capitalists. Workers do not own what they produce. Workers are alienated from other people because in a capitalist economy workers see each other as competition for jobs. Thus for Marx, labor is simply a means to an end.
Because of the conditions that the wage-workers worked in, Marx described it as exploitation. Marx felt that the wage workers were being exploited. The capitalist, also known as the bourgeoisie, were exploiting the wage workers, the proletariats, because of their cheap labor. They were essentially using them to create and increase their own profit. This in turn brought up alienation. Basically, alienation, also known as estrangement, is when a person is separated from their work, what they produce, themselves, and their environment. Marx’s theory of alienation was used to describe workers laboring under the capitalist society. The workers, also known as wage laborers, were commodities—things that are bought, sold, or exchanged in the market. They were selling their labor which means that they were being alienated from what they were doing.
Marx sees the laboring classes or workers as alienated under the system of “political economy,” more commonly known as capitalism. Marx believes the very nature of a capitalist system which divides the population into owners and workers causes alienation because the worker is not in control of what they can create, but rather are essentially pawns in the capitalists game. He explains “In the conditions dealt with by political economy [capitalism] this realization of labor appears as a loss of reality for the workers… as estrangement, [and] as alienation”(Marx 71-72). Marx further goes on to categorize the ways people are alienated.
In fact Marx directly says this, in his essay Alienated Labor, stating “alienation is shown not only in the results but also in the process of production” (61). What is meant by this alienation is that the worker class does not have the ability to think and choose for themselves, because the capitalist owns the means of production and the product that is being produced, only allocating enough surplus value to keep the working class alive in procreating. Because of this there is no conceivable way in which a worker could feel any connection to the product which they are producing making the worker alienated from said product. In the same sense the worker it is also alienated from their work, as the force of production is labor power which is paid for not by an equal share of profits made but by a living wage. A living wage being the lowest number value that a capitalist can give the worker that will keep the worker complacent. The alienation of the working class goes much deeper than a mere loss of connection to a product that is produced and it 's means of production, the worker also becomes alienated from the human
For Marx alienation often exists as a triadic relation between worker, commodity, and owner. Marx emphasises the estrangement of workers from the commodities that they produce. These commodities are sold by the owners of business
Marx conceives an empiricist perspective of material history, where consciousness arises from social relations , which is premised upon the material reality of social production forces at a particular time. Social conditions shape our consciousness, where “The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.” (p.150) According to Marx, in the capitalist epoch, alienation is the social estrangement of the individual from human nature, through four phases – alienation from the product of the individual’s creative activity, the estrangement from species-being, the individual’s fellow workers, and from the process of production itself. Alienation is thus a structural oppression of the full actualization