Edna Pontellier in The Awakening by Kate Chopin is much like a modern woman in today's society. In today's terms Edna would be considered a rebel. Unfortunately, the restraints of her society caused Edna to extricate herself later in life, and when she got to the point of her awakening,...

Human beings are naturally burdened with character imperfections that, to a great extent, define who they are as people. The idiosyncrasies, character flaws, actions, and turns of phrase characteristic of every individual are personifications of the "not so perfect" world. In literature,...

The Country Husband: Who is Francis Weed? After a near brush with death in a plane crash, Francis Weed's life is about to change. In the short story "The Country Husband" we are led through a period of time in the life of Francis Weed, a husband, father, an...

Robert Frost wrote many poems that gathered interest in readers' eyes and minds. Many of the poems made his universe seem almost terrifying. Robert Frost's universe is a show of how terrifying real life is. Death is one part of the terrifying universe that Frost shows everyone. The d...

Females were "the future wives, mothers, and housekeepers" (Pearson 211) of Elizabethan times. Not many options were open to them. They were dominated by men, and by society. The obedience of women to men was evidenced in their educational, marital, and household opportunities. Althoug...

The subject of love in the novel is in many ways a very interesting one. The most overwhelming love has to be that between Miss Brodie and the one-armed art master Teddy Lloyd. This is the case because they are the only two people in the book who love each other passionately, and the effects of this...

Jane Austen, unlike other famous authors of her time, wrote of the people who belonged to the upper middle class of English society. Albeit exceptional, her works dealt with the woes not of the common but the privileged man. Her characters in the novel Persuasion are set in the early 1800s, in Somer...

The rivalry between the right of men and women has been an hardily fight for decades. In The Color Purple, Alice Walker portrayed a patriarchal society made by and for men. In this system women struggle to obtain a voice. An example is the protagonist, Celie, who from the beginning of her life exper...

Trevor Nunn's direction of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" takes away some of the confusion present in the reading of the text, which begins with the complicated love interests of the main characters. Having been the artistic director for the world famous Royal Shakespeare Company for eighteen yea...

Ballyhoo is a play about a Jewish family in the south around Christmas. The play takes place in a house, mainly in one room, the family room. There are four people who live in the house. A working man who looks to be in his early fifties, his sister who is probably in her late forties, her daughte...

The book Magdalena and Balthasar by Steven Ozment describes the relationship between a married couple in the sixteenth century. Balthasar was a merchant who traveled a couple months out of each year for his trade. Magdalena, his wife, was very devoted to him and helped him with his business. Th...

Medieval records of psycho-cosmic journeys arouse feelings of love. This is especially true of The Divine Comedy. Not only do they arouse these feelings but they are also heroic with the achievement of a great reward after a perilous undertaking and may involve a summons that is most often the resu...

In the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Jane encounters two men of considerable power that profoundly change her life. One man, Edmund Rochester, is the love of her life, however, he is in an unfortunate marriage with a savage woman. The second man, St. John Rivers, will not be able to fulfi...

Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple, follows Celie down the winding road of her life. As a poor black girl living in the South, Celie endures and overcomes many hardships. As the novel opens, the readers learn that she has been raped repeatedly by her father, then later is forced into a love...

The Awakening of Love This novella takes place on the muggy sub tropical Isle of Grand just south of the state of Louisiana. This particular Gulf island was for the creole' elite. The Awakening focuses on a particular woman named Edna and her life's endeavors in the late ei...

The play, A Look Back in Anger, by John Osborne brings the notion of the "angry man gone mad" to the surface. But what does this play teach us? Or, does this play teach us anything? At the end of this paper it will be evident that this play does teach us something, and that is how some people, as ...

The results of a pernicious society on love: Love in Emily Brontë's, Wuthering Heights, is both a dark, consuming force that when influenced by society destroys characters, as well as a means for redemption and happiness when left to develop independently. For Heathcliff and Catherine lo...

Great Expectations is a novel of growth, understanding and life. Throughout the novel we see Pip Pirrup develop from a lonely young boy, to an ambitious boy, to an idle teen and finally a mature adult. Pip goes through a variety of events that help him develop the qualities that lead to him acquirin...

The Breakfast Club was a movie about five very different characters, Claire, Andrew, Brian, Allison, and John Bender. Claire was a popular girl, Andrew was a wrestler (jock), Brian was intellectually gifted, Allison was a basket case, and John Bender was a rebel. On the outside they seem like very d...

The persona of Othello in Shakespeare's tragic play Othello is the embodiment of a number of character traits from other characters within the work. Shakespeare's cunning use of personal motivations and individuality allowed the playwright to create a complex personality for each character...

Independent Reading "This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways." These words, spoken by the main character Celie, show her view of life. The novel The Color Purple depicts the life of an African American girl growing up during the early nineteen hundreds. It shows the hard ship...

Kate Chopin was a literary visionary. Her insights and sensitivity to the confinement as well as emancipation of women were a precursor to rights for women in the twentieth century. Throughout her works she masterfully explores the plight of the Southern woman at a time when women were not allowed...

The Great Gatsby: A moral issue The Roaring Twenties was a time of parties and illegal practices; it was a time of change. This change affected society as a whole- both how the people viewed their lives as well as the way they viewed the importance of morality. Before the Roaring Twenties the ...

The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, is written from a female point of view. The narrator of the story, Janie, is searching for her own identity in a world were she is made to believe that her individual character is not important. Her journey eventually takes her deep into ...

James Fenimore Cooper is often considered to be the "father" of the western genre. Cooper's novel, The Deerslayer, addresses numerous themes, among them the act of friendship versus heterosexual love. The plot does not follow a strict linear scheme, although it conveys a message concerning the so...