11
December
2009
The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde, is a parody of Victorian upper-class families. The humoristic and ironical aspects are concerned with the issues of being sincere, earnest, trivial, worthy, stylish, and worried with appearance, worried with the society aims, the values of marriage, education and also with the role each one has to pretend in society. So the books criticize the superficiality of a group of people who stresses the appearance, the social rules, and the conventions. The people who put apart those ideals are considered nothing, no important, and they are criticize and ignored in society. One famous statement which represents those aims in society is: “Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon” (Act III).
These principles and social rules are considered very important to young people, as Gwendolen and Cecily show us in the book. One good example is the name Earnest. Both women were worried in find a husband with that name, because according to Gwendolen this name “inspires absolute confidence” and Gwendolen, for example, try to find John, and said to her mother she wants to get married with him. Cecily, for example, make some comments in a conversation with Algy that his name, in her diary, is Earnest, so she dreamed of and made creations with someone called Earnest, their romance, their break up, and so on. For those reasons, Algy and John, who did not have this name, want to change their names quickly to get married with them. At this point, we can notice how the two women are manipulating them. In Victorian society, for instance, young ladies are governed by the gender rules which involve not only being innocent, pure, sweet, elegant but mainly submissive to the values and decisions imposed by their family. So they somehow transgress the role imposed on Victorian women.
Gwendolen does not want to wait for her mother’s permission to get engaged with her Earnest (Act II). So, she tries to find out him, she met Cecily and talk about their, possible relationship, and Cecily, for example, refuses to wait much time, going against what should be expected from an eighteen-year-old girl, and she says: “I don’t think I would care to catch a sensible man. I shouldn’t know what to talk to him about”.
In this way, it is clear that in this case people from society will expect a different behave because she is well educated, she should want to have a desire of having a sensible man by her side, which is the opposite as it is seen above (Act II). In act III, their to manipulate is clear when they said among them:
Gwendolen: The fact that they did not follow us at once into the house, as anyone else would have done, seems to me to show that they have some sense of shame left.
Cecily: They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.
Women at that time would be revolt, but they will not express this, they will suffer, cry, and do what the society expects from them. Throughout these manipulations, they achieve their goal, to get married with a man called Earnest.
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21
October
2009
Laura: When I had the attack of pleurosis – he asked me what was the matter when I came back. I said pleurosis – he thought that I said Blue Roses! So that’s what he always called me after that. Whenever he saw me, he’s holler,”Hello, Blue Roses!”
This Blue Roses image can be compared with Laura emotionally. First, in some cultures as the American, the color “Blue” has had many interpretations according to the context. I believe that in this case the color “Blue” represents the feeling of sadness which can be interpreted as Laura’s feeling of sadness, melancholy. Then, the image of Blue Roses gives an idea of something peculiar, unnatural, exotic, because there are not Blue Roses in the nature, they are not natural. The roses are also considered as fragile, beautiful, pure, and delicate.
Flowers, especially roses, must be observed, admired, analyzed to understand and feel their beauty, and purity. Flowers admires try to look for flowers traits, characteristics, they try to understand their beauty, as The Little Prince did with his rose. All of these traits can describe Laura’s personality. During the story, we can observe the way she acts, her sensibility, her appearance of a fragile person, and a peculiar beauty which she has inside her.
In a book called “A Rich Man’s Secret” Ken Roberts use the rose’s meaning in the language of flowers which was common in Victorian times. This symbolism is to be able to grant the owner youth or grant wishes. In some cultures, blue roses mean mystery or attaining the impossible. In Chinese folklore, for example, blue roses signify hope against unattainable love.
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15
September
2009
Lady Macbeth is a naive person. However, this cannot be an excuse which makes her innocent. We can observe she is naïve because she does not think in consequences; but Macbeth knows it perfectly, for this reason he is tormented. This murder is against his sense of morality, he breaks the taboo under her manipulation, she architects everything. By this way she affirms her guilt. In the beginning of the play, it is clear Macbeth’s doubt about how can he deal with witches’ predictions. After questioning the predictions, he let the destiny decided, as we can see in his speech:
“If chance will have me King, why, chance may crown me, Without my stir” (Act I, Scene III, Lines 158-160).
This happens because he became afraid of thinking on doing something against the King
“If good, why do I yield to that suggestion whose horrid image doth unfix my hair and make my seated heart knock at my ribs against the use of nature?” (Act I, Scene III, Lines 148-151).
So, the destiny is the only agent which can make him king, without his intervention.
Lady Macbeth, after reading the letter and talking to her husband, starts showing us her way of deal with life, with ambition, power and her evil character. Furthermore, we can observe the deconstruction of the “woman model”, which means kindness, fragile against the “man model”, which means being ruthless, as we can observe in her recovery
“ Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty”.
Macbeth’s wife manipulates him, because, according to her, he is too kind for it, and this idea in not the way man has to behave. So she shows him his vaulting ambition, his vanity, his “need” of the power, and from this moment on he starts to think effectively in the king’s murder. This manipulation is clear in
“What beast was’t then that made you break this enterprise to me? When you durst do it, then you were a man” (Act I, Scene VII, Lines 53-55).
She plans the murder with him, encourages him, uses their love to control his attitudes, believing, innocently, how perfect is the murder she plans.
In Act II, Macbeth starts having visions, and he also starts to become more and more afraid of killing someone whi is consider his father, admiring Macbeth’s honest, brave and honor, and believing in his fidelity and promessing him to help in his life. After the murder, Macbeth becomes more tormented. However, when he talks to her trying to explain his fears, his torment, his feeling of guilty, she proposes easy ways of forgetting the crime and she is ironic with him
“Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil” (Act II, Scene II, Lines 71-72).
Other innocent words is:
“My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so white” (Act II, Scene II, Lines 81-82)
And another is:
“Retire we to our chamber. A little water clears us of his deed.” (Act II, Scene II, Lines 84-85).
Lady Macbeth is the person who turns her husband into an evil. She wakes his dark side. She manipulates, controls, plans, destructs their lives. She was the one who insists in the murder, plans the murder and destroys Macbeth’s behavior, off course with his permission. She certainly was the agent to the disastrous which starts happening after the king’s murder. They choose their path, and now the will suffer the consequences.
Macbeth starts suffering since some time before the murder. He cannot sleep, he has visions, and he becomes colder and conscious about his horrible acts, and ironically, all the murders he plans in to become safer and in “peace with his mind” that anyone can discover, destroy his life, or take out their trone.
However, the woman who looked like colder, who was naive moments before the crime, starts suffering, being tormented because of what they have doing. Her thoughts about the crime, visions, her fear of someone uncover the crime and its consequence makes her crazy, tormented and leading her to a future suicide.
Therefore, she is guiltier than her husband, because she instigates, manipulates, and plans everything. Her obsession influences him a lot, but she was not aware, conscious about the magnitude, the size of her decision. She discovers that the water could not wash their hands and their minds; that the rest, the sleep is effectively for fair people. She is guilty although she did not commit the act.
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10
September
2009
William Shakespeare was and is one of the most influential writers in English literature and also in the world. He was born in 1564 to a successful middle-class glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no further. Around 1590 he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright. Public and critical acclaim quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England and part-owner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603) and James I (ruled 1603–1625), and he was a favorite of both monarchs.
Shakespeare’s works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but the dearth of biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s personal history shrouded in mystery.
In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the course of Western literature and culture ever after.
Shakespeare’s shortest and bloodiest tragedy, Macbeth tells the story of a brave Scottish general (Macbeth) who receives a prophecy from a trio of sinister witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed with ambitious thoughts and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and seizes the throne for himself. He begins his reign racked with guilt and fear and soon becomes a tyrannical ruler, as he is forced to commit more and more murders to protect himself from enmity and suspicion. The bloodbath swiftly propels Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to arrogance, madness, and death.
Macbeth was most likely written in 1606, early in the reign of James I, who had been James VI of Scotland before he succeeded to the English throne in 1603. James was a patron of Shakespeare’s acting company, and of all the plays Shakespeare wrote under James’s reign, Macbeth most clearly reflects the playwright’s close relationship with the sovereign. In focusing on Macbeth, a figure from Scottish history, Shakespeare paid homage to his king’s Scottish lineage. Additionally, the witches’ prophecy that Banquo will found a line of kings is a clear nod to James’s family’s claim to have descended from the historical Banquo. In a larger sense, the theme of bad versus good kingship, embodied by Macbeth and Duncan, respectively, would have resonated at the royal court, where James was busy developing his English version of the theory of divine right.
Macbeth is not Shakespeare’s most complex play, but it is certainly one of his most powerful and emotionally intense. Whereas Shakespeare’s other major tragedies, such as Hamlet and Othello, fastidiously explore the intellectual predicaments faced by their subjects and the fine nuances of their subjects’ characters, Macbeth tumbles madly from its opening to its conclusion. It is a sharp, jagged sketch of theme and character; as such, it has shocked and fascinated audiences for nearly four hundred years.
(Informations from http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/macbeth/context.html)
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