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LITERARY ELEMENTS IN TWO STORIES BY FAULKNER AND CHOPIN The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin is more on humanities sense of liberation for social forces that holds him / her down. The short story, particularly, focuses on the feminine genders side of such struggle. Caged in a patriarchal society, women have been rightfully fighting for a life worth living. Born in such a society, women are often aware of their right to happiness. In this story, it takes an accident, particularly her husbands death, for Mrs. Mallard to realize her self worth.
The story abounds in symbols and ironies. Mrs. Mallard symbolizes womens situation with respect to her role in society. Her husband represents the patriarchal mindset of culture and society. It is in a sense ironic, that Mrs. Mallards sense of awakening, her birth of a sort was made possible by the death of her husband.
In the same way, that her new-found freedom is cut short by her demise. One consistent element in Chopin's stories is the idea of a foreshadowing of things to come like people destroying themselves. One would ask how this particular short story carries such particular theme. How does this and other features of her writing express what is happening in her own life? Writers are known to apply aspects of their life into their writings and works.
Subsequently, an understanding into the mind of the author might reveal thematic elements of the short story into view. A further discussion regarding the life of Chopin initiated by the lecturer follows. Opinions and reaction on such personage might be solicited from the class. Do they take a liking to such persons or not is the prime question the lecturer would ask. Some literary critics may view such process as insignificant, citing that any analysis of such works in literature must concentrate mainly on the work body rather than any external consideration outside the work. But in our case, an authors biography is part of the short story itself.
The mention of Mrs. Mallards health condition at the very onset of the short story paves the way for the consistency of the storys ending. The simplicity of the setting indicates less the material sense of the story. For everything is much a personal sensing and contradiction of the main protagonist. In fact this particular part in the story is significant.
She writes, She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves. " Sensory images flood her being and all of a sudden the vision of the window means a lot to her.
These nostalgic sensory images are an onset of Mrs. Mallard sense of liberation. The vision through the open windows means a fresh and alternate perspective into her life. In my opinion, Brently treated her wife fairly as dictated by social norms of the time.
Mrs. Mallard utterance of those words was not an implication of an unhealthy and brutal marriage but was more a declaration of Mrs. Mallard new found sense of independence, a sort of unbinding from the social chains of familial duty. The closing of the door and the opening of the window was very much symbolic to Mrs. Mallards closing of one aspect of her life, her marriage, and an advent of life of new possibilities.
In a sense, it was a certain kind of freedom of socially-imposed prison of some sort. Mrs. Mallard, at the knowledge of the news, begins to feel a previously unknown sense of freedom and relief. She fights her own sense of awakening. As she imagines life without her husband, she embraces visions of the future.
She realizes that whether or not she had loved him was less important than "this possession of self-assertion" she now feels. The happiness Louise gains by this recognition of selfhood. The doctor statement, which could have very much been spoken by Josephine and Brently, was more a literary device, suspending basic personal truths to a realm of speculative opinions and outlooks. Marriage for women at those times was more of a one-sided arrangement in favor for the male species. Although one might argue that, at present, this is less prevalent.
But the fact remains that gender bias is still incorporated into society in much subtle ways. This is very much how Mrs. Mallard felt towards her marriage. Her happiness was much subordinated by her sense of duty. Duty was highly regarded in Victorian view of morality. The symbolic travel is Mrs.
Mallards personal journey of liberation paved by a sense of foreboding and tinge of sweet joy. Meanwhile, the complexity of William Faulkner's short story A Rose for Emily resides in the fact that it does not merely concentrate in narrating the eerie life story of Emily Greirson. Thus, unlike the other modernist stories of Faulkner's time, A Rose for Emily does not simply imply that her individual eccentricities are the results of her individual will and choices. Rather with deeper analysis, we find out that the story tells us another story within the surface reading. It is one which informs us about the significant historical change in America during the late 1800 s. And the character of Emily becomes a means to point out that the society and the culture a person is in, plays an enormous part in determining the limitations and possibilities of her life.
An analysis of the setting of the story would yield vital information on the historical background of this southern American society. Characters also provide a very significant area of analysis. This is because they have distinct values, beliefs, and characteristics that provide clues to the society's dominant and residual ideology and culture. The characters are often used as symbols for these ideologies. Therefore, their antagonism with each other is also symbolic of the antagonism present in the society's culture and ideology during its particular period. The setting of the story is clearly during the late 1800 s.
This was a few years after the American Civil War during which the Norths Union won. One of the obvious effects of this victory was that the North gained significant control over the economic production and development of the United States. Industrialization was the newest and most productive trend which the North was slowly mastering. Factories, industries, and manufacturing enterprises marked the rise of capitalism in the US. This is the historical background of Emily Greirsons life.
The traditional background she was raised in indicates that the feudal and aristocratic ideology was still dominant at that time. The law and politics of the town, as represented by Colonel Sartoris the mayor, still followed the traditional conventions. This is because the reason for his special treatment of Emily after her fathers death is that he respected the nobility of her family. The distinct difference of their ideology is implied in the line: Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it. (Faulkner 206) The act shows the importance of birth rights and bloodlines which was perhaps an influence of the British monarchal state. To be Emily's servant is a reminder of slavery which the traditional South sought to keep. Much like the slave owners before her, only her death would grant him his freedom.
Emily as a character represented the feudal and aristocratic ideology and society. Before her fathers death during which this traditional ideology was dominant, the town had a surreal representation of her as a tableau, a slender figure in white. (Faulkner 208) Her fall and her humanization mirrors the fall of this ideology. Not only does she become an unmarried pauper being pitied by the whole town, the law, which once saw her as privileged, no longer see her as such. This is why her refusal to pay the taxes is very significant in the story. The ongoing change of the town could also be observed in her china painting lessons. The narrator observes, The newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. (Faulkner 210) In the advent if the industrialization of the Northern states, the feudal and aristocratic culture was slowly being replaced by a modern liberal one.
Social status was no longer dictated by having a noble bloodline. The liberal ideology maintained that every man is equal and thus has every right to rise in status. Homer Barron is clearly representative of this new ideology. Not only was he a Yankee without noble blood, his sexuality, implied in the line he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club, is presented as a deviation to the towns norms. (Faulkner 210) Emily however, as the women in town expected, could not forget her noblesse oblige.
Her firm ideology could not permit her to marry him. The only way she could keep him without giving up her beliefs was to kill him and keep his body. Her murder of Homer Barron was symbolic of her refusal to change and look at the world in a different perspective. The ideology she had, however false it may be, encompassed her being. The clash of two dissimilar ideologies is often very chaotic.
One of the effects culminated in the American Civil War. The story tells us of another war. This is a war on a more personal level, one which people wage with their beliefs, ideas, and values. Faulkner's A Rose for Emily is an allegory of the Souths neuroses as it struggles to put itself together after the Civil War. The death of Emily's father was symbolic of the demise of traditional Southern cultures way of life. The Civil War not only cost them human lives, it too shook the social and economic foundations of the Southern states.
The presentation of Table, the sole old Negro servant, in Emily's house was an allusion to slavery as a forgotten practice. The emancipation of Negro slaves took from them their cheap source of labor which was very critical to the economy of the South. The proliferation of Northern businessmen, known as robber barons, is personified in Homer Baron. The growth of capitalist economy was slowly carving out a new social hierarchy. The land-owning, aristocratic elite were slowly uprooted and replaced by the capital-owning industrialist. Hints of Homers sexual inclination as echoed by the narrator: he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club, was reflective of the Souths sentiments towards the Northern carpetbaggers and the industrialists.
By todays standard, one sexual preference wouldnt matter much. But by Post-Civil War era, Southern culture saw homosexuality as a perverse act, depravity. The mention of Homers purported perverse sexuality by the narrator very much show how these foreigners are hated and looked down upon by Southern folks. Perhaps Homers demise was a longing the South wished so much to come true stemming from such hate. Emily's willingness to be seen in public and in town with a despised intruder was the Souths inevitable public facade of acceptance. Knowing too well that she later murdered him illustrates the falsity of the veneer.
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Research essay sample on American Civil War Rose For Emily
