The Awakening - The Birds, The Lovers And The Widow Essays

The Awakening - The Birds, The Lovers And The Widow In the novel, The Awakening there are several motifs or images that assist in developing Edna Pontellier in her awakening, the birds, the lovers and the woman and black all prove to be important parts in this. It is significant that The Awakening opens with two caged birds. Throughout the novel, Edna feels that marriage enslaves her to an identity she for which she is not suited. The parrot is an expensive bird valued for its beauty. The mockingbird is fairly common and plain, and it is valued for the music it provides. These two birds function as metaphors for the position of women in late Victorian society. Women are valued for their physical appearance and the entertainment they can provide for the men in their lives. Like parrots, they are not expected to voice opinions of their own, but to repeat the opinions that social convention defines as proper or respectable. The parrot shrieks Go away! Damnation! These are the first lines of The Awakening, and they signal the essentially tragic nature of the novel. The parrot speaks French, a little Spanish, and a language which nobody understood. Again, the parrot serves as a metaphor for Edna's predicament. As she becomes more defiant, she voices unconventional opinions about the sacred institutions of marriage, gender, and motherhood. Later in the novel, Mademoiselle uses wings as a metaphor for Edna's decision to defy social conventions. She warns Edna, 138 When she asks where Edna wants to soar, she means to ask Edna if she is sure that she can escape her gilded cage. If she fails, she will become one of the sad spectacles of the birds that fail. At the end of the novel, a bird with a broken wing sinks into the surf. The bird symbolizes Edna's failure to achieve the very goal that has driven her actions the entire time. In the end, Edna's freedom takes place in death. This is the choice that social convention allows her. Throughout the entire novel, the two young lovers are usually represented in conjunction with the woman in black. The two lovers are important symbols in The Awakening. Since the lovers always appear in conjunction with the woman in black, they foreshadow the eventual failure of Robert and Edna's love for one another. The contrast between the woman in black and the young lovers has a symbolic relationship to the love between Robert and Edna. The woman in black represents the logical conclusion to the conventional woman's life if her husband dies first. However, there is no old couple to represent Robert and Edna's contented futures. Therefore, the lovers and the woman in black foreshadow the failure of their love. Furthermore, there is no figure to symbolize the old age of the rebellious woman represented in Edna. The absence of this figure foreshadows Edna's suicide at the end of the novel. It implies that Edna must choose between conforming to social conventions or disappearing fro m the symbolic scene of the stages of a Victorian woman's life. English Essays

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buy custom The Aggressor in the Family essay Domestic violence continues until behaviors of infidelity come to an end. In the worst cases, it continues long after the spouse has stopped engaging in unfaithful behaviors. This is because the other spouse may not have completely lifted the burden of the offense caused off his heart. In most cases, such a cause of domestic violence is very serious and a third party may need to interrupt. The worst scenario is whereby such violence ends up in divorce. Through personal reasons, one of the parties in the family becomes the aggressor. The aggression may be caused by various factors. The aggression may emanate from one family member or it may involve an all against all kind of situation. In most cases, his kind of problem becomes very difficult to deal with. This type of violence may take the form of fights whereby family members intentionally hurt each other, physically, emotionally and psychologically. Physical or mental illness is a common cause of personal aggression in the family. The remedy to this problem is medical attention. Some of the mental conditions that lead to aggression in the family include schizophrenia and Alzheimers disease. Family members may not realize that a mental condition is fuelling the violence until it is too late. Carlson (1984) observes that people who use alcohol or drugs are also a cause of domestic violence in their respective families. This is a personal problem thaat can be remedied simply through a change of behavior. Unfortunately, it is never as simple as that. Alcohol and drugs are not only highly addictive; they take away a huge chunk of a familys resources. One family member may drain all the familys resources by buying drugs, leading to a domestic quarrel. An individual who has been exposed to domestic violence all his life may expose the same behavior towards his family. This is because that individual has been conditioned to a life of violence since early childhood and beyond. For such a person, it is difficult to understand what that there may be another form of life other than one that is characterized by violence. In this case, violence may reign as long as the family exists. Buy custom The Aggressor in the Family essay