Anthology of Ideas

In Emma ((Page Numbers are for the Riverside Edition edited by Lionel Trilling)), Jane Austen presents characters who are uniquely human: each has their own rich personality and storied background. Through these characters, Austen is able to intimately explore the human condition, as she saw it, and highlight some of the issues of society and class in her world. To achieve this, Austen creates a world into which a reader can insert themselves through the gossip and unique perspective that the narrator and Emma provides; the reader’s perspective is not that of an all-seeing observer, but almost a character in its own right who may judge the characters as an equal participant and member of the community. From this perspective the reader is able to see characters as rich and complex individuals with whom the reader can acquaint themselves. In doing so, one can pass judgment on the characters not from the outside, but from the inside.

The characters of Mrs.

In Silas Marner George Eliot doesn’t specifically state that religion is bad or dangerous nor does she say that one shouldn’t be religious. Instead, she presents certain aspects of religion that she believes are prone to creating uncertainty and confusion. She then allows readers to make up their own mind. One of her major concerns is the way people believe in God; she doesn’t deny the existence of God, but she says that even if he does exist, he does not interfere, so focusing on signs and symbols from God is dangerous because it detracts from the human aspects of life. Silas Marner states that how one treats others is more important than the religion one follows or if one believes in God.

Eliot directly questions the purpose of organized religion, but is less emphatic in questioning God, and tends to not refer directly to God (both literally and figuratively as the word “God” appears twenty-four times throughout the entire book, and most of these are general expressions.) Thus, the book is an impartial observer of the way religion is practiced and the way God is evidenced in the popular beliefs rather than a direct attack on the validity of religion and the concept of God.

There are three major interpretations of the slave in literature: the good human being who is forced to live their live as a slave, the slave who’s mind, body and soul are broken because of slavery, and the slave who’s mind is twisted and becomes a monster because of the institution of slavery. These views of slavery are prevalent in abolitionist literature because they focus on the evils of slavery rather than the evils of the men who support slavery. In Fredrick Douglas’s “The Heroic Slave”, Douglas presents the reader with Madison Washington: a good man and a loving father and husband. In Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno one is presented with the figure of Babo: a demented and twisted individual who is willing to do anything to regain his freedom. These two images of slavery are used because a writer can show both that slaves are human and legitimize their “evil” deeds as being forced by the institutions of slavery.

Chopin’s story expertly takes the average book and succinctly boils it down to two pages of rapid emotions and events. While the average writer would have felt a need to develop events prior to the story to allow the reader a full and developed sense of the personalities of the characters, Chopin instead says this is what you need to know, and you know what to do with it. The reader is given a short snapshot of a person: (wife, weak heart, young, pretty, unhappy, in most likely a semi-arranged marriage) and a range of emotions: (shock, surprise, grief, realization, elation, and triumph). The reader then has to assign each of these emotions and snapshots to Mrs. Mallard to gleam a small insight into her being. Overall this style leaves the reader with a powerful sense of the emotions and felling that went through Mrs.

“Cold Mountain” is the story of a confederate soldier named Inman and his journey back to his homeland after years of fighting in the civil war, along the way he meets many interesting personalities some benign some malevolent. The second focus of the story is on Inman’s lover Ada and her struggle to learn how to live without her father, Inman and servants. “The Odyssey” is the story of an Ithacan king named Odysseus and his journey back to his homeland after years of fighting in the Trojan War, along the way he meets many interesting personalities some benign and some malevolent. The second focus of the story is on Odysseus’s wife Penelope and her struggle to live without her husband. The two stories sound very similar on the surface, but how similar are they really after the two line synopsis? “Cold Mountain” has frequently been called a modern “Odyssey” but is this an accurate description?

To tell the truth this was one of the few books that I entirely disliked the style they were written in. It was not the magical qualities of the story that made it bad, the story was nice, but the style was distracting and scatter-brained. It felt like I was reading a normal book and every other paragraph I looked at a line from a cookbook. In most areas the recipes were not even seamlessly brought into the story, instead they were just stuck in a few sentences here and there. Overall I think the book’s style reflects the way a person with severe attention deficit disorder thinks. The story itself was nice but parts made no sense at all, and if anybody handed in a paper with the same lack of coherency it would receive a nice big red F.