A Rose for Emily

Other people influence our behaviors and development. In A Rose for Emily, by William
Faulkner, we can see the influence of the town's people, Emily's father and Homer and the
negative effect that  they have on Emily both physically and mentally.Through her father we are
able to see how a person can affect our mental development and sense of self when they are
constrictive. Through the town's people we can see how other's influence of alienation can
leave us feeling isolated and further affect our cognitive development. Through her interactions
with Homer we are able to more clearly see the detrimental affects of the influences and see
the mental strain it causes. 

Emily was set apart from the town's people because they viewed her as a social icon. They
embraced her only because they felt she was "a tradition, a duty and a care; a sort of hereditary
obligation upon the town" (702). Even after her death the whole town goes to her funeral, not
out of respect for her as an individual or out of personal necessity but with the respect one has
for a "fallen" icon or out of curiosity to see the inside of her home. They alienate her by holding
her above them and by trying to find reasons to pity her or humanize her. They find themselves
glad after her father's passing and his leaving her nothing but the house because "at last they
could pity Miss Emily" (704). Also finding pleasure in her buying arsenic. "The next day we all
said, 'She will kill herself' and we said it would be the best thing" (705, instead of trying to
console her or going to her. We see how this affects Emily and makes her feel isolated y the
limited amount of times she leaves her home and in when she buys the arsenic and looks at the
druggist, "her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away" (705).

Her father further set her apart by driving away all of her suitors, depriving her of building
fulfilling relationships outside of their own. Behavioral theorists would say this kept her from
building a stable relationship with her self since we model our behaviors after other people; this
is also how we gain a sense of what is right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. According
to their psycho-social development theory, this deprivation of inter-personal relationships is
what prevented her from reaching an independent and stable mental capacity and caused
reliance on him. After his death, Emily lost what had been her life's center and beacon of
direction. In her grief she employed the coping mechanism of denial, refusing to allow them to
properly dispose of the body for some time stating that he was not dead. Unable to accept the
loss of her life's 'lighthouse' she was left "clinging to that which had robbed her" (704) of her
own sense of true self and the development of being self-regulating.

This repression of feelings and inability to take actions of her own accord made her "sick for a
long time" (704) and she spent her time shut into the house that was all he had left to her, only
to be seen in the windows on occasion like he had only allowed parts of her to be seen by them
on occasion. The house and its content became covered in a coating of dust that was almost
unapparent, standing out particularly so in the not frequently let in light. This house that was
his, is like her life which was also his. After his death she too seems to get coated in a fine layer
of dust particles of oppression and repression that have finally settled on her. When visitors
came to the house "faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in a
single sunray" (702). A visitor comes into Emily's life as well to act as a sunray and stir up her
dust coating.

In the summer after her father's death, most psychologists would agree that this was not an
appropriate amount of time to develop mental independence and find one's self after forced
dependence, she met and began to be courted by Homer Baron. Although not of the same
social standing as her father, he became a public icon like her father. He "knew everyone in
town" (704) and often could be found at the center of attention. She persists after him even
after he remarks that he likes men. She defends him to the church, town and her extended
family. This inability to let go shows the transference of emotion and dependence for her father
onto him. In him she "wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness" (705)
just as she had gotten it from her father's authoritarian parenting style and through the town's
people placing her above and outside of them because of her status. With Homer, as with her
father, she is unable to let go after she had grounded herself in him mentally. Instead of
drawing her out of the house that trapped her in her mind and continued to add fresh coats of
dust, he allows himself to be shut inside with her because "that quality of her father which
thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulent and to furious die" (706). As we
find after her own death, even his death could not part her from him and she keeps his corpse
upstairs in a bridal fashioned room and there is evidence that she had not only kept him after
death but also continued to lay with him, unable to let him go as she was unable to let her
father go. Only in the prior, the town's people had not known and therefore not interjected and
removed him. 
The influence that the town's people, her father and Homer had on her affected and stunted
Emily's growth as a person. It limited her ability to form gratifying relationships and so looking
"bloated like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that palled hue" (703), she
"fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows" (707) and died doubting her sanity.

Faulkner did a great job in creating the setting, characters and dialogue in this story. Everything
is so well written and understood. We can understand many things about small town life in the
south in the early 1900's. It is a wonderful story, even though irony surrounds the ending. That
is another reason why this story is so memorable.

THE LIGHT HOUSE

"To the Lighthouse" is a book in three parts, in three movements. All of it is laid at the Summer
home of an English family named Ramsay in the Hebrides, the first portion occupying an
afternoon and evening, the second portion constituting an interlude of ten years during which
the house remains unoccupied, the third portion occupying a morning at the end of these ten
years. The Ramsays are a middle-aged couple, when the book opens, with eight children, who
have with them at their Summer place about half a dozen friends. Husband and wife, though
very different, are in love with each other. Mrs. Ramsay, who though fifty is beautiful, has
charm, intelligence, understanding; also she is a little anxious to have a hand in things, a little
anxious to be liked, a little anxious to keep her illusions and have others keep theirs. Her
children love her; they do not love their father--she works harder to hold their love. The best
minds about her seemingly mistrust her a little, dislike her a little, for her charm is persuasive
rather than compelling. She watches those about her without mingling too much; both because
she chooses a vantage point--symbolized by the window--and because of her personality she
becomes the dominant and focal figure of the group.

Ramsay is less easy to understand, possibly because he is given less attention. In many ways he
is a more interesting as well as original character: brilliant no doubt, but introverted, lacking
those immediate graces which win for his wife the greater love of their children, lacking
warmth, too, and a sense of social compromise--rigid in his truthfulness, a man, a thinker,
where his wife is a woman, a psychologist. He lacks sensitiveness, one feels, either that or his
sensitiveness is a very deep and hidden one. He loves his wife, they have a fundamental
understanding, yet he is not a "help" to her in their relationships with others.

And around them are their children and their friends, the fumbling Lily Briscoe, the one-sided
and arrogant yet somehow pathetic Tansley; a true product of early environment: the serene
Mr. Carmichael, somehow about the clash of personalities; the unimportant couple who
become engaged. They are an assortment of lives, most of them moving in different directions,
yet moving, at least intermittently, under the influence of Mrs. Ramsay, who, beneath the
stress of their presence, cannot quite find the chance to live her own inner life.

Then ten years pass, Mrs. Ramsay and two of her children die, the house remains uninhabited,
and finally some of those who were together ten years before come to the Summer house
again. It is a different house without Mr. Ramsay, and to Lily Briscoe, at least, it must always
compare itself with the house of ten years before, and Mrs. Ramsay's existence in it must go on
in the spirit. And Mr. Ramsay and two of his children do what ten years before remained
undone because of bad weather--they row across the bay to the lighthouse. Reaching it, they
achieve a climax, the end of a period.

It is the final portion of the book which is most perplexing. It seems to sound in the minor what
the long first portion sounded in the major, to persist as an ironical mood, to re-establish a
scene with the sorry changes time has wrought, to reduce a symbolical achievement when it is
finally made to the level of negation. The long opening portion seems to be carrying you ahead
toward something which will be magnificently expressive, and then this final portion becomes
obscure, a matter of arcs, of fractions, of uncoordinated notes. By comparison with the rest this
final portion seems pale and weak. Perhaps there is a reason for this, perhaps Mrs. Woolf
meant to show that with Mrs. Ramsay's death things fall apart, get beyond correlation. Mr.
Ramsay is no longer interesting--can it be because he is no longer counterpoised against his
wife? Life seems drifting, as the Ramsays drift over the bay in their boat, and all their physical
vigor and all their reaching of the lighthouse at last conveys no significance.

The truth is that this final portion of the book strikes a minor note, not an intentional minor
note which might still in the artistic sense be major, but a meaningless minor note which
conveys the feeling that one has not quite arrived somewhere, that the story which opens
brilliantly and carries on through a magnificent interlude ends with too little force and
expressiveness.

At any rate the rest of the book has its excellencies. Like "Mrs. Dalloway" it is underlaid with
Mrs. Woolf's ironic feeling toward life, though here character is not pitted against manners, but
against other character. Once again Mrs. Woolf makes use of her remarkable method of
characterization, a method not based on observation or personal experience, but purely
synthetic, purely creational. Clarissa Dalloway is a marvelous synthesis, and it is just for that
reason that "Mrs. Dalloway," which has been identified because of its modernity with the
"Ulysses" school, differs from it in character fundamentals, for it is as objective as "Ulysses" is
autobiographical and observational. There is nothing "photographic" about Mrs. Woolf's
characters, here or in "Mrs. Dalloway." Neither Clarissa nor Mrs. Ramsay has anything
autobiographical about her; both are complete creations and both, for all their charm and
graces, must suffer a little beneath the searchlight of Mrs. Woolf's independently used mind
and sense of irony.

In "To the Lighthouse" there is nobody who even approaches Clarissa Dalloway in completeness
and memorability, but on a smaller and perhaps more persuasive scale Mrs. Ramsay achieves
powerful reality. The other characters are not fully alive because they are not whole enough.
Most of them are one-dimensional fragments that have been created with great insight but
insufficient vitality. They have minds, moods, emotions--but they get all three through creative
intellect. For passion Mrs. Woolf has no gift--her people never invade the field of elementary
emotions: they are hardly animal at all.

It is, I think, in the superb interlude called "Time Passes" that Mrs. Woolf reaches the most
impressive height of the book, and there one can find a new note in her work, something
beyond the ironic sophistication and civilized human values of "Mrs. Dalloway." In this
description of the unused house in the Hebrides, entered for ten years only by old and forlorn
women caretakers and the wind and the sea air and the light of the lighthouse lamp, she has
told the story of all life passing on, of change and destruction and solitude and waste--the story
which more than a little embodies the plot action of the rest of the book, but above all the story
which has for man the profoundest human values of all, though for ten years the house itself
never received a human guest. The great beauty of these eighteen pages of prose carries in it
an emotional and ironical undertone that is superior to anything else that the first-class
technician, the expert stylist, the deft student of human life in Mrs. Woolf ever has done. Here
in prose of extraordinary distinction in our time: here is poetry:

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and
so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of
the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The Winter holds a pack of them in store and
deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of
them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. * * *

"To the Lighthouse" has not the formal perfection, the cohesiveness, the intense vividness of
characterization that belong to "Mrs. Dalloway." It has particles of failure in it. It is inferior to
"Mrs. Dalloway" in the degree to which its aims are achieved; it is superior in the magnitude of
the aims themselves. For in its portrayal of life that is less orderly, more complex and so much
doomed to frustration, it strikes a more important note, and it gives us an interlude of vision
that must stand at the head of all Virginia Woolf's work.

ADIEU TO A SOLDIER

Explanation of Walt Whitman's "Adieu to a Soldier"

Summary:   Provides an analysis of to a Soldier, a poem in whichWalt Whitman compares
himself to a soldier. Describes how the poem portrays Whitman as being the perserverant
soldier contrary to his fellow comrade fighting in the trenches.

Walt Whitman's Adieu to a Soldier is the exploration of himself and a soldier fighting on
opposite sides of a war. The poem portrays Whitman as being the perserverant soldier contrary
to his fellowcomrade fighting in the trenches. Through ambushes, muddy roads, and many
crises the soldiers trudge on for the good of their country.
The speaker is a soldier himself talking about his experiences on the "Opposing fronts", and
"Red [bloody] battles (line 3,4)." This poem is a dedication to the warriors on the front lines
their battle heroines of their nation.
The poem is about the life of a soldier and Whitman's personal "marching" through life. A
"rapid march" and "long maneuvers" throughout "untried roads (line 3,12)." Whitman
talksabout how the soldiers have a day-to-day struggle in the areas they fight in. Whitman also
talks about how he the [more warlike (line 8)] soldier with his "contentious soul (line 10)" still
"campaigns (line 11)" marching ever on to his "victory."
The poem is about how both he and the soldier are battling on in their worlds and how he,
going through all of a soldiers struggles, has more perseverance and will succeed in his will.
Whitman comments on how the soldiers mission is "fulfill'd (line 9) after the war but his duty is
still "Ever marching on (line 14)" through his urge to be more "warlike (line 9)." Whitman
throughout this entire passage is portraying himself as an individual who has more "drive" and
has more motivation than the common soldier. Whitman says that war takes "all brave and
manly hearts (line 6)" saying essentially that he is braver and mightier than the "brave and
mighty hearts." Through his want to proclaim his perseveranceWhitman creates this poem to
proclaim his will to fight, the will that exceeds brave men and soldierly men.
-source is the poem, that's where i get my quotes from-
Analysis of How Much Land Does a Man Need by Leo Tolstoy
In the short story "How Much Land Does A Man Need" by Leo Tolstoy, Pahom is a peasant living
on a small plot of land. When his wife brags that a peasant's life is safer than having money,
because with money comes temptation, Pahom agrees, adding that he would not be "afraid of
the devil himself" if he only had more land. He buys more land, but is unhappy, for no matter
how much more land he gets, he wants more. He becomes greedier and greedier until he loses
control of his life and, in the end, loses everything. This story shows us that even if we have
enough to get by, the prospect of becoming wealthier is so alluring it can cause us to risk all the
good things we already have.

At the start, Pahom is a content, hardworking men. Unfortunately, he makes the mistake of
thinking that more land would make his life better . Pahom says to himself "our only trouble is
that we haven't land enough. If I had plenty of land, I shouldn't fear the devil himself"! When an
opportunity arises for Pahom to acquire more land, he jumps at the chance, convinced that
more would make him happy. He paid off his debts and had plenty of fertile land to grow his
crops and raise his cattle, but he was only satisfied for a short while. "Pahom was well-
contented and everything would have been right if the neighboring peasants would only not
have trespassed on his cornfields and meadows", so even when he had the extra land he
wanted. His life was far from perfect. Disputes with his neighbors and court battles cause
Pahom to be disliked by the Commune, so even though he had more land, his position in the
town was worse than ever. Pahom's life may have been improved by owning more land, but
human nature prompted him to continue to be greedy, wanting even more than he already
had.
One day, Pahom hears word of a place where free land was given to any man who joins the
Commune. Immediately the many acres of land that he does own seem unbearable and barren
compared to the promise of better land. He asks himself ,”Why should I suffer in this narrow
hole, if one can live so well elsewhere"? so, although he has plenty of good land and a good life,
Pahom sells everything he owns to pursue what he thinks will complete his idea of a happy life.
With the new land, Pahom was content, but soon he grew accustomed to it and began to want
more once again. After renting extra land, Pahom decided it would be an even better idea if he
actually owned all his land for he believed he "should be independent, and there would not be
any unpleasantness". He planned to buy more land, but along cam an opportunity that he
would not let pass by.

A tradesman passing through told Pahom of lush land, sold for nearly no money, so Pahom
decided that land would be a better deal. "If I take it out there, I can get more than ten times as
much for the money" he figured, so he abandoned everything he had worked so hard for and
when to check out the land. Just as the tradesman had promised, the land was lush and fertile
and the owners promised to give Pahom all the land he could walk around in a day for a very
cheap price. Pahom walked the entire day, but greed overtook him and he bit off more than he
could chew. Exhausted, he tried to make it back to the designated meeting place before the day
was over, but his body was too tired. Defeated, he made one last effort, "there is plenty of land,
but will God let me live on it" he wondered. This journey was to no avail-he had taken too
much, and died in the process.

Through the story we are shown that human nature pushes us to want more and more. We are
never content with our lives, no matter how well off we may be, and , while trying to better out
standard of living, we put ourselves in danger of ending up with nothing.

Sources:
"How Much Land Does A Man Need" by Leo Tolstoy
This story represents the greed present in Americans during the time of the settlement of
westernAmerica. Americans were very greedy people. They were never content with what they
had and,in more than one way, destroyed their own lives to try and get more for themselves.
Things fall apart
The novel "Things Fall Apart", by Chinua Achebe, was an eye-opening account of the life and
eventual extinction of an African tribe called the Ibo. It focuses on one character, Okonkwo,
who at a very early age set out on a quest of self-perfection. Coming from a family ruled by a
man who was lazy and inconsistent with everything he did, Okonkwo vowed to never accept
the fate of his father. Okonkwo and his family suffered through many hard times in their lives,
but usually managed to come out on top. Through terrible crop seasons and bad judgement
calls, Okonkwo usually prevailed, until the day came when he was faced with a situation that
could not be resolved by his strength and character alone. 

This novel also provided a very detailed, and seemingly accurate, account of the lives of the Ibo.
The Ibo were an extremely spiritual people who answered to their gods daily. A hardworking
people who based their personal worth on their community and crop achievements. Their yam
crops were the backbone of the community and he who possessed the largest crops were
usually respected by all in the community. The Ibo were a very gendered people. The men
normally made all the rules and the woman were taught to respect their husbands decisions. In
particular, Okonkwo ruled his household with an iron fist. He often beat his wives for small
reasons and felt little to no remorse for doing so. While it was not uncommon for the men of
the Ibo tribe to beat their wives if they disobeyed orders, Okonkwo was a character that
oftentimes took it too far. In one point in the novel he badly beat one of his wives, Ojiugo,
during the sacred week. During this time no one in the tribe is to commit such acts, as it is a
time for peace. By beating his wife, he defied the gods and was forced to offer up animal
sacrifices and payment to them. This one of Okonkwo's major character flaws, he is stubborn
and self-righteous, and wishes to answer to nobody but himself. This even leads to eventual
fate, when he refuses to join the Christians when most everyone else of the tribe gave in to
their ideas. Okonkwo in the end decided to hang himself rather then give up his `freedom' to
the white man. Even in his death he defied the gods of his tribe, knowing that he would receive
no burial and his body be cast into the evil forest. Rather then accepting defeat and working
together with his tribe to bring about change, he chose death and eternity roaming the earth as
a lost/evil soul. He had lost his chance to regain back his authority and respect in the
community after he was cast out of the clan for accidentally killing a member of the
community. Upon his return to Umuofia he expected to pick up where he left off, his crops to
blossom, his daughters to marry and his past deeds be forgotten. But it turned out to be a
harder struggle then he imagined. 
The novel itself was a great story, full of colorful characters and a supernatural outlook. The
style was very simple and oftentimes I found it read like a children's book. This being said it
wasn't a challenging read. Aside from the complex names of the communities and its people,
the language was very clear and simple. The most interesting aspect of the novel that drew me
into the story were the descriptions of their complex religious and spiritual beliefs. I found it
very interesting to learn how they worshipped all these different gods, and ultimately what
these gods represented. Chinua Achebe did a great job in breaking down the language barriers
of English and Ibo.