SHAKESPEARE- THE SONNETS The Sonnets Shakespeares sonnets are very different from Shakespeares plays, but they

do contain dramatic elements and an overall sense of story. Each of the poems deals with a highly personal theme, and each can be taken on its own or in relation to the poems around it. The sonnets have the feel of autobiographical poems, but we dont know whether they deal with real events or not, because no one knows enough about Shakespeares life to say whether or not they deal with real events and feelings, so we tend to refer to the voice of the sonnets as the speakeras though he were a dramatic creation like Hamlet or King Lear. THE SONNET FORM. A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem, traditionally written in iambic pentameterthat is, in lines ten syllables long, with accents falling on every second syllable, as in: Shall I compare thee to a summers day? Themes Different Types of Romantic Love. Modern readers associate the sonnet form with romantic love and with good reason: the first sonnets written in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy celebrated the poets feelings for their beloveds and their patrons. Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets to Mr. W. H., and the identity of this man remains unknown. He dedicated an earlier set of poems, Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, to Henry Wriothesly, earl of Southampton, but its not known what Wriothesly gave him for this honor. In contrast to tradition, Shakespeare addressed most of his sonnets to an unnamed young man, possibly Wriothesly. Addressing sonnets to a young man was unique in Elizabethan England. Shakespeare used his sonnets to explore different types of love between the young man and the speaker, the young man and the dark lady, and the dark lady and the speaker. In his sequence, the speaker expresses passionate concern for the young man, praises his beauty, and articulates what we would now call homosexual desire. Several sonnets also probe the nature of love, comparing the idealized love found in poems with the messy, complicated love found in real life. The Dangers of Lust and Love. In Shakespeares sonnets, falling in love can have painful emotional and physical consequences. But many sonnets warn readers about the dangers of lust and love. According to some poems, lust causes us to mistake sexual desire for true love, and love itself causes us to lose our powers of perception. Several sonnets warn about the dangers of lust, claiming that it turns humans savage, extreme, rude, cruel (4), as in Sonnet 129. Real Beauty vs. Clichd Beauty. In Sonnet 130, Shakespeare directly engagesand skewers clichd concepts of beauty. The speaker explains that his lover, the dark lady, has wires for hair, bad breath, dull cleavage, a heavy step, and pale lips. He concludes by saying that he loves her all the more precisely because he loves her and not some idealized, false version. Real love, the sonnet implies, begins when we accept our lovers for what they are as well as what they are not. The Responsibilities of Being Beautiful. Shakespeare portrays beauty as conveying a great responsibility in the sonnets addressed to the young man, Sonnets 1126. Here the speaker urges the young man to make his beauty immortal by having children, a theme that appears repeatedly throughout the poems: as an attractive person, the young man has a responsibility to procreate. Sonnet 95 compares the young mans behavior to a canker in the fragrant rose

(2) or a rotten spot on an otherwise beautiful flower. In other words, the young mans beauty allows him to get away with bad behavior, but this bad behavior will eventually distort his beauty, much like a rotten spot eventually spreads. Nature gave the young man a beautiful face, but it is the young mans responsibility to make sure that his soul is worthy of such a visage. Motifs Art vs. Time. Shakespeare, like many sonneteers, portrays time as an enemy of love. Time destroys love because time causes beauty to fade, people to age, and life to end. Through art, nature and beauty overcome time. Several sonnets use the seasons to symbolize the passage of time and to show that everything in naturefrom plants to peopleis mortal. But nature creates beauty, which poets capture and render immortal in their verse. Stopping the March Toward Death. Growing older and dying are inescapable aspects of the human condition, but Shakespeares sonnets give suggestions for halting the progress toward death. Shakespeares speaker spends a lot of time trying to convince the young man to cheat death by having children. In Sonnets 117, the speaker argues that the young man is too beautiful to die without leaving behind his replica, and the idea that the young man has a duty to procreate becomes the dominant motif of the first several sonnets. The Significance of Sight. Other sonnets link writing and painting with sight: in Sonnet 24, the speakers eye becomes a pen or paintbrush that captures the young mans beauty and imprints it on the blank page of the speakers heart. But our loving eyes can also distort our sight, causing us to misperceive reality. In the sonnets addressed to the dark lady, the speaker criticizes his eyes for causing him to fall in love with a beautiful but duplicitous woman. Ultimately, Shakespeare uses eyes to act as a warning: while our eyes allow us to perceive beauty, they sometimes get so captivated by beauty that they cause us to misjudge character and other attributes not visible to the naked eye. Readers eyes are as significant in the sonnets as the speakers eyes. Shakespeare encourages his readers to see by providing vivid visual descriptions. One sonnet compares the young mans beauty to the glory of the rising sun, while another uses the image of clouds obscuring the sun as a metaphor for the young mans faithlessness and still another contrasts the beauty of a rose with one rotten spot to warn the young man to cease his sinning ways. Other poems describe bare trees to symbolize aging. Symbols Flowers and Trees. Flowers and trees appear throughout the sonnets to illustrate the passage of time, the transience of life, the aging process, and beauty. Traditionally, roses signify romantic love, a symbol Shakespeare employs in the sonnets, discussing their attractiveness and fragrance in relation to the young man. Sometimes Shakespeare compares flowers and weeds to contrast beauty and ugliness. Stars. Shakespeare uses stars to stand in for fate, a common poetic trope, but also to explore the nature of free will. Using his eyes, the speaker reads that the young mans good fortune and beauty shall pass to his children, should he have them. During Shakespeares time, people generally believed in astrology, even as scholars were making great gains in astronomy and cosmology, a metaphysical system for ordering the universe. According to Elizabethan astrology, a cosmic order determined the place of everything in the universe, from planets and stars to people. Weather and the Seasons. In the sonnets, the speaker frequently employs the pathetic fallacy, associating his absence from the young man to the freezing days of December and the

promise of their reunion to a pregnant spring. Weather and the seasons also stand in for human emotions: the speaker conveys his sense of foreboding about death by likening himself to autumn, a time in which natures objects begin to decay and ready themselves for winter, or death. Similarly, despite the arrival of proud-pied April (2) in Sonnet 98, the speaker still feels as if it were winter because he and the young man are apart. ROMEO&JULIET Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy by William Shakespeare about the fate of two lovers who struggle against fate. It is perhaps his most famous song, one of his early successes and is considered the most typical love story of the Renaissance. Dramatic structure. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare employs several dramatic techniques that have garnered praise from critics; most notably the abrupt shifts from comedy to tragedy (an example is the punning exchange between Benvolio and Mercutio just before Tybalt arrives). Before Mercutio's death in Act three, the play is largely a comedy. After his accidental demise, the play suddenly becomes serious and takes on a tragic tone. Language. Shakespeare uses a variety of poetic forms throughout the play. He begins with a 14-line prologue in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, spoken by a Chorus. Most of Romeo and Juliet is, however, written in blank verse, and much of it in strict iambic pentameter, with less rhythmic variation than in most of Shakespeare's later plays.In choosing forms, Shakespeare matches the poetry to the character who uses it. Friar Laurence, for example, uses sermon and sententiae forms, and the Nurse uses a unique blank verse form that closely matches colloquial speech. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet in the Capulet tomb (5.3) PROTAGONISTS Romeo; Juliet ANTAGONISTS The feuding Montagues and Capulets; Tybalt; the Prince and citizens of Verona; fate SETTINGS (TIME) Renaissance (fourteenth or fifteenth century) SETTINGS (PLACE) Verona and Mantua (cities in northern Italy) POINT OF VIEW Insofar as a play has a point of view, that of Romeo and Juliet; occasionally the play uses the point of view of the Montague and Capulet servants to illuminate the actions of their masters. FALLING ACTION The end of Act 5, scene 3, when the Prince and the parents discover the bodies of Romeo and Juliet, and agree to put aside their feud in the interest of peace. TENSE Present GENRE Tragedy, revenge tragedy TONES Passionate, romantic, intense, rhapsodic, violent, prone to extremes of emotion (ecstasy, rage, misery, etc.)
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Themes .The Forcefulness of Love. Romeo and Juliet is the most famous love story in the English literary tradition. Love is naturally the plays dominant and most important theme. The play focuses on romantic love, specifically the intense passion that springs up at first sight between Romeo and Juliet. Love in Romeo and Juliet is a brutal, powerful emotion that captures individuals and catapults them against their world, and, at times, against themselves. The powerful nature of love can be seen in the way it is described, or, more accurately, the

way descriptions of it so consistently fail to capture its entirety. At times love is described in the terms of religion, as in the fourteen lines when Romeo and Juliet first meet. Love as a Cause of Violence. The themes of death and violence permeate Romeo and Juliet, and they are always connected to passion, whether that passion is love or hate. The connection between hate, violence, and death seems obvious. But the connection between love and violence requires further investigation. This theme is ilustrated by the double suicide. This tragic choice is the highest, most potent expression of love that Romeo and Juliet can make. It is only through death that they can preserve their love, and their love is so profound that they are willing to end their lives in its defense. In the play, love emerges as an amoral thing, leading as much to destruction as to happiness. But in its extreme passion, the love that Romeo and Juliet experience also appears so exquisitely beautiful that few would want, or be able, to resist its power. The Individual Versus Society. It is possible to see Romeo and Juliet as a battle between the responsibilities and actions demanded by social institutions and those demanded by the private desires of the individual. Romeo and Juliets appreciation of night, with its darkness and privacy, and their renunciation of their names, with its attendant loss of obligation, make sense in the context of individuals who wish to escape the public world. But the lovers cannot stop the night from becoming day. And Romeo cannot cease being a Montague simply because he wants to; the rest of the world will not let him. The lovers suicides can be understood as the ultimate night, the ultimate privacy. The Inevitability of Fate. In its first address to the audience, the Chorus states that Romeo and Juliet are star-crossedthat is to say that fate (a power often vested in the movements of the stars) controls them (Prologue.6). This sense of fate permeates the play, and not just for the audience. The characters also are quite aware of it: Romeo and Juliet constantly see omens. Of course, Romeos defiance itself plays into the hands of fate, and his determination to spend eternity with Juliet results in their deaths. The mechanism of fate works in all of the events surrounding the lovers: the feud between their families Motifs .Light/Dark Imagery. One of the plays most consistent visual motifs is the contrast between light and dark, often in terms of night/day imagery. This contrast is not given a particular metaphoric meaninglight is not always good, and dark is not always evil. On the contrary, light and dark are generally used to provide a sensory contrast and to hint at opposed alternatives. One of the more important instances of this motif is Romeos lengthy meditation on the sun and the moon during the balcony scene, in which Juliet, metaphorically described as the sun, is seen as banishing the envious moon and transforming the night into day. Opposite Points of View. Shakespeare includes numerous speeches and scenes in Romeo and Juliet that hint at alternative ways to evaluate the play. Shakespeare uses two main devices in this regard: Mercutio and servants. Symbols. Poison. poison is not intrinsically evil, but is instead a natural substance made lethal by human hands. Friar Lawrences words prove true over the course of the play. The sleeping potion he gives Juliet is concocted to cause the appearance of death, not death itself, but through circumstances beyond the Friars control, the potion does bring about a fatal result: Romeos suicide. Poison symbolizes human societys tendency to poison good things and

make them fatal, just as the pointless Capulet-Montague feud turns Romeo and Juliets love to poison. After all, unlike many of the other tragedies, this play does not have an evil villain, but rather people whose good qualities are turned to poison by the world in which they live. Thumb-biting.The thumb-biting, as an essentially meaningless gesture, represents the foolishness of the entire Capulet/Montague feud and the stupidity of violence in general. Queen Mab. One of the most noteworthy aspects of Queen Mabs ride is that the dreams she brings generally do not bring out the best sides of the dreamers, but instead serve to confirm them in whatever vices they are addicted tofor example, greed, violence, or lust. HAMLET GENRE Tragedy, revenge tragedy LANGUAGE English TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN London, England, early seventeenth century (probably 16001602) DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION 1603, in a pirated quarto edition titled The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet; 1604 in a superior quarto edition PROTAGONIST Hamlet MAJOR CONFLICT Hamlet feels a responsibility to avenge his fathers murder by his uncle Claudius, but Claudius is now the king and thus well protected. Moreover, Hamlet struggles with his doubts about whether he can trust the ghost and whether killing Claudius is the appropriate thing to do. RISING ACTION The ghost appears to Hamlet and tells Hamlet to revenge his murder; Hamlet feigns madness to his intentions; Hamlet stages the mousetrap play; Hamlet passes up the opportunity to kill Claudius while he is praying. CLIMAX When Hamlet stabs Polonius through the arras in Act III, scene iv, he commits himself to overtly violent action and brings himself into unavoidable conflict with the king. Another possible climax comes at the end of Act IV, scene iv, when Hamlet resolves to commit himself fully to violent revenge. FALLING ACTION Hamlet is sent to England to be killed; Hamlet returns to Denmark and confronts Laertes at Ophelias funeral; the fencing match; the deaths of the royal family SETTING (TIME) The late medieval period, though the plays chronological setting is notoriously imprecise SETTINGS (PLACE) Denmark FORESHADOWING The ghost, which is taken to foreshadow an ominous future for Denmark TONE Dark, ironic, melancholy, passionate, contemplative, desperate, violent Themes.The Impossibility of Certainty. What separates Hamlet from other revenge plays (and maybe from every play written before it) is that the action we expect to see, particularly from Hamlet himself, is continually postponed while Hamlet tries to obtain more certain knowledge about what he is doing. This play poses many questions that other plays would simply take for granted. Can we have certain knowledge about ghosts? The Complexity of Action. Directly related to the theme of certainty is the theme of action. In Hamlet, the question of how to act is affected not only by rational considerations, such as the need for certainty, but also by emotional, ethical, and psychological factors. Hamlet himself appears to distrust the idea that its even possible to act in a controlled, purposeful way. When he does act, he prefers to do it blindly, 5

recklessly, and violently. The other characters obviously think much less about action in the abstract than Hamlet does, and are therefore less troubled about the possibility of acting effectively. They simply act as they feel is appropriate. The Mystery of Death. In the aftermath of his fathers murder, Hamlet is obsessed with the idea of death, and over the course of the play he considers death from a great many perspectives. Throughout, the idea of death is closely tied to the themes of spirituality, truth, and uncertainty in that death may bring the answers to Hamlets deepest questions, ending once and for all the problem of trying to determine truth in an ambiguous world. And, since death is both the cause and the consequence of revenge, it is intimately tied to the theme of revenge and justiceClaudiuss murder of King Hamlet initiates Hamlets quest for revenge, and Claudiuss death is the end of that quest. The Nation as a Diseased Body. The Nation as a Diseased Body Everything is connected in Hamlet, including the welfare of the royal family and the health of the state as a whole. The plays early scenes explore the sense of anxiety and dread that surrounds the transfer of power from one ruler to the next. Throughout the play, characters draw explicit connections between the moral legitimacy of a ruler and the health of the nation. Denmark is frequently described as a physical body made ill by the moral corruption of Claudius and Gertrude, and many observers interpret the presence of the ghost as a supernatural omen indicating that [s]omething is rotten in the state of Denmark (I.iv.67). The dead King Hamlet is portrayed as a strong, forthright ruler under whose guard the state was in good health, while Claudius, a wicked politician, has corrupted and compromised Denmark to satisfy his own appetites. At the end of the play, the rise to power of the upright Fortinbras suggests that Denmark will be strengthened once again. Motifs.Incest and Incestuous Desire. The motif of incest runs throughout the play and is frequently alluded to by Hamlet and the ghost, most obviously in conversations about Gertrude and Claudius, the former brother-in-law and sister-in-law who are now married. A subtle motif of incestuous desire can be found in the relationship of Laertes and Ophelia, as Laertes sometimes speaks to his sister in suggestively sexual terms and, at her funeral, leaps into her grave to hold her in his arms. However, the strongest overtones of incestuous desire arise in the relationship of Hamlet and Gertrude, in Hamlets fixation on Gertrudes sex life with Claudius and his preoccupation with her in general. Misogyny Shattered by his mothers decision to marry Claudius so soon after her husbands death, Hamlet becomes cynical about women in general, showing a particular obsession with what he perceives to be a connection between female sexuality and moral corruption. This motif of misogyny, or hatred of women, occurs sporadically throughout the play, but it is an important inhibiting factor in Hamlets relationships with Ophelia and Gertrude. He urges Ophelia to go to a nunnery rather than experience the corruptions of sexuality and exclaims of Gertrude, Frailty, thy name is woman (I.ii.146). Ears and Hearing One facet of Hamlets exploration of the difficulty of attaining true knowledge is slipperiness of language. Words are used to communicate ideas, but they can also be used to distort the truth, manipulate other people, and serve as tools in corrupt quests for power. Claudius, the shrewd politician, is the most obvious example of a man who manipulates words to enhance his own power. The sinister uses of words are represented by images of ears and hearing, from Claudiuss murder of the king by pouring poison into his ear to Hamlets claim to

Horatio that I have words to speak in thine ear will make thee dumb (IV.vi.21). The poison poured in the kings ear by Claudius is used by the ghost to symbolize the corrosive effect of Claudiuss dishonesty on the health of Denmark. Declaring that the story that he was killed by a snake is a lie, he says that the whole ear of Denmark is Rankly abused. . . . (I.v.3638). Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Yoricks Skull In Hamlet, physical objects are rarely used to represent thematic ideas. One important exception is Yoricks skull, which Hamlet discovers in the graveyard in the first scene of Act V. As Hamlet speaks to the skull and about the skull of the kings former jester, he fixates on deaths inevitability and the disintegration of the body. He urges the skull to get you to my ladys chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must comeno one can avoid death (V.i.178179). He traces the skulls mouth and says, Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft, indicating his fascination with the physical consequences of death (V.i.174175). This latter idea is an important motif throughout the play, as Hamlet frequently makes comments referring to every human bodys eventual decay, noting that Polonius will be eaten by worms, that even kings are eaten by worms, and that dust from the decayed body of Alexander the Great might be used to stop a hole in a beer barrel. MACBETH
Key Facts

The Tragedy of Macbeth AUTHOR William Shakespeare GENRE Tragedy TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN 1606, England DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION First Folio edition, 1623 TONE Dark and ominous, suggestive of a world turned topsy-turvy by foul and unnatural crimes TENSE Not applicable (drama) SETTING (TIME) The Middle Ages, specifically the eleventh century SETTING (PLACE) Various locations in Scotland; also England, briefly PROTAGONIST Macbeth MAJOR CONFLICTS The struggle within Macbeth between his ambition and his sense of right and wrong; the struggle between the murderous evil represented by Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and the best interests of the nation, represented by Malcolm and Macduff RISING ACTION Macbeth and Banquos encounter with the witches initiates both conflicts; Lady Macbeths speeches goad Macbeth into murdering Duncan and seizing the crown. CLIMAX Macbeths murder of Duncan in Act 2 represents the point of no return, after which Macbeth is forced to continue butchering his subjects to avoid the consequences of his crime. FALLING ACTION Macbeths increasingly brutal murders (of Duncans servants, Banquo, Lady Macduff and her son); Macbeths second meeting with the witches; Macbeths final confrontation with Macduff and the opposing armies
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Themes.The Corrupting Power of Unchecked Ambition. The main theme of Macbeththe destruction wrought when ambition goes unchecked by moral constraintsfinds its most

powerful expression in the plays two main characters. Macbeth is a courageous Scottish general who is not naturally inclined to commit evil deeds, yet he deeply desires power and advancement. The problem, the play suggests, is that once one decides to use violence to further ones quest for power, it is difficult to stop. There are always potential threats to the throneBanquo, Fleance, Macduffand it is always tempting to use violent means to dispose of them. The Difference Between Kingship and Tyranny.In the play, Duncan is always referred to as a king, while Macbeth soon becomes known as the tyrant. The difference between the two types of rulers seems to be expressed in a conversation that occurs in Act 4, scene 3, when Macduff meets Malcolm in England. In order to test Macduffs loyalty to Scotland, Malcolm pretends that he would make an even worse king than Macbeth. Motifs .Hallucinations.Visions and hallucinations recur throughout the play and serve as reminders of Macbeth and Lady Macbeths joint culpability for the growing body count. When he is about to kill Duncan, Macbeth sees a dagger floating in the air. Covered with blood and pointed toward the kings chamber, the dagger represents the bloody course on which Macbeth is about to embark. Later, he sees Banquos ghost sitting in a chair at a feast, pricking his conscience by mutely reminding him that he murdered his former friend. The seemingly hardheaded Lady Macbeth also eventually gives way to visions, as she sleepwalks and believes that her hands are stained with blood that cannot be washed away by any amount of water. In each case, it is ambiguous whether the vision is real or purely hallucinatory; but, in both cases, the Macbeths read them uniformly as supernatural signs of their guilt.

Violence.Macbeth is a famously violent play. Interestingly, most of the killings take place
offstage, but throughout the play the characters provide the audience with gory descriptions of the carnage, from the opening scene where the captain describes Macbeth and Banquo wading in blood on the battlefield, to the endless references to the bloodstained hands of Macbeth and his wife. The action is bookended by a pair of bloody battles: in the first, Macbeth defeats the invaders; in the second, he is slain and beheaded by Macduff. In between is a series of murders: Duncan, Duncans chamberlains, Banquo, Lady Macduff, and Macduffs son all come to bloody ends. By the end of the action, blood seems to be everywhere.

Prophecy.Prophecy sets Macbeths plot in motionnamely, the witches prophecy that

Macbeth will become first thane of Cawdor and then king. The weird sisters make a number of other prophecies: they tell us that Banquos heirs will be kings, that Macbeth should beware Macduff, that Macbeth is safe till Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, and that no man born of woman can harm Macbeth. Save for the prophecy about Banquos heirs, all of these predictions are fulfilled within the course of the play. Still, it is left deliberately ambiguous whether some of them are self-fulfillingfor example, whether Macbeth wills himself to be king or is fated to be king. Additionally, as the Birnam Wood and born of woman prophecies make clear, the prophecies must be interpreted as riddles, since they do not always mean what they seem to mean.

Symbols .Blood.Blood is everywhere in Macbeth, beginning with the opening battle

between the Scots and the Norwegian invaders, which is described in harrowing terms by the wounded captain in Act 1, scene 2. Once Macbeth and Lady Macbeth embark upon their murderous journey, blood comes to symbolize their guilt, and they begin to feel that their crimes have stained them in a way that cannot be washed clean. Will all great Neptunes ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? Macbeth cries after he has killed Duncan, even as his wife scolds him and says that a little water will do the job (2.2.5859). Later, though, she comes to share his horrified sense of being stained: Out, damned spot; out, I say . . . who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? she asks as she wanders through the halls of their castle near the close of the play (5.1.3034). Blood symbolizes the guilt that sits like a permanent stain on the consciences of both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, one that hounds them to their graves.

The Weather/As in other Shakespearean tragedies, Macbeths grotesque murder spree is

accompanied by a number of unnatural occurrences in the natural realm. From the thunder and lightning that accompany the witches appearances to the terrible storms that rage on the night of Duncans murder, these violations of the natural order reflect corruption in the moral and political orders.

A Midsummer Nights Dream Key Facts

A Midsummer Nights Dream AUTHOR William Shakespeare TYPE OF WORK Play GENRES Comedy; fantasy; romance; farce LANGUAGE English TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN London, 1594 or 1595 DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION 1600 PUBLISHER Thomas Fisher NARRATOR None CLIMAX In the strictest sense, there is no real climax, as the conflicts of the play are all resolved swiftly by magical means in Act IV; the moment of greatest tension is probably the quarrel between the lovers in Act III, scene ii. PROTAGONIST Because there are three main groups of characters, there is no single protagonist in the play; however, Puck is generally considered the most important character. ANTAGONIST None; the plays tensions are mostly the result of circumstances, accidents, and mistakes. SETTINGS (TIME) Combines elements of Ancient Greece with elements of Renaissance England SETTINGS (PLACE) Athens and the forest outside its walls POINT OF VIEW Varies from scene to scene FALLING ACTION Act V, scene i, which centers on the craftsmens play TENSE Present
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 Comments made in Act I, scene i about the difficulties that lovers face Romantic; comedic; fantastic; satirical; dreamlike; joyful; farcical SYMBOLS Theseus and Hippolyta represent order, stability, and wakefulness; Theseuss hounds represent the coming of morning; Oberons love potion represents the power and instability of love. THEMES The difficulties of love; magic; the nature of dreams; the relationships between fantasy and reality and between environment and experience MOTIFS Love out of balance; contrast (juxtaposed opposites, such as beautiful and ugly, short and tall, clumsy and graceful, ethereal and earthy)
FORESHADOWING TONES

Themes.Loves Difficulty. The course of true love never did run smooth, comments Lysander, articulating one of A Midsummer Nights Dreams most important themesthat of the difficulty of love (I.i.134). Though most of the conflict in the play stems from the troubles of romance, and though the play involves a number of romantic elements, it is not truly a love story; it distances the audience from the emotions of the characters in order to poke fun at the torments and afflictions that those in love suffer. The tone of the play is so lighthearted that the audience never doubts that things will end happily, and it is therefore free to enjoy the comedy without being caught up in the tension of an uncertain outcome. The theme of loves difficulty is often explored through the motif of love out of balancethat is, romantic situations in which a disparity or inequality interferes with the harmony of a relationship. The prime instance of this imbalance is the asymmetrical love among the four young Athenians: Hermia loves Lysander, Lysander loves Hermia, Helena loves Demetrius, and Demetrius loves Hermia instead of Helenaa simple numeric imbalance in which two men love the same woman, leaving one woman with too many suitors and one with too few. The play has strong potential for a traditional outcome, and the plot is in many ways based on a quest for internal balance; that is, when the lovers tangle resolves itself into symmetrical pairings, the traditional happy ending will have been achieved. Somewhat similarly, in the relationship between Titania and Oberon, an imbalance arises out of the fact that Oberons coveting of Titanias Indian boy outweighs his love for her. Later, Titanias passion for the ass-headed Bottom represents an imbalance of appearance and nature: Titania is beautiful and graceful, while Bottom is clumsy and grotesque. Magic The fairies magic, which brings about many of the most bizarre and hilarious situations in the play, is another element central to the fantastic atmosphere of A Midsummer Nights Dream. Shakespeare uses magic both to embody the almost supernatural power of love (symbolized by the love potion) and to create a surreal world. Although the misuse of magic causes chaos, as when Puck mistakenly applies the love potion to Lysanders eyelids, magic ultimately resolves the plays tensions by restoring love to balance among the quartet of Athenian youths. Additionally, the ease with which Puck uses magic to his own ends, as when he reshapes Bottoms head into that of an ass and recreates the voices of Lysander and Demetrius, stands in contrast to the laboriousness and gracelessness of the craftsmens attempt to stage their play. Dreams As the title suggests, dreams are an important theme in A Midsummer Nights Dream; they are linked to the bizarre, magical mishaps in the forest. Hippolytas first words in the play evidence the prevalence of dreams (Four days will quickly steep themselves in night, / Four 10

nights will quickly dream away the time), and various characters mention dreams throughout (I.i.78). The theme of dreaming recurs predominantly when characters attempt to explain bizarre events in which these characters are involved: I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what / dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about texpound this dream, Bottom says, unable to fathom the magical happenings that have affected him as anything but the result of slumber. Shakespeare is also interested in the actual workings of dreams, in how events occur without explanation, time loses its normal sense of flow, and the impossible occurs as a matter of course; he seeks to recreate this environment in the play through the intervention of the fairies in the magical forest. At the end of the play, Puck extends the idea of dreams to the audience members themselves, saying that, if they have been offended by the play, they should remember it as nothing more than a dream. This sense of illusion and gauzy fragility is crucial to the atmosphere of A Midsummer Nights Dream, as it helps render the play a fantastical experience rather than a heavy drama. Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the texts major themes. Contrast The idea of contrast is the basic building block of A Midsummer Nights Dream. The entire play is constructed around groups of opposites and doubles. Nearly every characteristic presented in the play has an opposite: Helena is tall, Hermia is short; Puck plays pranks, Bottom is the victim of pranks; Titania is beautiful, Bottom is grotesque. Further, the three main groups of characters (who are developed from sources as varied as Greek mythology, English folklore, and classical literature) are designed to contrast powerfully with one another: the fairies are graceful and magical, while the craftsmen are clumsy and earthy; the craftsmen are merry, while the lovers are overly serious. Contrast serves as the defining visual characteristic of A Midsummer Nights Dream, with the plays most indelible image being that of the beautiful, delicate Titania weaving flowers into the hair of the ass-headed Bottom. It seems impossible to imagine two figures less compatible with each other. The juxtaposition of extraordinary differences is the most important characteristic of the plays surreal atmosphere and is thus perhaps the plays central motif; there is no scene in which extraordinary contrast is not present. Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Theseus and Hippolyta Theseus and Hippolyta bookend A Midsummer Nights Dream, appearing in the daylight at both the beginning and the end of the plays main action. They disappear, however, for the duration of the action, leaving in the middle of Act I, scene i and not reappearing until Act IV, as the sun is coming up to end the magical night in the forest. Shakespeare uses Theseus and Hippolyta, the ruler of Athens and his warrior bride, to represent order and stability, to contrast with the uncertainty, instability, and darkness of most of the play. Whereas an important element of the dream realm is that one is not in control of ones environment, Theseus and Hippolyta are always entirely in control of theirs. Their reappearance in the

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daylight of Act IV to hear Theseuss hounds signifies the end of the dream state of the previous night and a return to rationality. The Love Potion The love potion is made from the juice of a flower that was struck with one of Cupids misfired arrows; it is used by the fairies to wreak romantic havoc throughout Acts II, III, and IV. Because the meddling fairies are careless with the love potion, the situation of the young Athenian lovers becomes increasingly chaotic and confusing (Demetrius and Lysander are magically compelled to transfer their love from Hermia to Helena), and Titania is hilariously humiliated (she is magically compelled to fall deeply in love with the ass-headed Bottom). The love potion thus becomes a symbol of the unreasoning, fickle, erratic, and undeniably powerful nature of love, which can lead to inexplicable and bizarre behavior and cannot be resisted. The Craftsmens Play The play-within-a-play that takes up most of Act V, scene i is used to represent, in condensed form, many of the important ideas and themes of the main plot. Because the craftsmen are such bumbling actors, their performance satirizes the melodramatic Athenian lovers and gives the play a purely joyful, comedic ending. Pyramus and Thisbe face parental disapproval in the play-within-a-play, just as Hermia and Lysander do; the theme of romantic confusion enhanced by the darkness of night is rehashed, as Pyramus mistakenly believes that Thisbe has been killed by the lion, just as the Athenian lovers experience intense misery because of the mix-ups caused by the fairies meddling. The craftsmens play is, therefore, a kind of symbol for A Midsummer Nights Dream itself: a story involving powerful emotions that is made hilarious by its comical presentation. DANIEL DEFOE- ROBINSON CRUSOE
Adventure story; novel of isolation LANGUAGE English TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN 1719; London, England DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION 1719 PUBLISHER William Taylor NARRATOR Robinson Crusoe is both the narrator and main character of the tale. POINT OF VIEW Crusoe narrates in both the first and third person, presenting what he observes. Crusoe occasionally describes his feelings, but only when they are overwhelming. Usually he favors a more factual narrative style focused on actions and events. TONE Crusoes tone is mostly detached, meticulous, and objective. He displays little rhetorical grandeur and few poetic or colorful turns of phrase. He generally avoids dramatic storytelling, preferring an inventorylike approach to the facts as they unfold. He very rarely registers his own feelings, or those of other characters, and only does so when those feelings affect a situation directly, such as when he describes the mutineers as tired and confused, indicating that their fatigue allows them to be defeated. TENSE Past SETTING (TIME) From 1659 to 1694 SETTING (PLACE) York, England; then London; then Sallee, North Africa; then Brazil; then a deserted island off Trinidad; then England; then Lisbon; then overland from Spain toward England; then England; and finally the island again PROTAGONIST Robinson Crusoe
GENRE

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 Shipwrecked alone, Crusoe struggles against hardship, privation, loneliness, and cannibals in his attempt to survive on a deserted island. RISING ACTION Crusoe disobeys his father and goes out to sea. Crusoe has a profitable first merchant voyage, has fantasies of success in Brazil, and prepares for a slave-gathering expedition. CLIMAX Crusoe becomes shipwrecked on an island near Trinidad, forcing him to fend for himself and his basic needs. FALLING ACTION Crusoe constructs a shelter, secures a food supply, and accepts his stay on the island as the work of Providence. THEMES The ambivalence of mastery; the necessity of repentance; the importance of self-awareness MOTIFS Counting and measuring; eating; ordeals at sea SYMBOLS The footprint; the cross; Crusoes bower
MAJOR CONFLICT

Themes.The Ambivalence of Mastery. Crusoes success in mastering his situation, overcoming his obstacles, and controlling his environment shows the condition of mastery in a positive light, at least at the beginning of the novel. Crusoe lands in an inhospitable environment and makes it his home. His taming and domestication of wild goats and parrots with Crusoe as their master illustrates his newfound control. Moreover, Crusoes mastery over nature makes him a master of his fate and of himself. Early in the novel, he frequently blames himself for disobeying his fathers advice or blames the destiny that drove him to sea. But in the later part of the novel, Crusoe stops viewing himself as a passive victim and strikes a new note of self-determination. In building a home for himself on the island, he finds that he is master of his lifehe suffers a hard fate and still finds prosperity. But this theme of mastery becomes more complex and less positive after Fridays arrival, when the idea of mastery comes to apply more to unfair relationships between humans. In Chapter XXIII, Crusoe teaches Friday the word [m]aster even before teaching himyes and no, and indeed he lets him know that was to be [Crusoes] name. Crusoe never entertains the idea of considering Friday a friend or equalfor some reason, superiority comes instinctively to him. We further question Crusoes right to be called [m]asterwhen he later refers to himself as king over the natives and Europeans, who are his subjects. In short, while Crusoe seems praiseworthy in mastering his fate, the praiseworthiness of his mastery over his fellow humans is more doubtful. Defoe explores the link between the two in his depiction of the colonial mind. The Necessity of Repentance .Crusoes experiences constitute not simply an adventure story in which thrilling things happen, but also a moral tale illustrating the right and wrong ways to live ones life. This moral and religious dimension of the tale is indicated in the Preface, which states that Crusoes story is being published to instruct others in Gods wisdom, and one vital part of this wisdom is the importance of repenting ones sins. While it is important to be grateful for Gods miracles, as Crusoe is when his grain sprouts, it is not enough simply to express gratitude or even to pray to God, as Crusoe does several times with few results. Crusoe needs repentance most, as he learns from the fiery angelic figure that comes to him during a feverish hallucination and says, Seeing all these things have not brought thee to repentance, now thou shalt die. Crusoe believes that his major sin is his rebellious behavior toward his father, which he refers to as his original sin, akin to Adam and Eves first disobedience of God. This biblical reference also suggests that Crusoes exile from civilization represents Adam and Eves expulsion from Eden. For Crusoe, repentance consists of acknowledging his wretchedness and his absolute dependence on the Lord. This admission marks a turning point in Crusoes spiritual consciousness, and is almost a born-again experience for him. After repentance, he complains much less about his sad fate and views the island more positively. Later, when Crusoe is rescued and his fortune restored, he compares himself to Job, who also regained divine favor. Ironically, this view of the necessity of repentance ends up justifying sin: Crusoe may never have learned to repent if he had never sinfully disobeyed his

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father in the first place. Thus, as powerful as the theme of repentance is in the novel, it is nevertheless complex and ambiguous. The Importance of Self-Awareness .Crusoes arrival on the island does not make him revert to a brute existence controlled by animal instincts, and, unlike animals, he remains conscious of himself at all times. Indeed, his island existence actually deepens his self-awareness as he withdraws from the external social world and turns inward. The idea that the individual must keep a careful reckoning of the state of his own soul is a key point in the Presbyterian doctrine that Defoe took seriously all his life. We see that in his normal day-to-day activities, Crusoe keeps accounts of himself enthusiastically and in various ways. For example, it is significant that Crusoes makeshift calendar does not simply mark the passing of days, but instead more egocentrically marks the days he has spent on the island: it is about him, a sort of self-conscious or autobiographical calendar with him at its center. Similarly, Crusoe obsessively keeps a journal to record his daily activities, even when they amount to nothing more than finding a few pieces of wood on the beach or waiting inside while it rains. Crusoe feels the importance of staying aware of his situation at all times. We can also sense Crusoes impulse toward self-awareness in the fact that he teaches his parrot to say the words, Poor Robin Crusoe. . . . Where have you been? This sort of selfexamining thought is natural for anyone alone on a desert island, but it is given a strange intensity when we recall that Crusoe has spent months teaching the bird to say it back to him. Crusoe teaches nature itself to voice his own self-awareness. Motifs .Counting and Measuring .Crusoe is a careful note-taker whenever numbers and quantities are involved. He does not simply tell us that his hedge encloses a large space, but informs us with a surveyors precision that the space is 150 yards in length, and 100 yards in breadth. He tells us not simply that he spends a long time making his canoe in Chapter XVI, but that it takes precisely twenty days to fell the tree and fourteen to remove the branches. It is not just an immense tree, but is five foot ten inches in diameter at the lower part . . . and four foot eleven inches diameter at the end of twenty-two foot. Furthermore, time is measured with similar exactitude, as Crusoes journal shows. We may often wonder why Crusoe feels it useful to record that it did not rain on December 26, but for him the necessity of counting out each day is never questioned. All these examples of counting and measuring underscore Crusoes practical, businesslike character and his hands-on approach to life. But Defoe sometimes hints at the futility of Crusoes measuringas when the carefully measured canoe cannot reach water or when his obsessively kept calendar is thrown off by a day of oversleeping. Defoe may be subtly poking fun at the urge to quantify, showing us that, in the end, everything Crusoe counts never really adds up to much and does not save him from isolation. One of Crusoes first concerns after his shipwreck is his food supply. Even while he is still wet from the sea in Chapter V, he frets about not having anything to eat or drink to comfort me. He soon provides himself with food, and indeed each new edible item marks a new stage in his mastery of the island, so that his food supply becomes a symbol of his survival. His securing of goat meat staves off immediate starvation, and his discovery of grain is viewed as a miracle, like manna from heaven. His cultivation of raisins, almost a luxury food for Crusoe, marks a new comfortable period in his island existence. In a way, these images of eating convey Crusoes ability to integrate the island into his life, just as food is integrated into the body to let the organism grow and prosper. But no sooner does Crusoe master the art of eating than he begins to fear being eaten himself. The cannibals transform Crusoe from the consumer into a potential object to be consumed. Life for Crusoe always illustrates this eat or be eaten philosophy, since even back in Europe he is threatened by man-eating wolves. Eating is an image of existence itself, just as being eaten signifies death for Crusoe. Ordeals at Sea .Crusoes encounters with water in the novel are often associated not simply with hardship, but with a kind of symbolic ordeal, or test of character. First, the storm off the

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coast of Yarmouth frightens Crusoes friend away from a life at sea, but does not deter Crusoe. Then, in his first trading voyage, he proves himself a capable merchant, and in his second one, he shows he is able to survive enslavement. His escape from his Moorish master and his successful encounter with the Africans both occur at sea. Most significantly, Crusoe survives his shipwreck after a lengthy immersion in water. But the sea remains a source of danger and fear even later, when the cannibals arrive in canoes. The Spanish shipwreck reminds Crusoe of the destructive power of water and of his own good fortune in surviving it. All the life-testing water imagery in the novel has subtle associations with the rite of baptism, by which Christians prove their faith and enter a new life saved by Christ. Symbols.The Footprint. Crusoes shocking discovery of a single footprint on the sand in Chapter XVIII is one of the most famous moments in the novel, and it symbolizes our heros conflicted feelings about human companionship. Crusoe has earlier confessed how much he misses companionship, yet the evidence of a man on his island sends him into a panic. Immediately he interprets the footprint negatively, as the print of the devil or of an aggressor. He never for a moment entertains hope that it could belong to an angel or another European who could rescue or befriend him. This instinctively negative and fearful attitude toward others makes us consider the possibility that Crusoe may not want to return to human society after all, and that the isolation he is experiencing may actually be his ideal state. The Cross.Concerned that he will lose [his] reckoning of timein Chapter VII, Crusoe marks the passing of days with [his] knife upon a large post, in capital letters, and making it into a great cross . . . set[s] it up on the shore where [he] first landed. . . . The large size and capital letters show us how important this cross is to Crusoe as a timekeeping device and thus also as a way of relating himself to the larger social world where dates and calendars still matter. But the cross is also a symbol of his own new existence on the island, just as the Christian cross is a symbol of the Christians new life in Christ after baptism, an immersion in water like Crusoes shipwreck experience. Yet Crusoes large cross seems somewhat blasphemous in making no reference to Christ. Instead, it is a memorial to Crusoe himself, underscoring how completely he has become the center of his own life. Crusoes Bower.On a scouting tour around the island, Crusoe discovers a delightful valley in which he decides to build a country retreat or bower in Chapter XII. This bower contrasts sharply with Crusoes first residence, since it is built not for the practical purpose of shelter or storage, but simply for pleasure: because I was so enamoured of the place. Crusoe is no longer focused solely on survival, which by this point in the novel is more or less secure. Now, for the first time since his arrival, he thinks in terms of pleasantness.Thus, the bower symbolizes a radical improvement in Crusoes attitude toward his time on the island. Island life is no longer necessarily a disaster to suffer through, but may be an opportunity for enjoymentjust as, for the Presbyterian, life may be enjoyed only after hard work has been finished and repentance achieved.

JONATHAN SWIFT GULLIVERS TRAVELS Key Facts full title Gullivers Travels, or, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver author Jonathan Swift type of work Novel genre Satire

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language English time and place written Approximately 17121726, London and Dublin date of first publication 1726 (1735 unabridged) Publisher George Faulkner (unabridged 1735 edition) narrator Lemuel Gulliver point of view Gulliver speaks in the first person. He describes other characters and actions as they appear to him. tone Gullivers tone is gullible and nave during the first three voyages; in the fourth, it turns cynical and bitter. The intention of the author, Jonathan Swift, is satirical and biting throughout. tense Past setting (time) Early eighteenth century setting (place) Primarily England and the imaginary countries of Lilliput, Blefuscu, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the land of the Houyhnhnms protagonist Lemuel Gulliver major conflict On the surface, Gulliver strives to understand the various societies with which he comes into contact and to have these societies understand his native England. Below the surface, Swift is engaged in a conflict with the English society he is satirizing. rising action Gullivers encounters with other societies eventually lead up to his rejection of human society in the fourth voyage climax Gulliver rejects human society in the fourth voyage, specifically when he shuns the generous Don Pedro as a vulgar Yahoo falling action Gullivers unhappy return to England accentuates his alienation and compels him to buy horses, which remind him of Houyhnhnms, to keep him company themes Might versus right; the individual versus society; the limits of human understanding motifs Excrement; foreign languages; clothing symbols Lilliputians; Brobdingnagians; Laputans; Houyhnhnms; England foreshadowing Gullivers experiences with various flawed societies foreshadow his ultimate rejection of human society in the fourth voyage.
Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes.Might Versus Right.Gullivers Travels implicitly poses the question of whether physical power or moral righteousness should be the governing factor in social life. Gulliver experiences the advantages of physical might both as one who has it, as a giant in Lilliput where he can defeat the Blefuscudian navy by virtue of his immense size, and as one who does not have it, as a miniature visitor to Brobdingnag where he is harassed by the hugeness of everything from insects to household pets. His first encounter with another society is one of entrapment, when he is physically tied down by the Lilliputians; later, in Brobdingnag, he is enslaved by a farmer. He also observes physical force used against others, as with the Houyhnhnms chaining up of the Yahoos. But alongside the use of physical force, there are also many claims to power based on moral correctness. The whole point of the egg controversy that has set Lilliput against Blefuscu is not merely a cultural difference but, instead, a religious and moral issue related to the proper interpretation of a passage in their holy book. This difference of opinion seems to justify, in their eyes at least, the warfare it has sparked. Similarly, the use of physical force against the Yahoos is justified for the Houyhnhnms by their sense of moral superiority: they are cleaner, better behaved, and more rational. But overall, the novel tends to show that claims to rule on the basis of moral righteousness are often just as arbitrary as, and sometimes simply disguises for, simple physical subjugation. The Laputans keep the lower land of Balnibarbi in check through force because they believe themselves to be more rational, even though we might see them as absurd and unpleasant. Similarly, the ruling elite of

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Balnibarbi believes itself to be in the right in driving Lord Munodi from power, although we perceive that Munodi is the rational party. Claims to moral superiority are, in the end, as hard to justify as the random use of physical force to dominate others. The Individual Versus Society.Like many narratives about voyages to nonexistent lands, Gullivers Travels explores the idea of utopiaan imaginary model of the ideal community. The idea of a utopia is an ancient one, going back at least as far as the description in Platos Republic of a city-state governed by the wise and expressed most famously in English by Thomas Mores Utopia. Swift nods to both works in his own narrative, though his attitude toward utopia is much more skeptical, and one of the main aspects he points out about famous historical utopias is the tendency to privilege the collective group over the individual. The children of Platos Republic are raised communally, with no knowledge of their biological parents, in the understanding that this system enhances social fairness. Swift has the Lilliputians similarly raise their offspring collectively, but its results are not exactly utopian, since Lilliput is torn by conspiracies, jealousies, and backstabbing. The Houyhnhnms also practice strict family planning, dictating that the parents of two females should exchange a child with a family of two males, so that the male-to-female ratio is perfectly maintained. Indeed, they come closer to the utopian ideal than the Lilliputians in their wisdom and rational simplicity. But there is something unsettling about the Houyhnhnms indistinct personalities and about how they are the only social group that Gulliver encounters who do not have proper names. Despite minor physical differences, they are all so good and rational that they are more or less interchangeable, without individual identities. In their absolute fusion with their society and lack of individuality, they are in a sense the exact opposite of Gulliver, who has hardly any sense of belonging to his native society and exists only as an individual eternally wandering the seas. Gullivers intense grief when forced to leave the Houyhnhnms may have something to do with his longing for union with a community in which he can lose his human identity. In any case, such a union is impossible for him, since he is not a horse, and all the other societies he visits make him feel alienated as well. Gullivers Travels could in fact be described as one of the first novels of modern alienation, focusing on an individuals repeated failures to integrate into societies to which he does not belong. England itself is not much of a homeland for Gulliver, and, with his surgeons business unprofitable and his fathers estate insufficient to support him, he may be right to feel alienated from it. He never speaks fondly or nostalgically about England, and every time he returns home, he is quick to leave again. Gulliver never complains explicitly about feeling lonely, but the embittered and antisocial misanthrope we see at the end of the novel is clearly a profoundly isolated individual. Thus, if Swifts satire mocks the excesses of communal life, it may also mock the excesses of individualism in its portrait of a miserable and lonely Gulliver talking to his horses at home in England. The Limits of Human Understanding.The idea that humans are not meant to know everything and that all understanding has a natural limit is important in Gullivers Travels. Swift singles out theoretical knowledge in particular for attack: his portrait of the disagreeable and self-centered Laputans, who show blatant contempt for those who are not sunk in private theorizing, is a clear satire against those who pride themselves on knowledge above all else. Practical knowledge is also satirized when it does not produce results, as in the academy of Balnibarbi, where the experiments for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers amount to nothing. Swift insists that there is a realm of understanding into which humans are simply not supposed to venture. Thus his depictions of rational societies, like Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnmland, emphasize not these peoples knowledge or understanding of abstract ideas but their ability to live their lives in a wise and steady way. The Brobdingnagian king knows shockingly little about the abstractions of political science, yet his country seems prosperous and well governed. Similarly, the Houyhnhnms know little about arcane

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subjects like astronomy, though they know how long a month is by observing the moon, since that knowledge has a practical effect on their well-being. Aspiring to higher fields of knowledge would be meaningless to them and would interfere with their happiness. In such contexts, it appears that living a happy and well-ordered life seems to be the very thing for which Swift thinks knowledge is useful.

Swift also emphasizes the importance of self-understanding. Gulliver is initially remarkably lacking in self-reflection and self-awareness. He makes no mention of his emotions, passions, dreams, or aspirations, and he shows no interest in describing his own psychology to us. Accordingly, he may strike us as frustratingly hollow or empty, though it is likely that his personal emptiness is part of the overall meaning of the novel. By the end, he has come close to a kind of twisted self-knowledge in his deranged belief that he is a Yahoo. His revulsion with the human condition, shown in his shabby treatment of the generous Don Pedro, extends to himself as well, so that he ends the novel in a thinly disguised state of self-hatred. Swift may thus be saying that self-knowledge has its necessary limits just as theoretical knowledge does, and that if we look too closely at ourselves we might not be able to carry on living happily.
Motifs..Excrement.While it may seem a trivial or laughable motif, the recurrent mention of excrement in Gullivers Travels actually has a serious philosophical significance in the narrative. It symbolizes everything that is crass and ignoble about the human body and about human existence in general, and it obstructs any attempt to view humans as wholly spiritual or mentally transcendent creatures. Since the Enlightenment culture of eighteenth-century England tended to view humans optimistically as noble souls rather than vulgar bodies, Swifts emphasis on the common filth of life is a slap in the face of the philosophers of his day. Thus, when Gulliver urinates to put out a fire in Lilliput, or when Brobdingnagian flies defecate on his meals, or when the scientist in Lagado works to transform excrement back into food, we are reminded how very little human reason has to do with everyday existence. Swift suggests that the human condition in general is dirtier and lowlier than we might like to believe it is. Foreign Languages.Gulliver appears to be a gifted linguist, knowing at least the basics of several European languages and even a fair amount of ancient Greek. This knowledge serves him well, as he is able to disguise himself as a Dutchman in order to facilitate his entry into Japan, which at the time only admitted the Dutch. But even more important, his linguistic gifts allow him to learn the languages of the exotic lands he visits with a dazzling speed and, thus, gain access to their culture quickly. He learns the languages of the Lilliputians, the Brobdingnagians, and even the neighing tongue of the Houyhnhnms. He is meticulous in recording the details of language in his narrative, often giving the original as well as the translation. One would expect that such detail would indicate a cross-cultural sensitivity, a kind of anthropologists awareness of how things vary from culture to culture. Yet surprisingly, Gullivers mastery of foreign languages generally does not correspond to any real interest in cultural differences. He compares any of the governments he visits to that of his native England, and he rarely even speculates on how or why cultures are different at all. Thus, his facility for translation does not indicate a culturally comparative mind, and we are perhaps meant to yearn for a narrator who is a bit less able to remember the Brobdingnagian word for lark and better able to offer a more illuminating kind of cultural analysis. Clothing.Critics have noted the extraordinary attention that Gulliver pays to clothes throughout his journeys. Every time he gets a rip in his shirt or is forced to adopt some native garment to replace one of his own, he recounts the clothing details with great precision. We are told how his pants are falling apart in Lilliput, so that as the army marches between his legs they get quite an eyeful. We are informed about the mouse skin he wears in Brobdingnag, and how the finest silks of the land are as thick as blankets on him. In one sense, these

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descriptions are obviously an easy narrative device with which Swift can chart his protagonists progression from one culture to another: the more ragged his clothes become and the stranger his new wardrobe, the farther he is from the comforts and conventions of England. His journey to new lands is also thus a journey into new clothes. When he is picked up by Don Pedro after his fourth voyage and offered a new suit of clothes, Gulliver vehemently refuses, preferring his wild animal skins. We sense that Gulliver may well never fully reintegrate into European society. But the motif of clothing carries a deeper, more psychologically complex meaning as well. Gullivers intense interest in the state of his clothes may signal a deep-seated anxiety about his identity, or lack thereof. He does not seem to have much selfhood: one critic has called him an abyss, a void where an individual character should be. If clothes make the man, then perhaps Gullivers obsession with the state of his wardrobe may suggest that he desperately needs to be fashioned as a personality. Significantly, the two moments when he describes being naked in the novel are two deeply troubling or humiliating experiences: the first when he is the boy toy of the Brobdingnagian maids who let him cavort nude on their mountainous breasts, and the second when he is assaulted by an eleven-year-old Yahoo girl as he bathes. Both incidents suggest more than mere prudery. Gulliver associates nudity with extreme vulnerability, even when there is no real danger presenta pre-teen girl is hardly a threat to a grown man, at least in physical terms. The state of nudity may remind Gulliver of how nonexistent he feels without the reassuring cover of clothing.

Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Lilliputians.The Lilliputians symbolize humankinds wildly excessive pride in its own puny existence. Swift fully intends the irony of representing the tiniest race visited by Gulliver as by far the most vainglorious and smug, both collectively and individually. There is surely no character more odious in all of Gullivers travels than the noxious Skyresh. There is more backbiting and conspiracy in Lilliput than anywhere else, and more of the pettiness of small minds who imagine themselves to be grand. Gulliver is a nave consumer of the Lilliputians grandiose imaginings: he is flattered by the attention of their royal family and cowed by their threats of punishment, forgetting that they have no real physical power over him. Their formally worded condemnation of Gulliver on grounds of treason is a model of pompous and self-important verbiage, but it works quite effectively on the nave Gulliver. The Lilliputians show off not only to Gulliver but to themselves as well. There is no mention of armies proudly marching in any of the other societies Gulliver visitsonly in Lilliput and neighboring Blefuscu are the six-inch inhabitants possessed of the need to show off their patriotic glories with such displays. When the Lilliputian emperor requests that Gulliver serve as a kind of makeshift Arch of Triumph for the troops to pass under, it is a pathetic reminder that their grand paradein full view of Gullivers nether regionsis supremely silly, a basically absurd way to boost the collective ego of the nation. Indeed, the war with Blefuscu is itself an absurdity springing from wounded vanity, since the cause is not a material concern like disputed territory but, rather, the proper interpretation of scripture by the emperors forebears and the hurt feelings resulting from the disagreement. All in all, the Lilliputians symbolize misplaced human pride, and point out Gullivers inability to diagnose it correctly. Brobdingnagians.The Brobdingnagians symbolize the private, personal, and physical side of humans when examined up close and in great detail. The philosophical era of the Enlightenment tended to overlook the routines of everyday life and the sordid or tedious little facts of existence, but in Brobdingnag such facts become very important for Gulliver, sometimes matters of life and death. An eighteenth-century philosopher could afford to ignore the fly buzzing around his head or the skin pores on his servant girl, but in his shrunken state

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Gulliver is forced to pay great attention to such things. He is forced take the domestic sphere seriously as well. In other lands it is difficult for Gulliver, being such an outsider, to get glimpses of family relations or private affairs, but in Brobdingnag he is treated as a doll or a plaything, and thus is made privy to the urination of housemaids and the sexual lives of women. The Brobdingnagians do not symbolize a solely negative human characteristic, as the Laputans do. They are not merely ridiculoussome aspects of them are disgusting, like their gigantic stench and the excrement left by their insects, but others are noble, like the queens goodwill toward Gulliver and the kings commonsense views of politics. More than anything else, the Brobdingnagians symbolize a dimension of human existence visible at close range, under close scrutiny. Laputans.The Laputans represent the folly of theoretical knowledge that has no relation to human life and no use in the actual world. As a profound cultural conservative, Swift was a critic of the newfangled ideas springing up around him at the dawn of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a period of great intellectual experimentation and theorization. He much preferred the traditional knowledge that had been tested over centuries. Laputa symbolizes the absurdity of knowledge that has never been tested or applied, the ludicrous side of Enlightenment intellectualism. Even down below in Balnibarbi, where the local academy is more inclined to practical application, knowledge is not made socially useful as Swift demands. Indeed, theoretical knowledge there has proven positively disastrous, resulting in the ruin of agriculture and architecture and the impoverishment of the population. Even up above, the pursuit of theoretical understanding has not improved the lot of the Laputans. They have few material worries, dependent as they are upon the Balnibarbians below. But they are tormented by worries about the trajectories of comets and other astronomical speculations: their theories have not made them wise, but neurotic and disagreeable. The Laputans do not symbolize reason itself but rather the pursuit of a form of knowledge that is not directly related to the improvement of human life. Houyhnhnms.The Houyhnhnms represent an ideal of rational existence, a life governed by sense and moderation of which philosophers since Plato have long dreamed. Indeed, there are echoes of Platos Republic in the Houyhnhnms rejection of light entertainment and vain displays of luxury, their appeal to reason rather than any holy writings as the criterion for proper action, and their communal approach to family planning. As in Platos ideal community, the Houyhnhnms have no need to lie nor any word for lying. They do not use force but only strong exhortation. Their subjugation of the Yahoos appears more necessary than cruel and perhaps the best way to deal with an unfortunate blot on their otherwise ideal society. In these ways and others, the Houyhnhnms seem like model citizens, and Gullivers intense grief when he is forced to leave them suggests that they have made an impact on him greater than that of any other society he has visited. His derangement on Don Pedros ship, in which he snubs the generous man as a Yahoo-like creature, implies that he strongly identifies with the Houyhnhnms. But we may be less ready than Gulliver to take the Houyhnhnms as ideals of human existence. They have no names in the narrative nor any need for names, since they are virtually interchangeable, with little individual identity. Their lives seem harmonious and happy, although quite lacking in vigor, challenge, and excitement. Indeed, this apparent ease may be why Swift chooses to make them horses rather than human types like every other group in the novel. He may be hinting, to those more insightful than Gulliver, that the Houyhnhnms should not be considered human ideals at all. In any case, they symbolize a standard of rational existence to be either espoused or rejected by both Gulliver and us. England.As the site of his fathers disappointingly small estateand Gullivers failing business, England seems to symbolize deficiency or insufficiency, at least in the financial sense that matters most to Gulliver. England is passed over very quickly in the first paragraph of

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Chapter I, as if to show that it is simply there as the starting point to be left quickly behind. Gulliver seems to have very few nationalistic or patriotic feelings about England, and he rarely mentions his homeland on his travels. In this sense, Gullivers Travels is quite unlike other travel narratives like the Odyssey, in which Odysseus misses his homeland and laments his wanderings. England is where Gullivers wife and family live, but they too are hardly mentioned. Yet Swift chooses to have Gulliver return home after each of his four journeys instead of having him continue on one long trip to four different places, so that England is kept constantly in the picture and given a steady, unspoken importance. By the end of the fourth journey, England is brought more explicitly into the fabric of Gullivers Travels when Gulliver, in his neurotic state, starts confusing Houyhnhnmland with his homeland, referring to Englishmen as Yahoos. The distinction between native and foreign thus unravelsthe Houyhnhnms and Yahoos are not just races populating a faraway land but rather types that Gulliver projects upon those around him. The possibility thus arises that all the races Gulliver encounters could be versions of the English and that his travels merely allow him to see various aspects of human nature more clearly.

JOHN KEATS ODES(Ode on Indolence,Ode to Psyche,Ode to a Nightingale,Ode on a Grecian Urn,Ode on Melancholy,To Autumn) ThemesThe Inevitability of Death.Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused on death and its inevitability in his work. For Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred every day, and he chronicled these small mortal occurrences. The end of a lovers embrace, the images on an ancient urn, the reaping of grain in autumnall of these are not only symbols of death, but instances of it. Examples of great beauty and art also caused Keats to ponder mortality, as in On Seeing the Elgin Marbles (1817). As a writer, Keats hoped he would live long enough to achieve his poetic dream of becoming as great as Shakespeare or John Milton: in Sleep and Poetry (1817), Keats outlined a plan of poetic achievement that required him to read poetry for a decade in order to understandand surpassthe work of his predecessors. Hovering near this dream, however, was a morbid sense that death might intervene and terminate his projects; he expresses these concerns in the mournful 1818 sonnet When I have fears that I may cease to be. The Contemplation of Beauty.In his poetry, Keats proposed the contemplation of beauty as a way of delaying the inevitability of death. Although we must die eventually, we can choose to spend our time alive in aesthetic revelry, looking at beautiful objects and landscapes. Keatss speakers contemplate urns (Ode on a Grecian Urn), books (On First Looking into Chapmans Homer [1816], On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again [1818]), birds (Ode to a Nightingale), and stars (Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art [1819]). Unlike mortal beings, beautiful things will never die but will keep demonstrating their beauty for all time. Keats explores this idea in the first book of Endymion (1818). The speaker in Ode on a Grecian Urn envies the immortality of the lute players and trees inscribed on the ancient vessel because they shall never cease playing their songs, nor will they ever shed their leaves. He reassures young lovers by telling them that even though they shall never catch their mistresses, these women shall always stay beautiful. The people on the urn, unlike the speaker, shall never stop having experiences. They shall remain permanently depicted while the speaker changes, grows old, and eventually dies.

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Motifs.Departures and Reveries.In many of Keatss poems, the speaker leaves the real world to explore a transcendent, mythical, or aesthetic realm. At the end of the poem, the speaker returns to his ordinary life transformed in some way and armed with a new understanding. Often the appearance or contemplation of a beautiful object makes the departure possible. The ability to get lost in a reverie, to depart conscious life for imaginative life without wondering about plausibility or rationality, is part of Keatss concept of negative capability. In Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art, the speaker imagines a state of sweet unrest (12) in which he will remain half-conscious on his lovers breast forever. As speakers depart this world for an imaginative world, they have experiences and insights that they can then impart into poetry once theyve returned to conscious life. Keats explored the relationship between visions and poetry in Ode to Psyche and Ode to a Nightingale.

The Five Senses and Art.Keats imagined that the five senses loosely corresponded to and
connected with various types of art. The speaker in Ode on a Grecian Urn describes the pictures depicted on the urn, including lovers chasing one another, musicians playing instruments, and a virginal maiden holding still. All the figures remain motionless, held fast and permanent by their depiction on the sides of the urn, and they cannot touch one another, even though we can touch them by holding the vessel. Although the poem associates sight and sound, because we see the musicians playing, we cannot hear the music. Similarly, the speaker in On First Looking into Chapmans Homercompares hearing Homers words to pure serene (7) air so that reading, or seeing, becomes associating with breathing, or smelling. In Ode to a Nightingale, the speaker longs for a drink of crystal-clear water or wine so that he might adequately describe the sounds of the bird singing nearby. Each of the five senses must be involved in worthwhile experiences, which, in turn, lead to the production of worthwhile art. The Disappearance of the Poet and the Speaker.In Keatss theory of negative capability, the poet disappears from the workthat is, the work itself chronicles an experience in such a way that the reader recognizes and responds to the experience without requiring the intervention or explanation of the poet. Keatss speakers become so enraptured with an object that they erase themselves and their thoughts from their depiction of that object. In essence, the speaker/poet becomes melded to and indistinguishable from the object being described. For instance, the speaker of Ode on a Grecian Urn describes the scenes on the urn for several stanzas until the famous conclusion about beauty and truth, which is enclosed in quotation marks. Since the poems publication in 1820, critics have theorized about who speaks these lines, whether the poet, the speaker, the urn, or one or all the figures on the urn. The erasure of the speaker and the poet is so complete in this particular poem that the quoted lines are jarring and troubling. Symbols.Music and Musicians.Music and musicians appear throughout Keatss work as symbols of poetry and poets. In Ode on a Grecian Urn, for instance, the speaker describes musicians playing their pipes. Although we cannot literally hear their music, by using our imaginations, we can imagine and thus hear music. The speaker of To Autumn reassures us that the season of fall, like spring, has songs to sing. Fall, the season of changing leaves and decay, is as worthy of poetry as spring, the season of flowers and rejuvenation. Ode to a Nightingale uses the birds music to contrast the mortality of humans with the immortality of art. Caught up in beautiful birdsong, the speaker imagines himself capable of using poetry to join the bird in the forest. The beauty of the birds music represents the ecstatic, imaginative possibilities of poetry. As mortal beings who will eventually die, we can delay death through the timelessness of music, poetry, and other types of art. Nature.Like his fellow romantic poets, Keats found in nature endless sources of poetic inspiration, and he described the natural world with precision and care. Observing elements of nature allowed Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, among others, to create extended

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meditations and thoughtful odes about aspects of the human condition. For example, in Ode to a Nightingale, hearing the birds song causes the speaker to ruminate on the immortality of art and the mortality of humans. The speaker of Ode on Melancholy compares a bout of depression to a weeping cloud (12), then goes on to list specific flowers that are linked to sadness. He finds in nature apt images for his psychological state. In Ode to Psyche, the speaker mines the night sky to find ways to worship the Roman goddess Psyche as a muse: a star becomes an amorous glow-worm (27), and the moon rests amid a background of dark blue. Keats not only uses nature as a springboard from which to ponder, but he also discovers in nature similes, symbols, and metaphors for the spiritual and emotional states he seeks to describe. The Ancient World.Keats had an enduring interest in antiquity and the ancient world. His longer poems, such as The Fall of Hyperion or Lamia, often take place in a mythical world not unlike that of classical antiquity. He borrowed figures from ancient mythology to populate poems, such as Ode to Psyche and To Homer (1818). For Keats, ancient myth and antique objects, such as the Grecian urn, have a permanence and solidity that contrasts with the fleeting, temporary nature of life. In ancient cultures, Keats saw the possibility of permanent artistic achievement: if an urn still spoke to someone several centuries after its creation, there was hope that a poem or artistic object from Keatss time might continue to speak to readers or observers after the death of Keats or another writer or creator. This achievement was one of Keatss great hopes. In an 1818 letter to his brother George, Keats quietly prophesied: I think I shall be among the English poets after my death. S.T COLERIDGE THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER Themes.The Transformative Power of the Imagination.Coleridge believed that a strong, active imagination could become a vehicle for transcending unpleasant circumstances. Many of his poems are powered exclusively by imaginative flights, wherein the speaker temporarily abandons his immediate surroundings, exchanging them for an entirely new and completely fabricated experience. Using the imagination in this way is both empowering and surprising because it encourages a total and complete disrespect for the confines of time and place. These mental and emotional jumps are often well rewarded. Perhaps Coleridges most famous use of imagination occurs in This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison (1797), in which the speaker employs a keen poetic mind that allows him to take part in a journey that he cannot physically make. When hereturns to the bower, after having imagined himself on a fantastic stroll through the countryside, the speaker discovers, as a reward, plenty of things to enjoy from inside the bower itself, including the leaves, the trees, and the shadows. The power of imagination transforms the prison into a perfectly pleasant spot. The Interplay of Philosophy, Piety, and Poetry.Coleridge used his poetry to explore conflicting issues in philosophy and religious piety. Some critics argue that Coleridges interest in philosophy was simply his attempt to understand the imaginative and intellectual impulses that fueled his poetry. To support the claim that his imaginative and intellectual forces were, in fact, organic and derived from the natural world, Coleridge linked them to God, spirituality, and worship. In his work, however, poetry, philosophy, and piety clashed, creating friction and disorder for Coleridge, both on and off the page. In The Eolian Harp (1795), Coleridge struggles to reconcile the three forces. Here, the speakers philosophical tendencies, particularly the belief that an intellectual breeze (47) brushes by and inhabits all living things with consciousness, collide with those of his orthodox wife, who disapproves of his unconventional ideas and urges him to Christ. While his wife lies untroubled, the speaker agonizes over his spiritual conflict, caught between Christianity and a unique, individual spirituality that equates nature with God. The poem ends by discounting the pantheist spirit, and the speaker concludes by privileging God and Christ

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over nature and praising them for having healed him from the spiritual wounds inflicted by these unorthodox views. Nature and the Development of the Individual.Coleridge, Wordsworth, and other romantic poets praised the unencumbered, imaginative soul of youth, finding images in nature with which to describe it. According to their formulation, experiencing nature was an integral part of the development of a complete soul and sense of personhood. The death of his father forced Coleridge to attend school in London, far away from the rural idylls of his youth, and he lamented the missed opportunities of his sheltered, city-bound adolescence in many poems, including Frost at Midnight(1798). Here, the speaker sits quietly by a fire, musing on his life, while his infant son sleeps nearby. He recalls his boarding school days, during which he would both daydream and lull himself to sleep by remembering his home far away from the city, and he tells his son that he shall never be removed from nature, the way the speaker once was. Unlike the speaker, the son shall experience the seasons and shall learn about God by discovering the beauty and bounty of the natural world. The son shall be given the opportunity to develop a relationship with God and with nature, an opportunity denied to both the speaker and Coleridge himself. For Coleridge, nature had the capacity to teach joy, love, freedom, and piety, crucial characteristics for a worthy, developed individual. Motifs.Conversation Poems.Coleridge wanted to mimic the patterns and cadences of everyday speech in his poetry. Many of his poems openly address a single figurethe speakers wife, son, friend, and so onwho listens silently to the simple, straightforward language of the speaker. Unlike the descriptive, long, digressive poems of Coleridges classicist predecessors, Coleridges so-called conversation poems are short, self-contained, and often without a discernable poetic form. Colloquial, spontaneous, and friendly, Coleridges conversation poetry is also highly personal, frequently incorporating events and details of his domestic life in an effort to widen the scope of possible poetic content. Although he sometimes wrote in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, he adapted this metrical form to suit a more colloquial rhythm. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge believed that everyday language and speech rhythms would help broaden poetrys audience to include the middle and lower classes, who might have felt excluded or put off by the form and content of neoclassicists, such as Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and John Dryden. Delight in the Natural World.Like the other romantics, Coleridge worshiped nature and recognized poetrys capacity to describe the beauty of the natural world. Nearly all of Coleridges poems express a respect for and delight in natural beauty. Close observation, great attention to detail, and precise descriptions of color aptly demonstrate Coleridges respect and delight. Some poems, such as This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Youth and Age (1834), and Frost at Midnight, mourn the speakers physical isolation from the outside world. Others, including The Eolian Harp, use images of nature to explore philosophical and analytical ideas. Still other poems, including The Nightingale (ca. 1798), simply praise natures beauty. Even poems that dont directly deal with nature, including Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,derive some symbols and images from nature. Nevertheless, Coleridge guarded against the pathetic fallacy, or the attribution of human feeling to the natural world. To Coleridge, nature contained an innate, constant joyousness wholly separate from the ups and downs of human experience. Prayer.Although Coleridges prose reveals more of his religious philosophizing than his poetry, God, Christianity, and the act of prayer appear in some form in nearly all of his poems. The son of an Anglican vicar, Coleridge vacillated from supporting to criticizing Christian tenets and the Church of England. Despite his criticisms, Coleridge remained defiantly supportive of prayer, praising it in his notebooks and repeatedly referencing it in his poems. He once told the novelist Thomas de Quincey that prayer demanded such close attention that it was the one of the hardest actions of which human hearts were capable. The conclusion to Part

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1 of Christabel portrays Christabel in prayer, a lovely sight to see (279). In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the mariner is stripped of his ability to speak as part of his extreme punishment and, consequently, left incapable of praying. The Pains of Sleep (1803) contrasts the speaker at restful prayer, in which he prays silently, with the speaker at passionate prayer, in which he battles imaginary demons to pray aloud. In the sad poem, Epitaph (1833), Coleridge composes an epitaph for himself, which urges people to pray for him after he dies. Rather than recommend a manner or method of prayer, Coleridges poems reflect a wide variety, which emphasizes his belief in the importance of individuality. Symbols.The Sun.Coleridge believed that symbolic language was the only acceptable way of expressing deep religious truths and consistently employed the sun as a symbol of God. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge compares the sun to Gods own head (97) and, later, attributes the first phase of the mariners punishment to the sun, as it dehydrates the crew. All told, this poem contains eleven references to the sun, many of which signify the Christian conception of a wrathful, vengeful God. Bad, troubling things happen to the crew during the day, while smooth sailing and calm weather occur at night, by the light of the moon. Frequently, the sun stands in for Gods influence and power, as well as a symbol of his authority. The setting sun spurs philosophical musings, as in The Eolian Harp,and the dancing rays of sunlight represent a pinnacle of natures beauty, as in This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison. The Moon.Like the sun, the moon often symbolizes God, but the moon has more positive connotations than the sun. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the sun and the moon represent two sides of the Christian God: the sun represents the angry, wrathful God, whereas the moon represents the benevolent, repentant God. All told, the moon appears fourteen times in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,and generally favorable things occur during night, in contrast to the horrors that occur during the day. For example, the mariners curse lifts and he returns home by moonlight. Dejection: An Ode(1802) begins with an epitaph about the new moon and goes on to describe the beauty of a moonlit night, contrasting its beauty with the speakers sorrowful soul. Similarly, Frost at Midnight also praises the moon as it illuminates icicles on a winter evening and spurs the speaker to great thought. Dreams and Dreaming.Coleridge explores dreams and dreaming in his poetry to communicate the power of the imagination, as well as the inaccessible clarity of vision. Kubla Khan is subtitled A Vision in a Dream.According to Coleridge, he fell asleep while reading and dreamed of a marvelous pleasure palace for the next few hours. Upon awakening, he began transcribing the dream-vision but was soon called away; when he returned, he wrote out the fragments that now comprise Kubla Khan. Some critics doubt Coleridges story, attributing it to an attempt at increasing the poems dramatic effect. Nevertheless, the poem speaks to the imaginative possibilities of the subconscious. Dreams usually have a pleasurable connotation, as in Frost at Midnight.There, the speaker, lonely and insomniac as a child at boarding school, comforts himself by imagining and then dreaming of his rural home. In his real life, however, Coleridge suffered from nightmares so terrible that sometimes his own screams would wake him, a phenomenon he details in The Pains of Sleep. Opium probably gave Coleridge a sense of well-being that allowed him to sleep without the threat of nightmares.

JANE AUSTEN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

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Key Facts
FULL TITLE

Pride and Prejudice Novel

TYPE OF WORK

GENRE

Comedy of manners English England, between 1796 and 1813 1813

LANGUAGE

TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN

DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION PUBLISHER NARRATOR CLIMAX

Thomas Egerton of London Third-person omniscient

Mr. Darcys proposal to Elizabeth (Volume 3, Chapter 16) Elizabeth Bennet Snobbish class-consciousness (epitomized by Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Miss Some point during the Napoleonic Wars (17971815) Longbourn, in rural England

PROTAGONIST ANTAGONIST

Bingley)
SETTING (TIME)

SETTING (PLACE) POINT OF VIEW

The novel is primarily told from Elizabeth Bennets point of view. The two chapters of the novel after Darcys proposal

FALLING ACTION TENSE

Past tense

The only notable example of foreshadowing occurs when Elizabeth visits Pemberley, Darcys estate, in Volume 3, Chapter 1. Her appreciation of the estate foreshadows her eventual realization of her love for its owner.
FORESHADOWING TONE

Comicor, in Jane Austens own words, light and bright, and sparkling Love; Reputation; Class Courtship; Journeys

THEMES MOTIFS

The novel is light on symbolism, except on the visit to Pemberley, which is described as being neither formal, nor falsely adorned,and is clearly meant to symbolize the character of Mr. Darcy.
SYMBOLS

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

ThemES
Love.Pride and Prejudice contains one of the most cherished love stories in English literature: the courtship between Darcy and Elizabeth. As in any good love story, the lovers must elude and overcome numerous stumbling blocks, beginning with the tensions caused by the lovers own personal qualities. Elizabeths pride makes her misjudge Darcy on the basis of a poor first impression, while Darcys prejudice against Elizabeths poor social standing

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blinds him, for a time, to her many virtues. (Of course, one could also say that Elizabeth is guilty of prejudice and Darcy of pridethe title cuts both ways.) Austen, meanwhile, poses countless smaller obstacles to the realization of the love between Elizabeth and Darcy, including Lady Catherines attempt to control her nephew, Miss Bingleys snobbery, Mrs. Bennets idiocy, and Wickhams deceit. In each case, anxieties about social connections, or the desire for better social connections, interfere with the workings of love. Darcy and Elizabeths realization of a mutual and tender love seems to imply that Austen views love as something independent of these social forces, as something that can be captured if only an individual is able to escape the warping effects of hierarchical society. Austen does sound some more realist (or, one could say, cynical) notes about love, using the character of Charlotte Lucas, who marries the buffoon Mr. Collins for his money, to demonstrate that the heart does not always dictate marriage. Yet with her central characters, Austen suggests that true love is a force separate from society and one that can conquer even the most difficult of circumstances. Reputation.Pride and Prejudice depicts a society in which a womans reputation is of the utmost importance. A woman is expected to behave in certain ways. Stepping outside the social norms makes her vulnerable to ostracism. This theme appears in the novel, when Elizabeth walks to Netherfield and arrives with muddy skirts, to the shock of the reputationconscious Miss Bingley and her friends. At other points, the ill-mannered, ridiculous behavior of Mrs. Bennet gives her a bad reputation with the more refined (and snobbish) Darcys and Bingleys. Austen pokes gentle fun at the snobs in these examples, but later in the novel, when Lydia elopes with Wickham and lives with him out of wedlock, the author treats reputation as a very serious matter. By becoming Wickhams lover without benefit of marriage, Lydia clearly places herself outside the social pale, and her disgrace threatens the entire Bennet family. The fact that Lydias judgment, however terrible, would likely have condemned the other Bennet sisters to marriageless lives seems grossly unfair. Why should Elizabeths reputation suffer along with Lydias? Darcys intervention on the Bennets behalf thus becomes all the more generous, but some readers might resent that such an intervention was necessary at all. If Darcys money had failed to convince Wickham to marry Lydia, would Darcy have still married Elizabeth? Does his transcendence of prejudice extend that far? The happy ending of Pride and Prejudice is certainly emotionally satisfying, but in many ways it leaves the theme of reputation, and the importance placed on reputation, unexplored. One can ask of Pride and Prejudice, to what extent does it critique social structures, and to what extent does it simply accept their inevitability?

Class.The theme of class is related to reputation, in that both reflect the strictly regimented nature of
life for the middle and upper classes in Regency England. The lines of class are strictly drawn. While the Bennets, who are middle class, may socialize with the upper-class Bingleys and Darcys, they are clearly their social inferiors and are treated as such. Austen satirizes this kind of class-consciousness, particularly in the character of Mr. Collins, who spends most of his time toadying to his upper-class patron, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Though Mr. Collins offers an extreme example, he is not the only one to hold such views. His conception of the importance of class is shared, among others, by Mr. Darcy, who believes in the dignity of his lineage; Miss Bingley, who dislikes anyone not as socially accepted as she is; and Wickham, who will do anything he can to get enough money to raise himself into a higher station. Mr. Collinss views are merely the most extreme and obvious. The satire directed at Mr. Collins is therefore also more subtly directed at the entire social hierarchy and the conception of all those within it at its correctness, in complete disregard of other, more worthy virtues. Through the Darcy-Elizabeth and Bingley-Jane marriages, Austen shows the power of love and happiness to overcome class boundaries and prejudices, thereby implying that such prejudices are hollow, unfeeling, and unproductive. Of course, this whole discussion of class must be made with the understanding that Austen herself is often criticized as being a classist: she doesnt really represent anyone from the lower classes; those servants she does portray are generally

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happy with their lot. Austen does criticize class structure but only a limited slice of that structure.

Motifs .Courtship.In a sense, Pride and Prejudice is the story of two courtshipsthose between
Darcy and Elizabeth and between Bingley and Jane. Within this broad structure appear other, smaller courtships: Mr. Collinss aborted wooing of Elizabeth, followed by his successful wooing of Charlotte Lucas; Miss Bingleys unsuccessful attempt to attract Darcy; Wickhams pursuit first of Elizabeth, then of the never-seen Miss King, and finally of Lydia. Courtship therefore takes on a profound, if often unspoken, importance in the novel. Marriage is the ultimate goal, courtship constitutes the real working-out of love. Courtship becomes a sort of forge of a persons personality, and each courtship becomes a microcosm for different sorts of love (or different ways to abuse love as a means to social advancement). Journeys.Nearly every scene in Pride and Prejudice takes place indoors, and the action centers around the Bennet home in the small village of Longbourn. Nevertheless, journeyseven short onesfunction repeatedly as catalysts for change in the novel. Elizabeths first journey, by which she intends simply to visit Charlotte and Mr. Collins, brings her into contact with Mr. Darcy, and leads to his first proposal. Her second journey takes her to Derby and Pemberley, where she fans the growing flame of her affection for Darcy. The third journey, meanwhile, sends various people in pursuit of Wickham and Lydia, and the journey ends with Darcy tracking them down and saving the Bennet family honor, in the process demonstrating his continued devotion to Elizabeth.

Symbols .Pemberley.Pride

and Prejudice is remarkably free of explicit symbolism, which perhaps has something to do with the novels reliance on dialogue over description. Nevertheless, Pemberley, Darcys estate, sits at the center of the novel, literally and figuratively, as a geographic symbol of the man who owns it. Elizabeth visits it at a time when her feelings toward Darcy are beginning to warm; she is enchanted by its beauty and charm, and by the picturesque countryside, just as she will be charmed, increasingly, by the gifts of its owner. Austen makes the connection explicit when she describes the stream that flows beside the mansion. In front, she writes,a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Darcy possesses a natural importancethat is swelled by his arrogance, but which coexists with a genuine honesty and lack of artificial appearance. Like the stream, he is neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Pemberley even offers a symbol-within-a-symbol for their budding romance: when Elizabeth encounters Darcy on the estate, she is crossing a small bridge, suggesting the broad gulf of misunderstanding and class prejudice that lies between themand the bridge that their love will build across it.

Great Expectations Charles Dickens

Key Facts
FULL TITLE AUTHOR

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens Novel

TYPE OF WORK GENRES

Bildungsroman, social criticism, autobiographical fiction

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LANGUAGE

English London, 1860-1861

TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN

Published serially in England from December 1860 to August 1861; published in book form in England and America in 1861
DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION PUBLISHER

Serialized in All the Year Round; published in England by Chapman & Hall; published in America by

Harper & Brothers

NARRATOR CLIMAX

Pip

A sequence of climactic events occurs from Chapter 51 to Chapter 56: Miss Havishams burning in the

fire, Orlicks attempt to murder Pip, and Pips attempt to help Magwitch escape London.
PROTAGONIST ANTAGONIST

Pip

Great Expectations does not contain a traditional single antagonist. Various characters serve as

figures against whom Pip must struggle at various times: Magwitch, Mrs. Joe, Miss Havisham, Estella, Orlick, Bentley Drummle, and Compeyson. With the exception of the last three, each of the novels antagonists is redeemed before the end of the book.
SETTING (TIME)

Mid-nineteenth century Kent and London, England

SETTINGS (PLACE) POINT OF VIEW

First person The period following Magwitchs capture in Chapter 54, including Magwitchs death, Pips

FALLING ACTION

reconciliation with Joe, and Pips reunion with Estella eleven years later
TENSE

Past Great Expectations contains a great deal of foreshadowing. The repeated references to the

FORESHADOWING

convict (the man with the file in the pub, the attack on Mrs. Joe) foreshadow his return; the second convict on the marsh foreshadows the revelation of Magwitchs conflict with Compeyson; the man in the pub who gives Pip money foreshadows the revelation that Pips fortune comes from Magwitch; Miss Havishams wedding dress and her bizarre surroundings foreshadow the revelation of her past and her relationship with Estella; Pips feeling that Estella reminds him of someone he knows foreshadows his discovery of the truth of her parentage; the fact that Jaggers is a criminal lawyer foreshadows his involvement in Magwitchs life; and so on. Moreover, the weather often foreshadows dramatic events: a storm brewing generally means there will be trouble ahead, as on the night of Magwitchs return.
TONE

Comic, cheerful, satirical, wry, critical, sentimental, dark, dramatic, foreboding, Gothic, sympathetic Ambition and the desire for self-improvement (social, economic, educational, and moral); guilt,

THEMES

criminality, and innocence; maturation and the growth from childhood to adulthood; the importance of affection, loyalty, and sympathy over social advancement and class superiority; social class; the difficulty of maintaining superficial moral and social categories in a constantly changing world
MOTIFS

Crime and criminality; disappointed expectations; the connection between weather or atmosphere and

dramatic events; doubles (two convicts, two secret benefactors, two invalids, etc.)
SYMBOLS

The stopped clocks at Satis House symbolize Miss Havishams attempt to stop time; the many objects

relating to crime and guilt (gallows, prisons, handcuffs, policemen, lawyers, courts, convicts, chains, files) symbolize the theme of guilt and innocence; Satis House represents the upper-class world to which Pip longs to belong; Bentley Drummle represents the grotesque caprice of the upper class; Joe represents conscience, affection, loyalty, and simple good nature; the marsh mists represent danger and ambiguity.

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Themes.Ambition and Self-Improvement.The moral theme of Great Expectations is quite simple: affection, loyalty, and conscience are more important than social advancement, wealth, and class. Dickens establishes the theme and shows Pip learning this lesson, largely by exploring ideas of ambition and self-improvementideas that quickly become both the thematic center of the novel and the psychological mechanism that encourages much of Pips development. At heart, Pip is an idealist; whenever he can conceive of something that is better than what he already has, he immediately desires to obtain the improvement. When he sees Satis House, he longs to be a wealthy gentleman; when he thinks of his moral shortcomings, he longs to be good; when he realizes that he cannot read, he longs to learn how. Pips desire for selfimprovement is the main source of the novels title: because he believes in the possibility of advancement in life, he has great expectationsabout his future. Ambition and self-improvement take three forms in Great Expectationsmoral, social, and educational; these motivate Pips best and his worst behavior throughout the novel. First, Pip desires moral self-improvement. He is extremely hard on himself when he acts immorally and feels powerful guilt that spurs him to act better in the future. When he leaves for London, for instance, he torments himself about having behaved so wretchedly toward Joe and Biddy. Second, Pip desires social selfimprovement. In love with Estella, he longs to become a member of her social class, and, encouraged by Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, he entertains fantasies of becoming a gentleman. The working out of this fantasy forms the basic plot of the novel; it provides Dickens the opportunity to gently satirize the class system of his era and to make a point about its capricious nature. Significantly, Pips life as a gentleman is no more satisfyingand certainly no more moralthan his previous life as a blacksmiths apprentice. Third, Pip desires educational improvement. This desire is deeply connected to his social ambition and longing to marry Estella: a full education is a requirement of being a gentleman. As long as he is an ignorant country boy, he has no hope of social advancement. Pip understands this fact as a child, when he learns to read at Mr. Wopsles aunts school, and as a young man, when he takes lessons from Matthew Pocket. Ultimately, through the examples of Joe, Biddy, and Magwitch, Pip learns that social and educational improvement are irrelevant to ones real worth and that conscience and affection are to be valued above erudition and social standing. Social Class.Throughout Great Expectations, Dickens explores the class system of Victorian England, ranging from the most wretched criminals (Magwitch) to the poor peasants of the marsh country (Joe and Biddy) to the middle class (Pumblechook) to the very rich (Miss Havisham). The theme of social class is central to the novels plot and to the ultimate moral theme of the bookPips realization that wealth and class are less important than affection, loyalty, and inner worth. Pip achieves this realization when he is finally able to understand that, despite the esteem in which he holds Estella, ones social status is in no way connected to ones real character. Drummle, for instance, is an upper-class lout, while Magwitch, a persecuted convict, has a deep inner worth. Perhaps the most important thing to remember about the novels treatment of social class is that the class system it portrays is based on the post-Industrial Revolution model of Victorian England. Dickens generally ignores the nobility and the hereditary aristocracy in favor of characters whose fortunes have been earned through commerce. Even Miss Havishams family fortune was made through the brewery that is still connected to her manor. In this way, by connecting the theme of social class to the idea of work and self-advancement, Dickens subtly reinforces the novels overarching theme of ambition and self-improvement. Crime, Guilt, and Innocence.The theme of crime, guilt, and innocence is explored throughout the novel largely through the characters of the convicts and the criminal lawyer Jaggers. From the handcuffs Joe mends at the smithy to the gallows at the prison in London, the imagery of crime and criminal justice pervades the book, becoming an important symbol of Pips inner struggle to reconcile his own inner moral conscience with the institutional justice

30

system. In general, just as social class becomes a superficial standard of value that Pip must learn to look beyond in finding a better way to live his life, the external trappings of the criminal justice system (police, courts, jails, etc.) become a superficial standard of morality that Pip must learn to look beyond to trust his inner conscience. Magwitch, for instance, frightens Pip at first simply because he is a convict, and Pip feels guilty for helping him because he is afraid of the police. By the end of the book, however, Pip has discovered Magwitchs inner nobility, and is able to disregard his external status as a criminal. Prompted by his conscience, he helps Magwitch to evade the law and the police. As Pip has learned to trust his conscience and to value Magwitchs inner character, he has replaced an external standard of value with an internal one.

Motifs .Doubles.One of the most remarkable aspects of Dickenss work is its structural intricacy
and remarkable balance. Dickenss plots involve complicated coincidences, extraordinarily tangled webs of human relationships, and highly dramatic developments in which setting, atmosphere, event, and character are all seamlessly fused. In Great Expectations, perhaps the most visible sign of Dickenss commitment to intricate dramatic symmetryapart from the knot of character relationships, of courseis the fascinating motif of doubles that runs throughout the book. From the earliest scenes of the novel to the last, nearly every element of Great Expectations is mirrored or doubled at some other point in the book. There are two convicts on the marsh (Magwitch and Compeyson), two invalids (Mrs. Joe and Miss Havisham), two young women who interest Pip (Biddy and Estella), and so on. There are two secret benefactors: Magwitch, who gives Pip his fortune, and Pip, who mirrors Magwitchs action by secretly buying Herberts way into the mercantile business. Finally, there are two adults who seek to mold children after their own purposes: Magwitch, who wishes to own a gentleman and decides to make Pip one, and Miss Havisham, who raises Estella to break mens hearts in revenge for her own broken heart. Interestingly, both of these actions are motivated by Compeyson: Magwitch resents but is nonetheless covetous of Compeysons social status and education, which motivates his desire to make Pip a gentleman, and Miss Havishams heart was broken when Compeyson left her at the altar, which motivates her desire to achieve revenge through Estella. The relationship between Miss Havisham and Compeysona well-born woman and a common manfurther mirrors the relationship between Estella and Pip. This doubling of elements has no real bearing on the novels main themes, but, like the connection of weather and action, it adds to the sense that everything in Pips world is connected. Throughout Dickenss works, this kind of dramatic symmetry is simply part of the fabric of his novelistic universe. Comparison of Characters to Inanimate Objects.Throughout Great Expectations, the narrator uses images of inanimate objects to describe the physical appearance of charactersparticularly minor characters, or characters with whom the narrator is not intimate. For example, Mrs. Joe looks as if she scrubs her face with a nutmeg grater, while the inscrutable features of Mr. Wemmick are repeatedly compared to a letter-box. This motif, which Dickens uses throughout his novels, may suggest a failure of empathy on the narrators part, or it may suggest that the characters position in life is pressuring them to resemble a thing more than a human being. The latter interpretation would mean that the motif in general is part of a social critique, in that it implies that an institution such as the class system or the criminal justice system dehumanizes certain people.

31

Symbols .Satis House.In

Satis House, Dickens creates a magnificent Gothic setting whose various elements symbolize Pips romantic perception of the upper class and many other themes of the book. On her decaying body, Miss Havishams wedding dress becomes an ironic symbol of death and degeneration. The wedding dress and the wedding feast symbolize Miss Havishams past, and the stopped clocks throughout the house symbolize her determined attempt to freeze time by refusing to change anything from the way it was when she was jilted on her wedding day. The brewery next to the house symbolizes the connection between commerce and wealth: Miss Havishams fortune is not the product of an aristocratic birth but of a recent success in industrial capitalism. Finally, the crumbling, dilapidated stones of the house, as well as the darkness and dust that pervade it, symbolize the general decadence of the lives of its inhabitants and of the upper class as a whole. and always sets a tone that is perfectly matched to the novels dramatic action. The misty marshes near Pips childhood home in Kent, one of the most evocative of the books settings, are used several times to symbolize danger and uncertainty. As a child, Pip brings Magwitch a file and food in these mists; later, he is kidnapped by Orlick and nearly murdered in them. Whenever Pip goes into the mists, something dangerous is likely to happen. Significantly, Pip must go through the mists when he travels to London shortly after receiving his fortune, alerting the reader that this apparently positive development in his life may have dangerous consequences.

The Mists on the Marshes.The setting almost always symbolizes a theme in Great Expectations

Bentley Drummle.Although he is a minor character in the novel, Bentley Drummle provides an important contrast with Pip and represents the arbitrary nature of class distinctions. In his mind, Pip has connected the ideas of moral, social, and educational advancement so that each depends on the others. The coarse and cruel Drummle, a member of the upper class, provides Pip with proof that social advancement has no inherent connection to intelligence or moral worth. Drummle is a lout who has inherited immense wealth, while Pips friend and brother-in-law Joe is a good man who works hard for the little he earns. Drummles negative example helps Pip to see the inner worth of characters such as Magwitch and Joe, and eventually to discard his immature fantasies about wealth and class in favor of a new understanding that is both more compassionate and more realistic.

David Copperfield
Charles Dickens

Key Facts
FULL TITLE AUTHOR

The Personal History and Experience of David Copperfield the Younger

Charles Dickens Novel

TYPE OF WORK GENRE

Bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) English May 1849November 1850; England May 1849November 1850 (serial publication)

LANGUAGE

TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN

DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION

32

PUBLISHER NARRATOR

Bradbury and Evans An older David Copperfield narrates the story of his childhood from his happy home in London. David writes in the first person, limiting his viewpoint to what he sees in his youth and his attitude

POINT OF VIEW

at that time.
TONE

David reflects upon his youth fondly and remembers his nave youth wistfully. Past 1800s England

TENSE

SETTING (TIME)

SETTING (PLACE) PROTAGONIST

David Copperfield David struggles to become a man in a cruel world, with little money and few people to guide

MAJOR CONFLICT

him.
RISING ACTION

David loses his mother and falls victim to a cruel childhood but then has a happier youth with Miss

Betsey and Agnes.

CLIMAX

David realizes, while watching the reconciliation between the Strongs, that marriage cannot be happy

unless husband and wife are equal partners. This realization forces David to contemplate his marriage to Dora in a new light and reconsider most of the values he has held up to this point.
FALLING ACTION

The various subplots involving secondary characters resolve themselves. David realizes his love

for Agnes, marries her, and comes to grips with the treachery and death of his good friend Steerforth.
THEMES MOTIFS

The plight of the weak; equality in marriage; wealth and class

The role of mothers; accented speech; physical beauty The sea; flowers; Mr. Dicks kite The opening scenes observation that Davids birth is inauspicious; the adult Davids remark that

SYMBOLS

FORESHADOWING

Little Emly would have been better off if the sea had swallowed her as a child; Agness distrust of Steerforth; Agness blush when David asks her about her love life

Themes.The Plight of the Weak.Throughout David Copperfield, the powerful abuse the weak and
helpless. Dickens focuses on orphans, women, and the mentally disabled to show that exploitation not pity or compassionis the rule in an industrial society. Dickens draws on his own experience as a child to describe the inhumanity of child labor and debtors prison. His characters suffer punishment at the hands of forces larger than themselves, even though they are morally good people. The arbitrary suffering of innocents makes for the most vividly affecting scenes of the novel. David starves and suffers in a wine-bottling factory as a child. As his guardian, Mr. Murdstone can exploit David as factory labor because the boy is too small and dependent on him to disobey. Likewise, the boys at Salem House have no recourse against the cruel Mr. Creakle. In both situations, children deprived of the care of their natural parents suffer at the hands of their own supposed protectors.The weak in David Copperfield never escape the domination of the powerful by challenging the powerful directly. Instead, the weak must ally themselves with equally powerful characters. David, for example, doesnt stand up to Mr. Murdstone and challenge his authority. Instead, he flees to the wealthy Miss Betsey, whose financial stability affords her the power to shelter David from Mr. Murdstone. Davids escape proves neither self-reliance nor his own inner virtue, but rather the significance of family ties and family money in human relationships. Equality in Marriage .In the world of the novel, marriages succeed to the extent that husband and wife attain equality in their relationship. Dickens holds up the Strongs marriage as an

33

example to show that marriages can only be happy if neither spouse is subjugated to the other. Indeed, neither of the Strongs views the other as inferior. Conversely, Dickens criticizes characters who attempt to invoke a sense of superiority over their spouses. Mr. Murdstones attempts to improve Davids mothers character, for example, only crush her spirit. Mr. Murdstone forces Clara into submission in the name of improving her, which leaves her meek and voiceless. In contrast, although Doctor Strong does attempt to improve Annies character, he does so not out of a desire to show his moral superiority but rather out of love and respect for Annie. Doctor Strong is gentle and soothing with his wife, rather than abrasive and imperious like Mr. Murdstone. Though Doctor Strongs marriage is based at least partially on an ideal of equality, he still assumes that his wife, as a woman, depends upon him and needs him for moral guidance. Dickens, we see, does not challenge his societys constrictive views about the roles of women. However, by depicting a marriage in which a man and wife share some balance of power, Dickens does point toward an age of empowered women. Wealth and Class.Throughout the novel, Dickens criticizes his societys view of wealth and class as measures of a persons value. Dickens uses Steerforth, who is wealthy, powerful, and noble, to show that these traits are more likely to corrupt than improve a persons character. Steerforth is treacherous and self-absorbed. On the other hand, Mr. Peggotty and Ham, both poor, are generous, sympathetic characters. Many people in Dickenss time believed that poverty was a symptom of moral degeneracy and that people who were poor deserved to suffer because of inherent deficiencies. Dickens, on the other hand, sympathizes with the poor and implies that their woes result from societys unfairness, not their own failings.

Dickens does not go so far as to suggest that all poor people are absolutely noble and that all rich people are utterly evil. Poor people frequently swindle David when he is young, even though he too is poor and helpless. Doctor Strong and Agnes, both wealthy, middle-class citizens, nonetheless are morally upstanding. Dickens does not paint a black-and-white moral picture but shows that wealth and class are are unreliable indicators of character and morality. Dickens invites us to judge his characters based on their individual deeds and qualities, not on the hand that the cruel world deals them.
Motifs .Mothers and Mother Figures.Mothers and mother figures have an essential influence on the identity of the characters in David Copperfield. Almost invariably, good mother figures produce good children while bad mothers yield sinister offspring. This moral connection between mothers and children indicates Dickenss belief that mothers have an all-important role in shaping their childrens characters and destinies.The success of mother figures in the novel hinges on their ability to care for their children without coddling them. Miss Betsey, the aunt who raises David, clearly adores him but does not doteon him. She encourages him to be strong in everything he does and to be fair at all times. She corrects him when she thinks he is making a mistake, as with his marriage to Dora, and her ability to see faults in him helps him to mature into a balanced adult. Although Miss Betsey raises David to deal with the difficulties of the world, she does not block those hardships. Instead, she forces David to confront them himself. In contrast, Uriahs mother, Mrs. Heep, dotes on her son and allows him to dominate her. As a result, Uriah develops a vain, inflated self-regard that breeds cruel behavior. On the whole, Dickenss treatment of mother-child relationships in the novel is intended to teach a lesson. He warns mothers to love their children only in moderation and to correct their faults while they can still be fixed. Accented Speech.Dickens gives his characters different accents to indicate their social class. Uriah Heep and Mr. Peggotty are two notable examples of such characters whose speech indicates their social standing. Uriah, in an attempt to appear poor and of good character, consistently drops the h in humble every time a group of Mr. Wickfields friends confront him. Uriah drops this accent as soon as his fraud is revealed: he is not the urchin-

34

child he portrays himself to be, who grew up hard and fell into his current character because of the cruelty of the world. Rather, Uriah is a conniving, double-crossing social climber who views himself as superior to the wealthy and who exploits everyone he can. Mr. Peggottys lower-class accent, on the other hand, indicates genuine humility and poverty. Dickens uses accent in both cases to advance his assertion that class and personal integrity are unrelated and that it is misleading to make any connection between the two. Physical Beauty.In David Copperfield, physical beauty corresponds to moral good. Those who are physically beautiful, like Davids mother, are good and noble, while those who are ugly, like Uriah Heep, Mr. Creakle, and Mr. Murdstone, are evil, violent, and ill-tempered. Dickens suggests that internal characteristics, much like physical appearance, cannot be disguised permanently. Rather, circumstances will eventually reveal the moral value of characters whose good goes unrecognized or whose evil goes unpunished. In David Copperfield, even the most carefully buried characteristics eventually come to light and expose elusive individuals for what they really are. Although Steerforth, for example, initially appears harmless but annoying, he cannot hide his true treachery for years. In this manner, for almost all the characters in the novel, physical beauty corresponds to personal worth. Symbols.The Sea.The sea represents an unknown and powerful force in the lives of the characters in David Copperfield, and it is almost always connected with death. The sea took Little Emlys father in an unfortunate accident over which she had no control. Likewise, the sea takes both Ham and Steerforth. The sea washes Steerforth up on the shorea moment that symbolizes Steerforths moral emptiness, as the sea treats him like flotsam and jetsam. The storm in the concluding chapters of the novel alerts us to the danger of ignoring the seas power and indicates that the novels conflicts have reached an uncontrollable level. Like death, the force of the sea is beyond human control. Humans must try to live in harmony with the seas mystical power and take precautions to avoid untimely death.

Flowers.Flowers represent simplicity and innocence in David Copperfield. For example, Steerforth
nicknames David Daisybecause David is nave. David brings Dora flowers on her birthday. Dora forever paints flowers on her little canvas. When David returns to the Wickfields house and the Heeps leave, he discovers that the old flowers are in the room, which indicates that the room has been returned to its previous state of simplicity and innocence. In each of these cases, flowers stand as images of rebirth and healtha significance that points to a springlike quality in characters associated with their blossoms. Flowers indicate fresh perspective and thought and often recall moments of frivolity and release.

Mr. Dicks Kite.Mr. Dicks enormous kite represents his separation from society. Just as the kite
soars above the other characters, Mr. Dick, whom the characters believe to be insane, stands apart from the rest of society. Because Mr. Dick is not a part of the social hierarchies that bind the rest of the characters, he is able to mend the disagreement between Doctor and Mrs. Strong, which none of the other characters can fix. The kites carefree simplicity mirrors Mr. Dicks own childish innocence, and the pleasure the kite offers resembles the honest, unpretentious joy Mr. Dick brings to those around him.

Alices Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll

35

Key Facts
FULL TITLE AUTHOR

Alices Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll Novella

TYPE OF WORK GENRE

Fairy tale; childrens fiction; satire; allegory English 18621863, Oxford 1865

LANGUAGE

TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN

DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION PUBLISHER NARRATOR

Macmillan & Co. The narrator is anonymous and does not use many words to describe events in the story. The narrator speaks in third person, though occasionally in first and second person. The narrative

POINT OF VIEW

follows Alice around on her travels, voicing her thoughts and feelings.
TONE

Straightforward; avuncular Past Victorian era, circa publication date England, Wonderland

TENSE

SETTING (TIME)

SETTING (PLACE) PROTAGONIST

Alice Alice attempts to come to terms with the puzzle of Wonderland as she undergoes great

MAJOR CONFLICT

individual changes while entrenched in Wonderland.

RISING ACTION CLIMAX

Alice follows the White Rabbit down a well and pursues him through Wonderland.

Alice gains control over her size and enters the garden, where she participates in the trial of the Knave of

Hearts.
FALLING ACTION

Alice realizes that Wonderland is a sham and knocks over the playing card court, causing her to

wake up and dispel the dream of Wonderland.

THEMES

The tragic and inevitable loss of childhood innocence; Life as a meaningless puzzle; Death as a constant

and underlying menace

MOTIFS

Dream; subversion; language; curious, nonsense,and confusing The garden; the mushroom The Mouses history about Fury and the Mouse foreshadows the trial at the end of the story.

SYMBOLS

FORESHADOWING

36

Themes.The Tragic and Inevitable Loss of Childhood Innocence.Throughout the course of Alices Adventures in Wonderland, Alice goes through a variety of absurd physical changes. The discomfort she feels at never being the right size acts as a symbol for the changes that occur during puberty. Alice finds these changes to be traumatic, and feels discomfort, frustration, and sadness when she goes through them. She struggles to maintain a comfortable physical size. In Chapter 1, she becomes upset when she keeps finding herself too big or too small to enter the garden. In Chapter 5, she loses control over specific body parts when her neck grows to an absurd length. These constant fluctuations represent the way a child may feel as her body grows and changes during puberty. Life as a Meaningless Puzzle.In Alices Adventures in Wonderland, Alice encounters a series of puzzles that seem to have no clear solutions, which imitates the ways that life frustrates expectations. Alice expects that the situations she encounters will make a certain kind of sense, but they repeatedly frustrate her ability to figure out Wonderland. Alice tries to understand the Caucus race, solve the Mad Hatters riddle, and understand the Queens ridiculous croquet game, but to no avail. In every instance, the riddles and challenges presented to Alice have no purpose or answer. Even though Lewis Carroll was a logician, in Alices Adventures in Wonderland he makes a farce out of jokes, riddles, and games of logic. Alice learns that she cannot expect to find logic or meaning in the situations that she encounters, even when they appear to be problems, riddles, or games that would normally have solutions that Alice would be able to figure out. Carroll makes a broader point about the ways that life frustrates expectations and resists interpretation, even when problems seem familiar or solvable. Death as a Constant and Underlying Menace.Alice continually finds herself in situations in which she risks death, and while these threats never materialize, they suggest that death lurks just behind the ridiculous events of Alices Adventures in Wonderland as a present and possible outcome. Death appears in Chapter 1, when the narrator mentions that Alice would say nothing of falling off of her own house, since it would likely kill her. Alice takes risks that could possibly kill her, but she never considers death as a possible outcome. Over time, she starts to realize that her experiences in Wonderland are far more threatening than they appear to be. As the Queen screams Off with its head! she understands that Wonderland may not merely be a ridiculous realm where expectations are repeatedly frustrated. Death may be a real threat, and Alice starts to understand that the risks she faces may not be ridiculous and absurd after all. Motifs .Dream.Alices Adventures in Wonderland takes place in Alices dream, so that the characters and phenomena of the real world mix with elements of Alices unconscious state. The dream motif explains the abundance of nonsensical and disparate events in the story. As in a dream, the narrative follows the dreamer as she encounters various episodes in which she attempts to interpret her experiences in relationship to herself and her world. Though Alices experiences lend themselves to meaningful observations, they resist a singular and coherent interpretation. Subversion.Alice quickly discovers during her travels that the only reliable aspect of Wonderland that she can count on is that it will frustrate her expectations and challenge her understanding of the natural order of the world. In Wonderland, Alice finds that her lessons no longer mean what she thought, as she botches her multiplication tables and incorrectly recites poems she had memorized while in Wonderland. Even Alices physical dimensions become warped as she grows and shrinks erratically throughout the story. Wonderland frustrates Alices desires to fit her experiences in a logical framework where she can make sense of the relationship between cause and effect.

37

Language.Carroll plays with linguistic conventions in Alices Adventures in Wonderland, making use of puns and playing on multiple meanings of words throughout the text. Carroll invents words and expressions and develops new meanings for words. Alices exclamation Curious and curiouser! suggests that both her surroundings and the language she uses to describe them expand beyond expectation and convention. Anything is possible in Wonderland, and Carrolls manipulation of language reflects this sense of unlimited possibility. Curious, Nonsense, and Confusing.Alice uses these words throughout her journey to describe phenomena she has trouble explaining. Though the words are generally interchangeable, she usually assigns curious and confusing to experiences or encounters that she tolerates. She endures is the experiences that are curious or confusing, hoping to gain a clearer picture of how that individual or experience functions in the world. When Alice declares something to be nonsense, as she does with the trial in Chapter 12, she rejects or criticizes the experience or encounter. Symbols.The Garden.Nearly every object in Alices Adventures in Wonderland functions as a symbol, but nothing clearly represents one particular thing. The symbolic resonances of Wonderland objects are generally contained to the individual episode in which they appear. Often the symbols work together to convey a particular meaning. The garden may symbolize the Garden of Eden, an idyllic space of beauty and innocence that Alice is not permitted to access. On a more abstract level, the garden may simply represent the experience of desire, in that Alice focuses her energy and emotion on trying to attain it. The two symbolic meanings work together to underscore Alices desire to hold onto her feelings of childlike innocence that she must relinquish as she matures. The Caterpillars Mushroom.Like the garden, the Caterpillars mushroom also has multiple symbolic meanings. Some readers and critics view the Caterpillar as a sexual threat, its phallic shape a symbol of sexual virility. The Caterpillars mushroom connects to this symbolic meaning. Alice must master the properties of the mushroom to gain control over her fluctuating size, which represents the bodily frustrations that accompany puberty. Others view the mushroom as a psychedelic hallucinogen that compounds Alices surreal and distorted perception of Wonderland.

Tess of the dUrbervilles Thomas Hardy

Key Facts
FULL TITLE AUTHOR

Tess of the dUrbervilles

Thomas Hardy Novel

TYPE OF WORK GENRE

Victorian, tragic English 1880s, England

LANGUAGE

TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN

38

DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION PUBLISHER NARRATOR

1891

Random House, but also published serially in different periodicals Anonymous The narrator speaks in the third person, and looks deep into the characters minds. The narrator is

POINT OF VIEW

objective but has an omniscient understanding of future implications of characters actions as they happen.
TONE

Realistic, pessimistic Past The 1880s and 1890s Wessex, the southwest of England

TENSE

SETTING (TIME)

SETTING (PLACE) PROTAGONIST

Tess Durbeyfield Tess is seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by the son of her upper-class patroness, making

MAJOR CONFLICT

her unacceptable to her true love Angel later in life.

RISING ACTION

Tesss familys discovery that they are ancient English aristocracy, giving them all fantasies of a

higher station in life; Tesss accidental killing of the family horse, which drives her to seek help from the dUrbervilles, where she is seduced and dishonored.
CLIMAX

Tesss new husband discovers her earlier seduction by Alec and decides to leave her, going off to Brazil

and not answering her letters, and bringing Tess to despair.

FALLING ACTION

Tesss last-ditch decision to marry Alec, who claims to love her; Angels return from Brazil to

discover Tess marriage to her former seducer, and his meeting with Tess; Tesss murder of Alec and short-lived escape with Angel before being apprehended and executed
THEMES MOTIFS

The injustice of existence; changing ideas of social class in Victorian England; men dominating women Birds; the Book of Genesis; variant names Prince; the dUrberville family vault; Brazil Tesss killing of the pheasants foreshadows her own death by hanging; Alecs assertion that he

SYMBOLS

FORESHADOWING

will master Tess again foreshadows his reemergence in her life

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Themes.The Injustice of Existence.Unfairness dominates the lives of Tess and her family to such an extent that it begins to seem like a general aspect of human existence in Tess of the dUrbervilles. Tess does not mean to kill Prince, but she is punished anyway, just as she is unfairly punished for her own rape by Alec. Nor is there justice waiting in heaven. Christianity teaches that there is compensation in the afterlife for unhappiness suffered in this life, but the only devout Christian encountered in the novel may be the reverend, Mr. Clare, who seems more or less content in his life anyway. For others in their misery, Christianity offers little solace of heavenly justice. Mrs. Durbeyfield never mentions otherworldly rewards. The converted Alec preaches heavenly justice for earthly sinners, but his faith seems shallow and insincere. Generally, the moral atmosphere of the novel is not Christian justice at all, but pagan injustice. The forces that rule human life are absolutely unpredictable and not necessarily well-disposed to us. The pre-Christian rituals practiced by the farm workers at the opening of the novel, and Tesss final rest at Stonehenge at the end, remind us of a world where the gods are not just and fair, but whimsical and uncaring. When the narrator concludes the novel with the statement that Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals (in the Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess, we are reminded that justice must be put in ironic quotation marks, since it is not really just at all. What passes for Justice is in fact one of the pagan gods enjoying a bit of sport, or a frivolous game. Changing Ideas of Social Class in Victorian England.Tess of the dUrbervilles presents complex pictures of both the importance of social class in nineteenth-century England and the difficulty of defining class in any simple way. Certainly the Durbeyfields are a powerful emblem of the way in which class is no longer evaluated in Victorian times as it would have been in the Middle Agesthat is, by blood alone, with no attention paid to fortune or worldly success. Indubitably the Durbeyfields have purity of blood, yet for the parson and nearly everyone else in the novel, this fact amounts to nothing more than a piece of genealogical trivia. In the Victorian context, cash matters more than lineage, which explains how Simon Stokes, Alecs father, was smoothly able to use his large fortune to purchase a lustrous family name and transform his clan into the Stoke-dUrbervilles. The dUrbervilles pass for what the Durbeyfields truly areauthentic nobilitysimply because definitions of class have changed. The issue of class confusion even affects the Clare clan, whose most promising son, Angel, is intent on becoming a farmer and marrying a milkmaid, thus bypassing the traditional privileges of a Cambridge education and a parsonage. His willingness to work side by side with the farm laborers helps endear him to Tess, and their acquaintance would not have been possible if he were a more traditional and elitist aristocrat. Thus, the three main characters in the Angel-Tess-Alec triangle are all strongly marked by confusion regarding their respective social classes, an issue that is one of the main concerns of the novel.

Men Dominating Women.One of the recurrent themes of the novel is the way in which men can
dominate women, exerting a power over them linked primarily to their maleness. Sometimes this command is purposeful, in the mans full knowledge of his exploitation, as when Alec acknowledges how bad he is for seducing Tess for his own momentary pleasure. Alecs act of abuse, the most life-altering event that Tess experiences in the novel, is clearly the most serious instance of male domination over a female. But there are other, less blatant examples of womens passivity toward dominant men. When, after Angel reveals that he prefers Tess, Tesss friend Retty attempts suicide and her friend Marian becomes an alcoholic, which makes their earlier schoolgirl-type crushes on Angel seem disturbing. This devotion is not merely fanciful love, but unhealthy obsession. These girls appear utterly dominated by a desire for a man who, we are told explicitly, does not even realize that they are interested in him. This sort of unconscious male domination of women is perhaps even more unsettling than Alecs outward and self-conscious cruelty.

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Even Angels love for Tess, as pure and gentle as it seems, dominates her in an unhealthy way. Angel substitutes an idealized picture of Tesss country purity for the real-life woman that he continually refuses to get to know. When Angel calls Tess names like Daughter of Nature and Artemis, we feel that he may be denying her true self in favor of a mental image that he prefers. Thus, her identity and experiences are suppressed, albeit unknowingly. This pattern of male domination is finally reversed with Tesss murder of Alec, in which, for the first time in the novel, a woman takes active steps against a man. Of course, this act only leads to even greater suppression of a woman by men, when the crowd of male police officers arrest Tess at Stonehenge. Nevertheless, for just a moment, the accepted pattern of submissive women bowing to dominant men is interrupted, and Tesss act seems heroic. Motifs .Birds.Images of birds recur throughout the novel, evoking or contradicting their traditional spiritual association with a higher realm of transcendence. Both the Christian dove of peace and the Romantic songbirds of Keats and Shelley, which symbolize sublime heights, lead us to expect that birds will have positive meaning in this novel. Tess occasionally hears birdcalls on her frequent hikes across the countryside; their free expressiveness stands in stark contrast to Tesss silent and constrained existence as a wronged and disgraced girl. When Tess goes to work for Mrs. dUrberville, she is surprised to find that the old womans pet finches are frequently released to fly free throughout the room. These birds offer images of hope and liberation. Yet there is irony attached to birds as well, making us doubt whether these images of hope and freedom are illusory. Mrs. dUrbervilles birds leave little white spots on the upholstery, which presumably some servantperhaps Tess herselfwill have to clean. It may be that freedom for one creature entails hardship for another, just as Alecs free enjoyment of Tesss body leads her to a lifetime of suffering. In the end, when Tess encounters the pheasants maimed by hunters and lying in agony, birds no longer seem free, but rather oppressed and submissive. These pheasants are no Romantic songbirds hovering far above the Earththey are victims of earthly violence, condemned to suffer down below and never fly again.

The Book of Genesis.The Genesis story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is evoked
repeatedly throughout Tess of the dUrbervilles, giving the novel a broader metaphysical and philosophical dimension. The roles of Eve and the serpent in paradise are clearly delineated: Angel is the noble Adam newly born, while Tess is the indecisive and troubled Eve. When Tess gazes upon Angel in Chapter XXVII, she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have regarded Adam.Alec, with his open avowal that he is bad to the bone, is the conniving Satan. He seduces Tess under a tree, giving her sexual knowledge in return for her lost innocence. The very name of the forest where this seduction occurs, the Chase, suggests how Eve will be chased from Eden for her sins. This guilt, which will never be erased, is known in Christian theology as the original sin that all humans have inherited. Just as John Durbeyfield is told in Chapter I that you dont live anywhere,and his family is evicted after his death at the end of the novel, their homelessness evokes the human exile from Eden. Original sin suggests that humans have fallen from their once great status to a lower station in life, just as the dUrbervilles have devolved into the modern Durbeyfields. This Story of the Fallor of the Pure Drop,to recall the name of a pub in Tesss home villageis much more than a social fall. It is an explanation of how all of us humansnot only Tessnever quite seem to live up to our expectations, and are never able to inhabit the places of grandeur we feel we deserve.

Variant Names.The transformation of the dUrbervilles into the Durbeyfields is one example of the
common phenomenon of renaming, or variant naming, in the novel. Names matter in this novel. Tess knows and accepts that she is a lowly Durbeyfield, but part of her still believes, as her parents also believe, that her aristocratic original name should be restored. John Durbeyfield goes a step further than Tess, and actually renames himself Sir John, as his tombstone epitaph shows. Another character who renames himself is Simon Stokes,

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Angels father, who purchased a family tree and made himself Simon Stoke-dUrberville. The question raised by all these cases of name changing, whether successful or merely imagined, is the extent to which an altered name brings with it an altered identity. Alec acts notoriously ungentlemanly throughout the novel, but by the end, when he appears at the dUrberville family vault, his lordly and commanding bearing make him seem almost deserving of the name his father has bought, like a spoiled medieval nobleman. Hardys interest in name changes makes reality itself seem changeable according to whims of human perspective. The village of Blakemore, as we are reminded twice in Chapters I and II, is also known as Blackmoor, and indeed Hardy famously renames the southern English countryside as Wessex. He imposes a fictional map on a real place, with names altered correspondingly. Reality may not be as solid as the names people confer upon it.

Symbols.Prince. When Tess dozes off in the wagon and loses control, the resulting death of the
Durbeyfield horse, Prince, spurs Tess to seek aid from the dUrbervilles, setting the events of the novel in motion. The horses demise is thus a powerful plot motivator, and its name a potent symbol of Tesss own claims to aristocracy. Like the horse, Tess herself bears a highclass name, but is doomed to a lowly life of physical labor. Interestingly, Princes death occurs right after Tess dreams of ancient knights, having just heard the news that her family is aristocratic. Moreover, the horse is pierced by the forward-jutting piece of metal on a mail coach, which is reminiscent of a wound one might receive in a medieval joust. In an odd way, Tesss dream of medieval glory comes true, and her horse dies a heroic death. Yet her dream of meeting a prince while she kills her own Prince, and with him her familys only means of financial sustenance, is a tragic foreshadowing of her own story. The death of the horse symbolizes the sacrifice of real-world goods, such as a useful animal or even her own honor, through excessive fantasizing about a better world.

The dUrberville Family Vault.A double-edged symbol of both the majestic grandeur and the
lifeless hollowness of the aristocratic family name that the Durbeyfields learn they possess, the dUrberville family vault represents both the glory of life and the end of life. Since Tess herself moves from passivity to active murder by the end of the novel, attaining a kind of personal grandeur even as she brings death to others and to herself, the double symbolism of the vault makes it a powerful site for the culminating meeting between Alec and Tess. Alec brings Tess both his lofty name and, indirectly, her own death later; it is natural that he meets her in the vault in dUrberville Aisle, where she reads her own name inscribed in stone and feels the presence of death. Yet the vault that sounds so glamorous when rhapsodized over by John Durbeyfield in Chapter I seems, by the end, strangely hollow and meaningless. When Alec stomps on the floor of the vault, it produces only a hollow echo, as if its basic emptiness is a complement to its visual grandeur. When Tess is executed, her ancestors are said to snooze on in their crypts, as if uncaring even about the fate of a member of their own majestic family. Perhaps the secret of the family crypt is that its grandiosity is ultimately meaningless.

Brazil.Rather surprising for a novel that seems set so solidly in rural England, the narration shifts
very briefly to Brazil when Angel takes leave of Tess and heads off to establish a career in farming. Even more exotic for a Victorian English reader than America or Australia, Brazil is the country in which Robinson Crusoe made his fortune and it seems to promise a better life far from the humdrum familiar world. Brazil is thus more than a geographical entity on the map in this novel: it symbolizes a fantasyland, a place where dreams come true. As Angels name suggests, he is a lofty visionary who lacks some experience with the real world, despite all his mechanical know-how in farm management. He may be able to milk cows, but he does not yet know how to tell the difference between an exotic dream and an everyday reality, so inevitably his experience in the imagined dream world of Brazil is a disaster that he barely survives. His fiasco teaches him that ideals do not exist in life, and this lesson helps him reevaluate his disappointment with Tesss imperfections, her failure

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to incarnate the ideal he expected her to be. For Angel, Brazil symbolizes the impossibility of ideals, but also forgiveness and acceptance of life in spite of those disappointed ideals.

The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne

Key Facts
FULL TITLE AUTHOR

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne Novel

TYPE OF WORK GENRE

Symbolic; semi-allegorical; historical fiction; romance (in the sense that it rejects realism in favor of

symbols and ideas)

LANGUAGE

English Salem and Concord, Massachusetts; late 1840s 1850

TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN

DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION PUBLISHER NARRATOR

Ticknor, Reed, and Fields The narrator is an unnamed customhouse surveyor who writes some two hundred years after the

events he describes took place. He has much in common with Hawthorne but should not be taken as a direct mouthpiece for the authors opinions.
POINT OF VIEW

The narrator is omniscient, because he analyzes the characters and tells the story in a way that

shows that he knows more about the characters than they know about themselves. Yet, he is also a subjective narrator, because he voices his own interpretations and opinions of things. He is clearly sympathetic to Hester and Dimmesdale.
TONE

Variescontemplative and somewhat bitter in the introduction; thoughtful, fairly straightforward, yet

occasionally tinged with irony in the body of the narrative

TENSE

The narrator employs the past tense to recount events that happened some two hundred years before his

time, but he occasionally uses the present tense when he addresses his audience.
SETTING (TIME)

Middle of the seventeenth century Boston, Massachusetts

SETTING (PLACE) PROTAGONIST

Hester Prynne Her husband having inexplicably failed to join her in Boston following their emigration from

MAJOR CONFLICT

Europe, Hester Prynne engages in an extramarital affair with Arthur Dimmesdale. When she gives birth to a child, Hester invokes the condemnation of her communitya condemnation they manifest by forcing her to wear a letter A foradulteroras well as the vengeful wrath of her husband, who has appeared just in time to witness her public shaming.
RISING ACTION

Dimmesdale stands by in silence as Hester suffers for the sin he helped to commit, though his

conscience plagues him and affects his health. Hesters husband, Chillingworth, hides his true identity and,

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posing as a doctor to the ailing minister, tests his suspicions that Dimmesdale is the father of his wifes child, effectively exacerbating Dimmesdales feelings of shame and thus reaping revenge.
CLIMAX

There are at least two points in The Scarlet Letter that could be identified as the books climax.The first

is in Chapter 12, at the exact center of the book. As Dimmesdale watches a meteor trace a letter A in the sky, he confronts his role in Hesters sin and realizes that he can no longer deny his deed and its consequences. The key characters confront one another when Hester and Pearl join Dimmesdale in an electric chain as he holds his vigil on the marketplace scaffold, the location of Hesters original public shaming. Chillingworth appears in this scene as well. The other climactic scene occurs in Chapter 23, at the end of the book. Here, the characters secrets are publicly exposed and their fates sealed. Dimmesdale, Hester, and Chillingworth not only acknowledge their secrets to themselves and to each other; they push these revelations to such extremes that they all must leave the community in one way or another.
FALLING ACTION

Depending on ones interpretation of which scene constitutes the books climax, the falling

action is either the course of events that follow Chapter 12 or the final reports on Hesters and Pearls lives after the deaths of Dimmesdale and Chillingworth.
THEMES MOTIFS

Sin, experience, and the human condition; the nature of evil; identity and society Civilization versus the wilderness; night versus day; evocative names The scarlet letter; the town scaffold; the meteor; Pearl; the rosebush next to the prison door Foreshadowing is minimal, because the symbols tend to coincide temporally with events,

SYMBOLS

FORESHADOWING

enriching their meaning rather than anticipating their occurrence.

Themes.Sin, Knowledge, and the Human Condition.Sin and knowledge are linked in the JudeoChristian tradition. The Bible begins with the story of Adam and Eve, who were expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As a result of their knowledge, Adam and Eve are made aware of their humanness, that which separates them from the divine and from other creatures. Once expelled from the Garden of Eden, they are forced to toil and to procreatetwo labors that seem to define the human condition. The experience of Hester and Dimmesdale recalls the story of Adam and Eve because, in both cases, sin results in expulsion and suffering. But it also results in knowledge specifically, in knowledge of what it means to be human. For Hester, the scarlet letter functions as her passport into regions where other women dared not tread, leading her to speculate about her society and herself more boldly than anyone else in New England. As for Dimmesdale, the burden of his sin gives him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind, so that his heart vibrate[s] in unison with theirs. His eloquent and powerful sermons derive from this sense of empathy. Hester and Dimmesdale contemplate their own sinfulness on a daily basis and try to reconcile it with their lived experiences. The Puritan elders, on the other hand, insist on seeing earthly experience as merely an obstacle on the path to heaven. Thus, they view sin as a threat to the community that should be punished and suppressed. Their answer to Hesters sin is to ostracize her. Yet, Puritan society is stagnant, while Hester and Dimmesdales experience shows that a state of sinfulness can lead to personal growth, sympathy, and understanding of others. Paradoxically, these qualities are shown to be incompatible with a state of purity.

The Nature of Evil.The characters in the novel frequently debate the identity of the Black Man,
the embodiment of evil. Over the course of the novel, the Black Man is associated with Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and Mistress Hibbins, and little Pearl is thought by some to be the Devils child. The characters also try to root out the causes of evil: did Chillingworths selfishness in marrying Hester force her to the evilshe committed in Dimmesdales arms? Is Hester and Dimmesdales deed responsible for Chillingworths transformation into a malevolent being? This confusion over the nature and causes of evil reveals the

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problems with the Puritan conception of sin. The book argues that true evil arises from the close relationship between hate and love. As the narrator points out in the novels concluding chapter, both emotions depend upon a high degree of intimacy and heartknowledge; each renders one individual dependent . . . upon another. Evil is not found in Hester and Dimmesdales lovemaking, nor even in the cruel ignorance of the Puritan fathers. Evil, in its most poisonous form, is found in the carefully plotted and precisely aimed revenge of Chillingworth, whose love has been perverted. Perhaps Pearl is not entirely wrong when she thinks Dimmesdale is the Black Man,because her father, too, has perverted his love. Dimmesdale, who should love Pearl, will not even publicly acknowledge her. His cruel denial of love to his own child may be seen as further perpetrating evil.

Identity and Society.After Hester is publicly shamed and forced by the people of Boston to wear a
badge of humiliation, her unwillingness to leave the town may seem puzzling. She is not physically imprisoned, and leaving the Massachusetts Bay Colony would allow her to remove the scarlet letter and resume a normal life. Surprisingly, Hester reacts with dismay when Chillingworth tells her that the town fathers are considering letting her remove the letter. Hesters behavior is premised on her desire to determine her own identity rather than to allow others to determine it for her. To her, running away or removing the letter would be an acknowledgment of societys power over her: she would be admitting that the letter is a mark of shame and something from which she desires to escape. Instead, Hester stays, refiguring the scarlet letter as a symbol of her own experiences and character. Her past sin is a part of who she is; to pretend that it never happened would mean denying a part of herself. Thus, Hester very determinedly integrates her sin into her life. Dimmesdale also struggles against a socially determined identity. As the communitys minister, he is more symbol than human being. Except for Chillingworth, those around the minister willfully ignore his obvious anguish, misinterpreting it as holiness. Unfortunately, Dimmesdale never fully recognizes the truth of what Hester has learned: that individuality and strength are gained by quiet self-assertion and by a reconfiguration, not a rejection, of ones assigned identity. Motifs.Civilization Versus the Wilderness.In The Scarlet Letter, the town and the surrounding forest represent opposing behavioral systems. The town represents civilization, a rule-bound space where everything one does is on display and where transgressions are quickly punished. The forest, on the other hand, is a space of natural rather than human authority. In the forest, societys rules do not apply, and alternate identities can be assumed. While this allows for misbehaviorMistress Hibbinss midnight rides, for exampleit also permits greater honesty and an escape from the repression of Boston. When Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the woods, for a few moments, they become happy young lovers once again. Hesters cottage, which, significantly, is located on the outskirts of town and at the edge of the forest, embodies both orders. It is her place of exile, which ties it to the authoritarian town, but because it lies apart from the settlement, it is a place where she can create for herself a life of relative peace.

Night Versus Day.By emphasizing the alternation between sunlight and darkness, the novel
organizes the plots events into two categories: those which are socially acceptable, and those which must take place covertly. Daylight exposes an individuals activities and makes him or her vulnerable to punishment. Night, on the other hand, conceals and enables activities that would not be possible or tolerated during the dayfor instance, Dimmesdales encounter with Hester and Pearl on the scaffold. These notions of visibility versus concealment are linked to two of the books larger themesthe themes of inner versus socially assigned identity and of outer appearances versus internal states. Night is the time when inner natures can manifest themselves. During the day, interiority is once again hidden from public view, and secrets remain secrets.

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Evocative Names.The names in this novel often seem to beg to be interpreted allegorically.
Chillingworth is cold and inhuman and thus brings a chill to Hesters and Dimmesdales lives. Prynne rhymes withsin, while Dimmesdale suggests dimnessweakness, indeterminacy, lack of insight, and lack of will, all of which characterize the young minister. The name Pearl evokes a biblical allegorical devicethe pearl of great price that is salvation. This system of naming lends a profundity to the story, linking it to other allegorical works of literature such as The Pilgrims Progress and to portions of the Bible. It also aligns the novel with popular forms of narrative such as fairy tales.

Symbols.The Scarlet Letter.The scarlet letter is meant to be a symbol of shame, but instead it
becomes a powerful symbol of identity to Hester. The letters meaning shifts as time passes. Originally intended to mark Hester as an adulterer, the A eventually comes to stand for Able.Finally, it becomes indeterminate: the Native Americans who come to watch the Election Day pageant think it marks her as a person of importance and status. Like Pearl, the letter functions as a physical reminder of Hesters affair with Dimmesdale. But, compared with a human child, the letter seems insignificant, and thus helps to point out the ultimate meaninglessness of the communitys system of judgment and punishment. The child has been sent from God, or at least from nature, but the letter is merely a human contrivance. Additionally, the instability of the letters apparent meaning calls into question societys ability to use symbols for ideological reinforcement. More often than not, a symbol becomes a focal point for critical analysis and debate.

The Meteor.As Dimmesdale stands on the scaffold with Hester and Pearl in Chapter 12, a meteor
traces out an A in the night sky. To Dimmesdale, the meteor implies that he should wear a mark of shame just as Hester does. The meteor is interpreted differently by the rest of the community, which thinks that it stands for Angel and marks Governor Winthrops entry into heaven. But Angel is an awkward reading of the symbol. The Puritans commonly looked to symbols to confirm divine sentiments. In this narrative, however, symbols are taken to mean what the beholder wants them to mean. The incident with the meteor obviously highlights and exemplifies two different uses of symbols: Puritan and literary.

Pearl.Although Pearl is a complex character, her primary function within the novel is as a symbol.
Pearl is a sort of living version of her mothers scarlet letter. She is the physical consequence of sexual sin and the indicator of a transgression. Yet, even as a reminder of Hesters sin, Pearl is more than a mere punishment to her mother: she is also a blessing. She represents not only sin but also the vital spirit and passion that engendered that sin. Thus, Pearls existence gives her mother reason to live, bolstering her spirits when she is tempted to give up. It is only after Dimmesdale is revealed to be Pearls father that Pearl can become fully human. Until then, she functions in a symbolic capacity as the reminder of an unsolved mystery.

Whitmans Poetry Walt Whitman Themes.Democracy As a Way of Life.Whitman envisioned democracy not just as a political system but as a way of experiencing the world. In the early nineteenth century, people still harbored many doubts about whether the United States could survive as a country and about whether democracy could thrive as a political system. To allay those fears and to praise democracy, Whitman tried to be democratic in both life and poetry. He imagined democracy as a way of interpersonal interaction and

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as a way for individuals to integrate their beliefs into their everyday lives.Song of Myself notes that democracy must include all individuals equally, or else it will fail. In his poetry, Whitman widened the possibilities of poetic diction by including slang, colloquialisms, and regional dialects, rather than employing the stiff, erudite language so often found in nineteenthcentury verse. Similarly, he broadened the possibilities of subject matter by describing myriad people and places. Like William Wordsworth, Whitman believed that everyday life and everyday people were fit subjects for poetry. Although much of Whitmans work does not explicitly discuss politics, most of it implicitly deals with democracy: it describes communities of people coming together, and it imagines many voices pouring into a unified whole. For Whitman, democracy was an idea that could and should permeate the world beyond politics, making itself felt in the ways we think, speak, work, fight, and even make art. The Cycle of Growth and Death.Whitmans poetry reflects the vitality and growth of the early United States. During the nineteenth century, America expanded at a tremendous rate, and its growth and potential seemed limitless. But sectionalism and the violence of the Civil War threatened to break apart and destroy the boundless possibilities of the United States. As a way of dealing with both the population growth and the massive deaths during the Civil War, Whitman focused on the life cycles of individuals: people are born, they age and reproduce, and they die. Such poems as When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd imagine death as an integral part of life. The speaker of When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd realizes that flowers die in the winter, but they rebloom in the springtime, and he vows to mourn his fallen friends every year just as new buds are appearing. Describing the life cycle of nature helped Whitman contextualize the severe injuries and trauma he witnessed during the Civil Warlinking death to life helped give the deaths of so many soldiers meaning. The Beauty of the Individual.Throughout his poetry, Whitman praised the individual. He imagined a democratic nation as a unified whole composed of unique but equal individuals. Song of Myself opens in a triumphant paean to the individual: I celebrate myself, and sing myself (1). Elsewhere the speaker of that exuberant poem identifies himself as Walt Whitman and claims that, through him, the voices of many will speak. In this way, many individuals make up the individual democracy, a single entity composed of myriad parts. Every voice and every part will carry the same weight within the single democracyand thus every voice and every individual is equally beautiful. Despite this pluralist view, Whitman still singled out specific individuals for praise in his poetry, particularly Abraham Lincoln. In 1865, Lincoln was assassinated, and Whitman began composing several elegies, includingO Captain! My Captain! Although all individuals were beautiful and worthy of praise, some individuals merited their own poems because of their contributions to society and democracy.

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Motifs.Lists.Whitman filled his poetry with long lists. Often a sentence will be broken into many clauses, separated by commas, and each clause will describe some scene, person, or object. These lists create a sense of expansiveness in the poem, as they mirror the growth of the United States. Also, these lists layer images atop one another to reflect the diversity of American landscapes and people. In Song of Myself, for example, the speaker lists several adjectives to describe Walt Whitman in section 24. The speaker uses multiple adjectives to demonstrate the complexity of the individual: true individuals cannot be described using just one or two words. Later in this section, the speaker also lists the different types of voices who speak through Whitman. Lists are another way of demonstrating democracy in action: in lists, all items possess equal weight, and no item is more important than another item in the list. In a democracy, all individuals possess equal weight, and no individual is more important than another.

The Human Body.Whitmans poetry revels in its depictions of the human body and the bodys
capacity for physical contact. The speaker ofSong of Myself claims that copulation is no more rank to me than death is (521) to demonstrate the naturalness of taking pleasure in the bodys physical possibilities. With physical contact comes spiritual communion: two touching bodies form one individual unit of togetherness. Several poems praise the bodies of both women and men, describing them at work, at play, and interacting. The speaker of I Sing the Body Electric (1855) boldly praises the perfection of the human form and worships the body because the body houses the soul. This free expression of sexuality horrified some of Whitmans early readers, and Whitman was fired from his job at the Indian Bureau in 1865 because the secretary of the interior found Leaves of Grass offensive. Whitmans unabashed praise of the male form has led many critics to argue that he was homosexual or bisexual, but the repressive culture of the nineteenth century prevented him from truly expressing those feelings in his work.

Rhythm and Incantation.Many of Whitmans poems rely on rhythm and repetition to create a
captivating, spellbinding quality of incantation. Often, Whitman begins several lines in a row with the same word or phrase, a literary device called anaphora. For example, the first four lines of When I Heard the Learnd Astronomer (1865) each begin with the word when. The long lines of such poems as Song of Myself and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd force readers to inhale several bits of text without pausing for breath, and this breathlessness contributes to the incantatory quality of the poems. Generally, the anaphora and the rhythm transform the poems into celebratory chants, and the joyous form and structure reflect the joyousness of the poetic content. Elsewhere, however, the repetition and rhythm contribute to an elegiac tone, as in O Captain! My Captain! This poem uses short lines and words, such as heart and father, to mournfully incant an elegy for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

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Symbols.Plants.Throughout Whitmans poetry, plant life symbolizes both growth and multiplicity. Rapid, regular plant growth also stands in for the rapid, regular expansion of the population of the United States. In When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd, Whitman uses flowers, bushes, wheat, trees, and other plant life to signify the possibilities of regeneration and re-growth after death. As the speaker mourns the loss of Lincoln, he drops a lilac spray onto the coffin; the act of laying a flower on the coffin not only honors the person who has died but lends death a measure of dignity and respect. The title Leaves of Grass highlights another of Whitmans themes: the beauty of the individual. Each leaf or blade of grass possesses its own distinct beauty, and together the blades form a beautiful unified whole, an idea Whitman explores in the sixth section ofSong of Myself. Multiple leaves of grass thus symbolize democracy, another instance of a beautiful whole composed of individual parts. In 1860, Whitman published an edition of Leaves of Grass that included a number of poems celebrating love between men. He titled this section The Calamus Poems, after the phallic calamus plant.

The Self.Whitmans interest in the self ties into his praise of the individual. Whitman links the self to
the conception of poetry throughout his work, envisioning the self as the birthplace of poetry. Most of his poems are spoken from the first person, using the pronoun I. The speaker of Whitmans most famous poem, Song of Myself, even assumes the name Walt Whitman, but nevertheless the speaker remains a fictional creation employed by the poet Whitman. Although Whitman borrows from his own autobiography for some of the speakers experiences, he also borrows many experiences from popular works of art, music, and literature. Repeatedly the speaker of this poem exclaims that he contains everything and everyone, which is a way for Whitman to reimagine the boundary between the self and the world. By imaging a person capable of carrying the entire world within him, Whitman can create an elaborate analogy about the ideal democracy, which would, like the self, be capable of containing the whole world.

Dickinsons Poetry

Emily Dickinson

Themes.The Individuals Struggle with God.Dickinson devoted a great amount of her work to
exploring the relationship between an individual and a Judeo-Christian God. Many poems describe a protracted rebellion against the God whom she deemed scornful and indifferent to human suffering, a divine being perpetually committed to subjugating human identity. In a sense, she was a religious poet. Unlike other religious poets, who inevitably saw themselves as subordinate to God, Dickinson rejected this premise in her poetry. She was dissatisfied with the notion that the poet can engage with God only insofar as God ordains the poet as his instrument, and she challenged Gods dominion throughout her life, refusing to submit to his divine will at the cost of her self. Perhaps her most fiery challenge comes in Mine by the Right of the White Election! (528), in which the speaker roars in revolt against God, claiming the earth and heavens for herself or himself. Elsewhere, Dickinsons poetry criticizes God not by speaking out directly against him, but by detailing the suffering he causes and his various affronts to an individuals sense of self. Though the speaker of Tell all the Truth but tell it slant (1129) never mentions God, the poem refers obliquely to his suppression of the apostle Paul in the last two lines. Here, the speaker describes how unmitigated truth (in the form of light) causes blindness. In the Bible (Acts 9:4), God decides to enlighten Paul by making him blind and then healing him on the condition that thenceforth Paul becomes a chosen

49

vessel of God, performing his will. The speaker recoils from this instance of Gods juggernaut-like domination of Paul in this poem but follows the poems advice and tells the truth slant,or indirectly, rather than censuring God directly. In another instance of implicit criticism, Dickinson portrays God as a murderous hunter of man in My Life had stooda Loaded Gun (754), in which Death goes about gleefully executing people for his divine master. These poems are among the hundreds of verses in which Dickinson portrays God as aloof, cruel, invasive, insensitive, or vindictive.

The Assertion of the Self.In her work, Dickinson asserts the importance of the self, a theme
closely related to Dickinsons censure of God. As Dickinson understood it, the mere act of speaking or writing is an affirmation of the will, and the call of the poet, in particular, is the call to explore and express the self to others. For Dickinson, the self entails an understanding of identity according to the way it systematizes its perceptions of the world, forms its goals and values, and comes to judgments regarding what it perceives. Nearly all Dickinsons speakers behave according to the primacy of the self, despite the efforts of others to intrude on them. Indeed, the self is never more apparent in Dickinsons poetry than when the speaker brandishes it against some potentially violating force. In They shut me up in Prose (613), the speaker taunts her captives, who have imprisoned her body but not her mind, which remains free and roaming. Because God most often plays the role of culprit as an omnipotent being, he can and does impose compromising conditions upon individuals according to his whim in Dickinsons work. Against this power, the self is essentially defined. The individual is subject to any amount of suffering, but so long as he or she remains a sovereign self, he or she still has that which separates him or her from other animate and inanimate beings.

The Power of Words and Poetry.Though Dickinson sequestered herself in Amherst for most of
her life, she was quite attuned to the modern trends of thought that circulated throughout Europe and North America. Perhaps the most important of these was Charles Darwins theory of evolution, published in 1859. Besides the tidal wave it unleashed in the scientific community, evolution throttled the notion of a world created by Gods grand design. For Dickinson, who renounced obedience to God through the steps of her own mental evolution, this development only reinforced the opposition to the belief in a transcendent and divine design in an increasingly secularized world. Dickinson began to see language and the word, which were formerly part of Gods domain, as the province of the poet. The duty of the poet was to re-create, through words, a sense of the world as a place in which objects have an essential and almost mythic relationship to each other. Dickinsons poems often link abstract entities to physical things in an attempt to embrace or create an integral design in the world. This act is most apparent in her poems of definition, such as Hope is the thing with feathers (254) or Hope is a subtle Glutton (1547). In these poems, Dickinson employs metaphors that assign physical qualities to the abstract feeling of hope in order to flesh out the nature of the word and what it means to human consciousness.

Nature as a Haunted House.In a letter to a friend, Dickinson once wrote: Nature is a

Haunted Housebut Arta House that tries to be haunted. The first part of the sentence implies that the natural world is replete with mystery and false signs, which deceive humankind as to the purpose of things in nature as well as to Gods purpose in the creation of nature. The sentences second part reveals the poets role. The poet does not exist merely to render aspects of nature, but rather to ascertain the character of Gods power in the world. For Dickinson, however, the characterizing of Gods power proved to be complicated since she often abstained from using the established religious symbols for things in nature. This abstention is most evident in Dickinsons poem about a snake,A narrow Fellow in the Grass (986), in which Dickinson refrains from the easy reference to Satan in Eden. Indeed, in many

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of her nature poems, such as A Bird came down the Walk (328), Dickinson ultimately insists on depicting nature as unapologetically incomprehensible, and thus haunted. Motifs.The Speakers Unique Poetic Voice.Dickinsons speakers are numerous and varied, but each exhibits a similar voice, or distinctive tone and style. Poets create speakers to literally speak their poems; while these speakers might share traits with their creators or might be based on real historical figures, ultimately they are fictional entities distinct from their writers. Frequently, Dickinson employs the first person, which lends her poems the immediacy of a dialogue between two people, the speaker and the reader. She sometimes aligns multiple speakers in one poem with the use of the plural personal pronoun we. The first-person singular and plural allow Dickinson to write about specific experiences in the world: her speakers convey distinct, subjective emotions and individual thoughts rather than objective, concrete truths. Readers are thus invited to compare their experiences, emotions, and thoughts with those expressed in Dickinsons lyrics. By emphasizing the subjectivity, or individuality, of experience, Dickinson rails against those educational and religious institutions that attempt to limit individual knowledge and experience.

The Connection Between Sight and Self.For Dickinson, seeing is a form of individual power.
Sight requires that the seer have the authority to associate with the world around her or him in meaningful ways and the sovereignty to act based on what she or he believes exists as opposed to what another entity dictates. In this sense, sight becomes an important expression of the self, and consequently the speakers in Dickinsons poems value it highly. The horror that the speaker of I heard a Fly buzzwhen I died (465) experiences is attributable to her loss of eyesight in the moments leading up to her death. The final utterance, I could not see to see (16), points to the fact that the last gasp of life, and thus of selfhood, is concentrated on the desire to see more than anything else. In this poem, sight and self are so synonymous that the end of one (blindness) translates into the end of the other (death). In other poems, sight and self seem literally fused, a connection that Dickinson toys with by playing on the sonic similarity of the words I and eye. This wordplay abounds in Dickinsons body of work. It is used especially effectively in the third stanza of The Soul selects her own Society(303), in which the speaker declares that she knows the soul, or the self. She commands the soul to choose one person from a great number of people and then close the lidsof attention. In this poem, the I that is the soul has eyelike properties: closing the lids, an act that would prevent seeing, is tantamount to cutting off the I from the rest of society. Symbols.Feet.Feet enter Dickinsons poems self-referentially, since the words foot and feet denote poetic terms as well as body parts. In poetry, feet are the groups of syllables in a line that form a metrical unit. Dickinsons mention of feet in her poems generally serves the dual task of describing functioning body parts and commenting on poetry itself. Thus, when the speaker of A narrow Fellow in the Grass (986) remembers himself a Barefoot boy (11), he indirectly alludes to a time when his sense of poetry was not fully formed. Likewise, when the speaker of After great pain, a formal feeling comes (341) notes that feet are going around in his head while he is going mad, he points to the fact that his ability to make poetry is compromised.

Stone.In Dickinsons poems, stones represent immutability and finality: unlike flowers or the light of
day, stones remain essentially unchanged. The speaker in Safe in their Alabaster Chambers (216) imagines the dead lying unaffected by the breezes of natureand of life. After the speaker chooses her soul in The Soul selects her own Society (303), she shuts her eyes Like Stone (12), firmly closing herself off from sensory perception or society. A stone becomes an object of envy in How happy is the little Stone (1510), a

51

poem in which the speaker longs for the rootless independence of a stone bumping along, free from human cares.

Birds.Dickinson uses the symbol of birds rather flexibly. InA Bird came down the Walk (328), the
bird becomes an emblem of the unyielding mystery of nature, while inHope is the thing with feathers (254), the bird becomes a personification of hope. Elsewhere, Dickinson links birds to poets, whose job is to sing whether or not people hear. In Splitthe Lark and youll find the Music (861), Dickinson compares the sounds of birds to the lyrical sounds of poetry; the poem concludes by asking rhetorically whether its listeners now understand the truths produced by both birds and poetry. Like nature, symbolized by the bird, art produces soothing, truthful sounds.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain
FULL TITLE

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

AUTHOR

Mark Twain (pseudonym for Samuel Clemens) Novel

TYPE OF WORK GENRE

Picaresque novel (episodic, colorful story often in the form of a quest or journey); satire of popular

adventure and romance novels; bildungsroman (novel of education or moral development)

LANGUAGE

English; frequently makes use of Southern and black dialects of the time 18761883; Hartford, Connecticut, and Elmira, New York 1884

TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN

DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION PUBLISHER NARRATOR

Charles L. Webster & Co. Huckleberry Finn Hucks point of view, although Twain occasionally indulges in digressions in which he shows off

POINT OF VIEW

his own ironic wit

TONE

Frequently ironic or mocking, particularly concerning adventure novels and romances; also contemplative,

as Huck seeks to decipher the world around him; sometimes boyish and exuberant
TENSE

Immediate past Before the Civil War; roughly 18351845; Twain said the novel was set forty to fifty years before

SETTING (TIME)

the time of its publication

SETTING (PLACE)

The Mississippi River town of St. Petersburg, Missouri; various locations along the river through

Arkansas
PROTAGONIST

Huck Finn At the beginning of the novel, Huck struggles against society and its attempts to civilize him,

MAJOR CONFLICT

represented by the Widow Douglas, Miss Watson, and other adults. Later, this conflict gains greater focus in Hucks dealings with Jim, as Huck must decide whether to turn Jim in, as society demands, or to protect and help his friend instead.
RISING ACTION

Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas attempt to civilize Huck until Pap reappears in town,

demands Hucks money, and kidnaps Huck. Huck escapes society by faking his own death and retreating to Jacksons Island, where he meets Jim and sets out on the river with him. Huck gradually begins to question the

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rules society has taught him, as when, in order to protect Jim, he lies and makes up a story to scare off some men searching for escaped slaves. Although Huck and Jim live a relatively peaceful life on the raft, they are ultimately unable to escape the evils and hypocrisies of the outside world. The most notable representatives of these outside evils are the con men the duke and the dauphin, who engage in a series of increasingly serious scams that culminate in their sale of Jim, who ends up at the Phelps farm.
CLIMAX

Huck considers but then decides against writing Miss Watson to tell her the Phelps family is holding Jim,

following his conscience rather than the prevailing morality of the day. Instead, Tom and Huck try to free Jim, and Tom is shot in the leg during the attempt.
FALLING ACTION

When Aunt Polly arrives at the Phelps farm and correctly identifies Tom and Huck, Tom reveals

that Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed Jim in her will. Afterward, Tom recovers from his wound, while Huck decides he is done with civilized society and makes plans to travel to the West.
THEMES MOTIFS

Racism and slavery; intellectual and moral education; the hypocrisy of civilized society

Childhood; lies and cons; superstitions and folk beliefs; parodies of popular romance novels The Mississippi River; floods; shipwrecks; the natural world Twain uses parallels and juxtapositions more so than explicit foreshadowing, especially in his

SYMBOLS

FORESHADOWING

frequent comparisons between Hucks plight and eventual escape and Jims plight and eventual escape.

Themes .Racism and Slavery.Although Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn two decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, Americaand especially the Southwas still struggling with racism and the aftereffects of slavery. By the early 1880s, Reconstruction, the plan to put the United States back together after the war and integrate freed slaves into society, had hit shaky ground, although it had not yet failed outright. As Twain worked on his novel, race relations, which seemed to be on a positive path in the years following the Civil War, once again became strained. The imposition of Jim Crow laws, designed to limit the power of blacks in the South in a variety of indirect ways, brought the beginning of a new, insidious effort to oppress. The new racism of the South, less institutionalized and monolithic, was also more difficult to combat. Slavery could be outlawed, but when white Southerners enacted racist laws or policies under a professed motive of self-defense against newly freed blacks, far fewer people, Northern or Southern, saw the act as immoral and rushed to combat it. Although Twain wrote the novel after slavery was abolished, he set it several decades earlier, when slavery was still a fact of life. But even by Twains time, things had not necessarily gotten much better for blacks in the South. In this light, we might read Twains depiction of slavery as an allegorical representation of the condition of blacks in the United States even after the abolition of slavery. Just as slavery places the noble and moral Jim under the control of white society, no matter how degraded that white society may be, so too did the insidious racism that arose near the end of Reconstruction oppress black men for illogical and hypocritical reasons. In Huckleberry Finn, Twain, by exposing the hypocrisy of slavery, demonstrates how racism distorts the oppressors as much as it does those who are oppressed. The result is a world of moral confusion, in which seemingly good white people such as Miss Watson and Sally Phelps express no concern about the injustice of slavery or the cruelty of separating Jim from his family.

Intellectual and Moral Education.By focusing on Hucks education, Huckleberry Finn fits into
the tradition of the bildungsroman: a novel depicting an individuals maturation and development. As a poor, uneducated boy, for all intents and purposes an orphan, Huck distrusts the morals and precepts of the society that treats him as an outcast and fails to protect him from abuse. This apprehension about society, and his growing relationship with Jim, lead Huck to question many of the teachings that he has received, especially

53

regarding race and slavery. More than once, we see Huck choose to go to hell rather than go along with the rules and follow what he has been taught. Huck bases these decisions on his experiences, his own sense of logic, and what his developing conscience tells him. On the raft, away from civilization, Huck is especially free from societys rules, able to make his own decisions without restriction. Through deep introspection, he comes to his own conclusions, unaffected by the acceptedand often hypocriticalrules and values of Southern culture. By the novels end, Huck has learned to read the world around him, to distinguish good, bad, right, wrong, menace, friend, and so on. His moral development is sharply contrasted to the character of Tom Sawyer, who is influenced by a bizarre mix of adventure novels and Sunday-school teachings, which he combines to justify his outrageous and potentially harmful escapades.

The Hypocrisy of Civilized Society.When Huck plans to head west at the end of the novel in
order to escape further sivilizing, he is trying to avoid more than regular baths and mandatory school attendance. Throughout the novel, Twain depicts the society that surrounds Huck as little more than a collection of degraded rules and precepts that defy logic. This faulty logic appears early in the novel, when the new judge in town allows Pap to keep custody of Huck. The judge privileges Paps rights to his son as his natural father over Hucks welfare. At the same time, this decision comments on a system that puts a white mans rights to his propertyhis slavesover the welfare and freedom of a black man. In implicitly comparing the plight of slaves to the plight of Huck at the hands of Pap, Twain implies that it is impossible for a society that owns slaves to be just, no matter how civilized that society believes and proclaims itself to be. Again and again, Huck encounters individuals who seem goodSally Phelps, for examplebut who Twain takes care to show are prejudiced slave-owners. This shaky sense of justice that Huck repeatedly encounters lies at the heart of societys problems: terrible acts go unpunished, yet frivolous crimes, such as drunkenly shouting insults, lead to executions. Sherburns speech to the mob that has come to lynch him accurately summarizes the view of society Twain gives in Huckleberry Finn: rather than maintain collective welfare, society instead is marked by cowardice, a lack of logic, and profound selfishness. Motifs .Childhood.Hucks youth is an important factor in his moral education over the course of the novel, for we sense that only a child is open-minded enough to undergo the kind of development that Huck does. Since Huck and Tom are young, their age lends a sense of play to their actions, which excuses them in certain ways and also deepens the novels commentary on slavery and society. Ironically, Huck often knows better than the adults around him, even though he has lacked the guidance that a proper family and community should have offered him. Twain also frequently draws links between Hucks youth and Jims status as a black man: both are vulnerable, yet Huck, because he is white, has power over Jim. And on a different level, the silliness, pure joy, and navet of childhood give Huckleberry Finn a sense of fun and humor. Though its themes are quite weighty, the novel itself feels light in tone and is an enjoyable read because of this rambunctious childhood excitement that enlivens the story.

Lies and Cons.Huckleberry Finn is full of malicious lies and scams, many of them coming from the
duke and the dauphin. It is clear that these con mens lies are bad, for they hurt a number of innocent people. Yet Huck himself tells a number of lies and even cons a few people, most notably the slave-hunters, to whom he makes up a story about a smallpox outbreak in order to protect Jim. As Huck realizes, it seems that telling a lie can actually be a good thing, depending on its purpose. This insight is part of Hucks learning process, as he finds that some of the rules he has been taught contradict what seems to be right. At other points, the lines between a con, legitimate entertainment, and approved social structures like religion are fine indeed. In this light, lies and cons provide an effective way for Twain to highlight the moral ambiguity that runs through the novel.

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Superstitions and Folk Beliefs.From the time Huck meets him on Jacksons Island until the end
of the novel, Jim spouts a wide range of superstitions and folktales. Whereas Jim initially appears foolish to believe so unwaveringly in these kinds of signs and omens, it turns out, curiously, that many of his beliefs do indeed have some basis in reality or presage events to come. Much as we do, Huck at first dismisses most of Jims superstitions as silly, but ultimately he comes to appreciate Jims deep knowledge of the world. In this sense, Jims superstition serves as an alternative to accepted social teachings and assumptions and provides a reminder that mainstream conventions are not always right.

Parodies of Popular Romance Novels.Huckleberry Finn is full of people who base their lives
on romantic literary models and stereotypes of various kinds. Tom Sawyer, the most obvious example, bases his life and actions on adventure novels. The deceased Emmeline Grangerford painted weepy maidens and wrote poems about dead children in the romantic style. The Shepherdson and Grangerford families kill one another out of a bizarre, overexcited conception of family honor. These characters proclivities toward the romantic allow Twain a few opportunities to indulge in some fun, and indeed, the episodes that deal with this subject are among the funniest in the novel. However, there is a more substantive message beneath: that popular literature is highly stylized and therefore rarely reflects the reality of a society. Twain shows how a strict adherence to these romantic ideals is ultimately dangerous: Tom is shot, Emmeline dies, and the Shepherdsons and Grangerfords end up in a deadly clash. Symbols .The Mississippi River.For Huck and Jim, the Mississippi River is the ultimate symbol of freedom. Alone on their raft, they do not have to answer to anyone. The river carries them toward freedom: for Jim, toward the free states; for Huck, away from his abusive father and the restrictive sivilizing of St. Petersburg. Much like the river itself, Huck and Jim are in flux, willing to change their attitudes about each other with little prompting. Despite their freedom, however, they soon find that they are not completely free from the evils and influences of the towns on the rivers banks. Even early on, the real world intrudes on the paradise of the raft: the river floods, bringing Huck and Jim into contact with criminals, wrecks, and stolen goods. Then, a thick fog causes them to miss the mouth of the Ohio River, which was to be their route to freedom. As the novel progresses, then, the river becomes something other than the inherently benevolent place Huck originally thought it was. As Huck and Jim move further south, the duke and the dauphin invade the raft, and Huck and Jim must spend more time ashore. Though the river continues to offer a refuge from trouble, it often merely effects the exchange of one bad situation for another. Each escape exists in the larger context of a continual drift southward, toward the Deep South and entrenched slavery. In this transition from idyllic retreat to source of peril, the river mirrors the complicated state of the South. As Huck and Jims journey progresses, the river, which once seemed a paradise and a source of freedom, becomes merely a short-term means of escape that nonetheless pushes Huck and Jim ever further toward danger and destruction.

Moby-Dick Herman Melville

Key Facts
FULL TITLE

Moby-Dick; or The Whale

55

AUTHOR

Herman Melville Novel

TYPE OF WORK GENRE

Epic, adventure story, quest tale, allegory, tragedy English Between 1850 and 1851, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and New York City 1851

LANGUAGE

TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN

DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION PUBLISHER

Harper & Brothers in America (simultaneously published in England by Richard Bentley as THE

WHALE)
NARRATOR

Ishmael, a junior member of the Pequods crew, casts himself as the author, recounting the events of

the voyage after he has acquired more experience and studied the whale extensively.
POINT OF VIEW

Ishmael narrates in a combination of first and third person, describing events as he saw them and

providing his own thoughts. He presents the thoughts and feelings of the other characters only as an outside observer might infer them.
TONE

Ironic, celebratory, philosophical, dramatic, hyperbolic Past 1830s or 1840s Aboard the whaling ship the Pequod, in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans Ahab dedicates his ship and crew to destroying Moby Dick, a white sperm whale, because he

TENSE

SETTING (TIME)

SETTING (PLACE) MAJOR CONFLICT

sees this whale as the living embodiment of all that is evil and malignant in the universe. By ignoring the physical dangers that this quest entails, setting himself against other men, and presuming to understand and fight evil on a cosmic scale, Ahab arrogantly defies the limitations imposed upon human beings.
RISING ACTION

Ahab announces his quest to the other sailors and nails the doubloon to the mast; the Pequod

encounters various ships with news and stories about Moby Dick.
CLIMAX

In Chapter 132, The Symphony,Ahab interrogates himself and his quest in front of Starbuck, and

realizes that he does not have the will to turn aside from his purpose.
FALLING ACTION

The death of Ahab and the destruction of the Pequod by Moby Dick; Ishmael, the only survivor of

the Pequods sinking, floats on a coffin and is rescued by another whaling ship, the Rachel.
THEMES MOTIFS

The limits of knowledge; the deceptiveness of fate; the exploitative nature of whaling Whiteness; surfaces and depths The Pequod symbolizes doom; Moby Dick, on an objective level, symbolizes humankinds inability to

SYMBOLS

understand the world; Queequegs coffin symbolizes both life and death
FORESHADOWING

Foreshadowing in Moby-Dick is extensive and inescapable: everything from the Pequods

ornamentation to the behavior of schools of fish to the appearance of a giant squid is read as an omen of the eventual catastrophic encounter with Moby Dick.

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Themes.The Limits of Knowledge.As Ishmael tries, in the opening pages of Moby-Dick, to offer a simple collection of literary excerpts mentioning whales, he discovers that, throughout history, the whale has taken on an incredible multiplicity of meanings. Over the course of the novel, he makes use of nearly every discipline known to man in his attempts to understand the essential nature of the whale. Each of these systems of knowledge, however, including art, taxonomy, and phrenology, fails to give an adequate account. The multiplicity of approaches that Ishmael takes, coupled with his compulsive need to assert his authority as a narrator and the frequent references to the limits of observation (men cannot see the depths of the ocean, for example), suggest that human knowledge is always limited and insufficient. When it comes to Moby Dick himself, this limitation takes on allegorical significance. The ways of Moby Dick, like those of the Christian God, are unknowable to man, and thus trying to interpret them, as Ahab does, is inevitably futile and often fatal. The Deceptiveness of Fate.In addition to highlighting many portentous or foreshadowing events, Ishmaels narrative contains many references to fate, creating the impression that the Pequods doom is inevitable. Many of the sailors believe in prophecies, and some even claim the ability to foretell the future. A number of things suggest, however, that characters are actually deluding themselves when they think that they see the work of fate and that fate either doesnt exist or is one of the many forces about which human beings can have no distinct knowledge. Ahab, for example, clearly exploits the sailorsbelief in fate to manipulate them into thinking that the quest for Moby Dick is their common destiny. Moreover, the prophesies of Fedallah and others seem to be undercut in Chapter 99, when various individuals interpret the doubloon in different ways, demonstrating that humans project what they want to see when they try to interpret signs and portents.

The Exploitative Nature of Whaling.At first glance, the Pequod seems like an island of
equality and fellowship in the midst of a racist, hierarchically structured world. The ships crew includes men from all corners of the globe and all races who seem to get along harmoniously. Ishmael is initially uneasy upon meeting Queequeg, but he quickly realizes that it is better to have a sober cannibal than a drunken Christianfor a shipmate. Additionally, the conditions of work aboard the Pequod promote a certain kind of egalitarianism, since men are promoted and paid according to their skill. However, the work of whaling parallels the other exploitative activitiesbuffalo hunting, gold mining, unfair trade with indigenous peoplesthat characterize American and European territorial expansion. Each of the Pequods mates, who are white, is entirely dependent on a nonwhite harpooner, and nonwhites perform most of the dirty or dangerous jobs aboard the ship. Flask actually stands on Daggoo, his African harpooner, in order to beat the other mates to a prize whale. Ahab is depicted as walking over the black youth Pip, who listens to Ahabs pacing from below deck, and is thus reminded that his value as a slave is less than the value of a whale. Motifs.Whiteness.Whiteness, to Ishmael, is horrible because it represents the unnatural and threatening: albinos, creatures that live in extreme and inhospitable environments, waves breaking against rocks. These examples reverse the traditional association of whiteness with purity. Whiteness conveys both a lack of meaning and an unreadable excess of meaning that confounds individuals. Moby Dick is the pinnacle of whiteness, and Melvilles characters cannot objectively understand the White Whale. Ahab, for instance, believes that Moby Dick represents evil, while Ishmael fails in his attempts to determine scientifically the whales fundamental nature.

Surfaces and Depths.Ishmael frequently bemoans the impossibility of examining anything in its
entirety, noting that only the surfaces of objects and environments are available to the human observer. On a live whale, for example, only the outer layer presents itself; on a dead whale, it is impossible to determine what constitutes the whales skin, or which part

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skeleton, blubber, headoffers the best understanding of the entire animal. Moreover, as the whale swims, it hides much of its body underwater, away from the human gaze, and no one knows where it goes or what it does. The sea itself is the greatest frustration in this regard: its depths are mysterious and inaccessible to Ishmael. This motif represents the larger problem of the limitations of human knowledge. Humankind is not all-seeing; we can only observe, and thus only acquire knowledge about, that fraction of entitiesboth individuals and environmentsto which we have access: surfaces.

Symbols.The Pequod.Named after a Native American tribe in Massachusetts that did not long
survive the arrival of white men and thus memorializing an extinction, the Pequod is a symbol of doom. It is painted a gloomy black and covered in whale teeth and bones, literally bristling with the mementos of violent death. It is, in fact, marked for death. Adorned like a primitive coffin, the Pequod becomes one.

Moby Dick.Moby Dick possesses various symbolic meanings for various individuals. To the
Pequods crew, the legendary White Whale is a concept onto which they can displace their anxieties about their dangerous and often very frightening jobs. Because they have no delusions about Moby Dick acting malevolently toward men or literally embodying evil, tales about the whale allow them to confront their fear, manage it, and continue to function. Ahab, on the other hand, believes that Moby Dick is a manifestation of all that is wrong with the world, and he feels that it is his destiny to eradicate this symbolic evil. Moby Dick also bears out interpretations not tied down to specific characters. In its inscrutable silence and mysterious habits, for example, the White Whale can be read as an allegorical representation of an unknowable God. As a profitable commodity, it fits into the scheme of white economic expansion and exploitation in the nineteenth century. As a part of the natural world, it represents the destruction of the environment by such hubristic expansion.

Queequegs Coffin.Queequegs coffin alternately symbolizes life and death. Queequeg has it built
when he is seriously ill, but when he recovers, it becomes a chest to hold his belongings and an emblem of his will to live. He perpetuates the knowledge tattooed on his body by carving it onto the coffins lid. The coffin further comes to symbolize life, in a morbid way, when it replaces the Pequods life buoy. When the Pequod sinks, the coffin becomes Ishmaels buoy, saving not only his life but the life of the narrative that he will pass on.

HENRY JAMES THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY Major themes.James's first idea for The Portrait of a Lady was simple: a young American woman confronting her destiny, whatever it might be. Only then did he begin to form a plot to bring out the character of his central figure. This was the uncompromising story of the freespirited Isabel losing her freedomdespite (or because of) suddenly coming into a great deal of moneyand getting "ground in the very mill of the conventional." It is a rather existentialist novel, as Isabel is very committed to living with the consequences of her choice with integrity but also a sort of stubbornness. The richness of The Portrait is hardly exhausted by a review of Isabel's character. The novel exhibits a huge panorama of trans-Atlantic life, a far larger canvas than any James had

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previously painted. This moneyed world appears charming and leisurely but proves to be plagued with treachery, deceit, and suffering.

Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad

Key Facts
FULL TITLE AUTHOR

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad Novella (between a novel and a short story in length and scope)

TYPE OF WORK GENRE

Symbolism, colonial literature, adventure tale, frame story, almost a romance in its insistence on heroism

and the supernatural and its preference for the symbolic over the realistic
LANGUAGE

English England, 18981899; inspired by Conrads journey to the Congo in 1890 Serialized in Blackwoods magazine in 1899; published in 1902 in the volume Youth:

TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN

DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION

A Narrative; and Two Other Stories

PUBLISHER NARRATOR

J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. There are two narrators: an anonymous passenger on a pleasure ship, who listens to Marlows story,

and Marlow himself, a middle-aged ships captain.

POINT OF VIEW

The first narrator speaks in the first-person plural, on behalf of four other passengers who listen to

Marlows tale. Marlow narrates his story in the first person, describing only what he witnessed and experienced, and providing his own commentary on the story.
TONE

Ambivalent: Marlow is disgusted at the brutality of the Company and horrified by Kurtzs degeneration, but

he claims that any thinking man would be tempted into similar behavior.
TENSE

Past Latter part of the nineteenth century, probably sometime between 1876 and 1892 Opens on the Thames River outside London, where Marlow is telling the story that makes up

SETTING (TIME)

SETTING (PLACE)

Heart of Darkness. Events of the story take place in Brussels, at the Companys offices, and in the Congo, then a Belgian territory.
PROTAGONIST

Marlow Both Marlow and Kurtz confront a conflict between their images of themselves as civilized

MAJOR CONFLICT

Europeans and the temptation to abandon morality completely once they leave the context of European society.
RISING ACTION

The brutality Marlow witnesses in the Companys employees, the rumors he hears that Kurtz is a

remarkable and humane man, and the numerous examples of Europeans breaking down mentally or physically in the environment of Africa.

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CLIMAX

Marlows discovery, upon reaching the Inner Station, that Kurtz has completely abandoned European

morals and norms of behavior

FALLING ACTION

Marlows acceptance of responsibility for Kurtzs legacy, Marlows encounters with Company

officials and Kurtzs family and friends, Marlows visit to Kurtzs Intended
THEMES MOTIFS

The hypocrisy of imperialism, madness as a result of imperialism, the absurdity of evil Darkness (very seldom opposed by light), interiors vs. surfaces (kernel/shell, coast/inland, station/forest,

etc.), ironic understatement, hyperbolic language, inability to find words to describe situation adequately, images of ridiculous waste, upriver versus downriver/toward and away from Kurtz/away from and back toward civilization (quest or journey structure)
SYMBOLS

Rivers, fog, women (Kurtzs Intended, his African mistress), French warship shelling forested coast,

grove of death, severed heads on fence posts, Kurtzs Report, dead helmsman, maps, whited sepulchreof Brussels, knitting women in Company offices, man trying to fill bucket with hole in it
FORESHADOWING

Permeates every moment of the narrativemostly operates on the level of imagery, which is

consistently dark, gloomy, and threatening

Themes.The Hypocrisy of Imperialism.Heart of Darkness explores the issues surrounding imperialism in complicated ways. As Marlow travels from the Outer Station to the Central Station and finally up the river to the Inner Station, he encounters scenes of torture, cruelty, and near-slavery. At the very least, the incidental scenery of the book offers a harsh picture of colonial enterprise. The impetus behind Marlows adventures, too, has to do with the hypocrisy inherent in the rhetoric used to justify imperialism. The men who work for the Company describe what they do as trade, and their treatment of native Africans is part of a benevolent project of civilization.Kurtz, on the other hand, is open about the fact that he does not trade but rather takes ivory by force, and he describes his own treatment of the natives with the words suppression and extermination:he does not hide the fact that he rules through violence and intimidation. His perverse honesty leads to his downfall, as his success threatens to expose the evil practices behind European activity in Africa. However, for Marlow as much as for Kurtz or for the Company, Africans in this book are mostly objects: Marlow refers to his helmsman as a piece of machinery, and Kurtzs African mistress is at best a piece of statuary. It can be argued that Heart of Darkness participates in an oppression of nonwhites that is much more sinister and much harder to remedy than the open abuses of Kurtz or the Companys men. Africans become for Marlow a mere backdrop, a human screen against which he can play out his philosophical and existential struggles. Their existence and their exoticism enable his selfcontemplation. This kind of dehumanization is harder to identify than colonial violence or open racism. While Heart of Darkness offers a powerful condemnation of the hypocritical operations of imperialism, it also presents a set of issues surrounding race that is ultimately troubling.

Madness as a Result of Imperialism.Madness is closely linked to imperialism in this book.

Africa is responsible for mental disintegration as well as physical illness. Madness has two primary functions. First, it serves as an ironic device to engage the readers sympathies. Kurtz, Marlow is told from the beginning, is mad. However, as Marlow, and the reader, begin to form a more complete picture of Kurtz, it becomes apparent that his madness is only relative, that in the context of the Company insanity is difficult to define. Thus, both Marlow and the reader begin to sympathize with Kurtz and view the Company with suspicion. Madness also functions to establish the necessity of social fictions. Although social mores and explanatory justifications are shown throughout Heart of Darkness to be utterly false and even leading to evil, they are nevertheless necessary for both group harmony and individual security. Madness, in Heart of Darkness, is the result of being removed from ones social context and allowed to be the sole arbiter of ones own actions.

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Madness is thus linked not only to absolute power and a kind of moral genius but to mans fundamental fallibility: Kurtz has no authority to whom he answers but himself, and this is more than any one man can bear.

The Absurdity of Evil.This novella is, above all, an exploration of hypocrisy, ambiguity, and
moral confusion. It explodes the idea of the proverbial choice between the lesser of two evils. As the idealistic Marlow is forced to align himself with either the hypocritical and malicious colonial bureaucracy or the openly malevolent, rule-defying Kurtz, it becomes increasingly clear that to try to judge either alternative is an act of folly: how can moral standards or social values be relevant in judging evil? Is there such thing as insanity in a world that has already gone insane? The number of ridiculous situations Marlow witnesses act as reflections of the larger issue: at one station, for instance, he sees a man trying to carry water in a bucket with a large hole in it. At the Outer Station, he watches native laborers blast away at a hillside with no particular goal in mind. The absurd involves both insignificant silliness and life-or-death issues, often simultaneously. That the serious and the mundane are treated similarly suggests a profound moral confusion and a tremendous hypocrisy: it is terrifying that Kurtzs homicidal megalomania and a leaky bucket provoke essentially the same reaction from Marlow. Motifs .Observation and Eavesdropping.Marlow gains a great deal of information by watching the world around him and by overhearing others conversations, as when he listens from the deck of the wrecked steamer to the manager of the Central Station and his uncle discussing Kurtz and the Russian trader. This phenomenon speaks to the impossibility of direct communication between individuals: information must come as the result of chance observation and astute interpretation. Words themselves fail to capture meaning adequately, and thus they must be taken in the context of their utterance. Another good example of this is Marlows conversation with the brickmaker, during which Marlow is able to figure out a good deal more than simply what the man has to say.

Interiors and Exteriors .Comparisons between interiors and exteriors pervade Heart of Darkness.
As the narrator states at the beginning of the text, Marlow is more interested in surfaces, in the surrounding aura of a thing rather than in any hidden nugget of meaning deep within the thing itself. This inverts the usual hierarchy of meaning: normally one seeks the deep message or hidden truth. The priority placed on observation demonstrates that penetrating to the interior of an idea or a person is impossible in this world. Thus, Marlow is confronted with a series of exteriors and surfacesthe rivers banks, the forest walls around the station, Kurtzs broad foreheadthat he must interpret. These exteriors are all the material he is given, and they provide him with perhaps a more profound source of knowledge than any falsely constructed interior kernel.

Darkness .Darkness is important enough conceptually to be part of the books title. However, it is
difficult to discern exactly what it might mean, given that absolutely everything in the book is cloaked in darkness. Africa, England, and Brussels are all described as gloomy and somehow dark, even if the sun is shining brightly. Darkness thus seems to operate metaphorically and existentially rather than specifically. Darkness is the inability to see: this may sound simple, but as a description of the human condition it has profound implications. Failing to see another human being means failing to understand that individual and failing to establish any sort of sympathetic communion with him or her.

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Symbols .Fog.Fog is a sort of corollary to darkness. Fog not only obscures but distorts: it gives one just enough information to begin making decisions but no way to judge the accuracy of that information, which often ends up being wrong. Marlows steamer is caught in the fog, meaning that he has no idea where hes going and no idea whether peril or open water lies ahead.

The Whited Sepulchre.The whited sepulchre is probably Brussels, where the Companys
headquarters are located. A sepulchre implies death and confinement, and indeed Europe is the origin of the colonial enterprises that bring death to white men and to their colonial subjects; it is also governed by a set of reified social principles that both enable cruelty, dehumanization, and evil and prohibit change. The phrase whited sepulchre comes from the biblical Book of Matthew. In the passage, Matthew describes whited sepulchres as something beautiful on the outside but containing horrors within (the bodies of the dead); thus, the image is appropriate for Brussels, given the hypocritical Belgian rhetoric about imperialisms civilizing mission. (Belgian colonies, particularly the Congo, were notorious for the violence perpetuated against the natives.)

Women.Both Kurtzs Intended and his African mistress function as blank slates upon which the
values and the wealth of their respective societies can be displayed. Marlow frequently claims that women are the keepers of nave illusions; although this sounds condemnatory, such a role is in fact crucial, as these nave illusions are at the root of the social fictions that justify economic enterprise and colonial expansion. In return, the women are the beneficiaries of much of the resulting wealth, and they become objects upon which men can display their own success and status.

The River.The Congo River is the key to Africa for Europeans. It allows them access to the center of
the continent without having to physically cross it; in other words, it allows the white man to remain always separate or outside. Africa is thus reduced to a series of two-dimensional scenes that flash by Marlows steamer as he travels upriver. The river also seems to want to expel Europeans from Africa altogether: its current makes travel upriver slow and difficult, but the flow of water makes travel downriver, back towardcivilization, rapid and seemingly inevitable. Marlows struggles with the river as he travels upstream toward Kurtz reflect his struggles to understand the situation in which he has found himself. The ease with which he journeys back downstream, on the other hand, mirrors his acquiescence to Kurtz and his choice of nightmares. JOSEPH CONRAD LORD JIM Major Themes
Piecing Together the Story.The novel begins in a third-person, omniscient voice, with a close view of Jim's inner life, and then shifts to a clear narrator, Marlow. Marlow is then presented telling his story to a gathering. On the verandah, he tells Jim's story, and the story is pieced together by means of his own observations, Jim's direct statements, and statements by his friend, the owner of a rice mill, Egstrom, one of Jim's employers, and Schomberg the Bangkok hotelkeeper. The Romantic.Stein concludes that Jim is a romantic, and Marlow concludes that Stein is a romantic. It is implied that Marlow too had once been a romantic, and that, oftentimes, careers at sea have their beginnings in youthful, romantic aspirations. The Leap.There are several occasions of leaping in Lord Jim. First, there is the leap Jim is too late in taking. This failure results in lost opportunities not only for a show of

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courage but also for personal glory and for respect.The second leap is the one that he ironically does take: a leap into "a deep hole" of shame and guilt. This second leap is ambiguously presented as an action or reflex. The impending event of the sinking of the steamship flooded Jim with fear. Facts vs. Experience.The official Inquiry into the facts surrounding the Patna incident occupies much of the first half of the novel. Women (and "the Eastern bride" of opportunity).The women in Lord Jim include Stein's wife "the princess," his daughter Emma, and their reflection in the Malay-Dutch woman who is a mother to Jewel, the only woman who survives the telling of the tale. The tale ends with Jewel living the quiet life in Stein's old age. Iron.The steamship Patna, on which Jim is chief mate, is made of iron, and after the disturbance cuts a hole in its underside, Jim and the rest of the crew express little faith in iron. It is a metal, they think, that will sink silently into the sea, like a block of lead. The Clean Slate.The image of "the clean slate" that Jim desires, upon which he can live his life free of the failure he had exhibited on the Patna, is the opportunity or chance to prove himself. The Patna vs. Patusan.The similarity between the names of the Patna and Patusan is striking, as well as the similarity of their respective communities. Both are isolated: the Patna by the sea; Patusan by both wilderness and the sea, since it is an island.

Ulysses
James Joyce
FULL TITLE AUTHOR

Ulysses

James Joyce Novel

TYPE OF WORK GENRE

Modernist novel; comic novel; quest novel English Trieste, Italy; Zurich, Switzerland; Paris; 19141921 Individual episodes were published serially starting in 1918; as a novel, it was first

LANGUAGE

TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN

DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION

published in 1922
PUBLISHER NARRATOR

First serially in The Little Review; as a novel by Shakespeare & Company Episodes One, Two, FourTwelve, Sixteen, and Seventeen feature anonymous narrators. Episode

Three features Stephens thoughts. Episode Thirteen features an amalgamation of anonymous narrator, Gerty MacDowell, and Bloom. Episode Fourteen features a variety of narrators, meant to be representative of the prose styles of historical English authors. Episode Fifteen has no narrator. Molly Bloom is the first-person narrator of Episode Eighteen.
POINT OF VIEW

Episodes One, Two, FourEleven, Sixteen, and Seventeen are told from the third-person

viewpoint. Episode Three features interior monologue. Episode Twelve is told from the first-person. Episode Thirteen is told from the third and first person. Episode Fourteen is told variously in the third-person and firstperson. Episode Fifteen is in play-script form. Episode Eighteen features an interior monologue.

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TONE

The narratives of Episodes One through Eight have a straightforward tone. Episodes Nine through Eleven

have a self-conscious, playful tone. Episode Twelve has a hyperbolic, belligerent tone. Episode Thirteen has a sentimental tone. Episode Fourteen has an extreme variety of tones, including pious, sensational, and satiric. Episode Fifteen has no narrator and therefore no dominant narrative tone. Episode Sixteen has a tired tone. Episode Seventeen has a scientific tone.
TENSE

Present 8:00 A.M., June 16, 1904approximately 3 A.M., June 17, 1904 Dublin, Ireland, and its surrounding suburbs

SETTING (TIME)

SETTING (PLACE) PROTAGONIST

Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom Molly Blooms infidelity with Blazes Boylan; Stephen Dedaluss search for a symbolic father;

MAJOR CONFLICT

Leopold Blooms desire for a son (his only son died eleven years ago several days after his birth)
RISING ACTION

Bloom leaves his house for the day, sees Blazes Boylan on the street several times, and becomes

anxious about Blazes and Mollys four oclock rendezvous. Bloom is convinced they are going to have sex. Stephen and Bloom go about their day. They pass by each other several times and coincidentally meet at Holles St. Maternity Hospital.
CLIMAX

The first climax could be when Bloom looks after Stephen during Stephens argument with Private Carr

(at the end of Episode Fifteen). The second climax is Blooms return home to his bedroom to discover evidence of Mollys infidelity and to mentally overcome the threat of Blazes Boylan (Episode Seventeen).
FALLING ACTION

Bloom and Stephen rest at a cabmans shelter (Episode Sixteen), then return to the Bloom

residence and have cocoa and talk (Episode Seventeen). Bloom tells Molly about his day and asks her to serve him breakfast in bed (Episode Seventeen). Molly lies awake considering the events of the day and a happy memory from her and Blooms past.
THEMES

The quest for paternity; the remorse of conscience; compassion as heroic; parallax or the necessity of

multiple perspectives
MOTIFS

Lightness and darkness; the home usurped; the East Plumtrees Potted Meat; the Gold Cup horserace; Stephens Latin Quarter hat; Blooms potato talisman

SYMBOLS

FORESHADOWING

Stephens and Blooms compatible dreams set in an Eastern marketplace street

Themes.The Quest for Paternity.At its most basic level, Ulysses is a book about Stephens search for a symbolic father and Blooms search for a son. In this respect, the plot of Ulysses parallels Telemachuss search for Odysseus, and vice versa, in The Odyssey. Blooms search for a son stems at least in part from his need to reinforce his identity and heritage through progeny. Stephen already has a biological father, Simon Dedalus, but considers him a father only in flesh. Stephen feels that his own ability to mature and become a father himself (of art or children) is restricted by Simons criticism and lack of understanding. Thus Stephens search involves finding a symbolic father who will, in turn, allow Stephen himself to be a father. Both men, in truth, are searching for paternity as a way to reinforce their own identities. Stephen is more conscious of his quest for paternity than Bloom, and he mentally recurs to several important motifs with which to understand paternity. Stephens thinking about the Holy Trinity involves, on the one hand, Church doctrines that uphold the unity of the Father and the Son and, on the other hand, the writings of heretics that challenge this doctrine by arguing that God created the rest of the Trinity, concluding that each subsequent creation is inherently different. Stephens second motif involves his Hamlet theory, which seeks to prove that Shakespeare represented himself through the ghost-father in Hamlet, but alsothrough his translation of his life into artbecame the father of his own father, of his life, and of all his race. The Holy Trinity and

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Hamlet motifs reinforce our sense of Stephens and Blooms parallel quests for paternity. These quests seem to end in Blooms kitchen, with Bloom recognizingthe future in Stephen and Stephen recognizing the past in Bloom. Though united as father and son in this moment, the men will soon part ways, and their paternity quests will undoubtedly continue, for Ulysses demonstrates that the quest for paternity is a search for a lasting manifestation of self.

The Remorse of Conscience.The phrase agenbite of inwit, a religious term meaning remorse of
conscience, comes to Stephens mind again and again in Ulysses. Stephen associates the phrase with his guilt over his mothers deathhe suspects that he may have killed her by refusing to kneel and pray at her sickbed when she asked. The theme of remorse runs through Ulysses to address the feelings associated with modern breaks with family and tradition. Bloom, too, has guilty feelings about his father because he no longer observes certain traditions his father observed, such as keeping kosher. Episode Fifteen, Circe, dramatizes this remorse as Blooms Sins of the Past rise up and confront him one by one. Ulysses juxtaposes characters who experience remorse with characters who do not, such as Buck Mulligan, who shamelessly refers to Stephens mother asbeastly dead, and Simon Dedalus, who mourns his late wife but does not regret his treatment of her. Though remorse of conscience can have a repressive, paralyzing effect, as in Stephens case, it is also vaguely positive. A self-conscious awareness of the past, even the sins of the past, helps constitute an individual as an ethical being in the present.

Compassion as Heroic.In nearly all senses, the notion of Leopold Bloom as an epic hero is
laughablehis job, talents, family relations, public relations, and private actions all suggest his utter ordinariness. It is only Blooms extraordinary capacity for sympathy and compassion that allows him an unironic heroism in the course of the novel. Blooms fluid ability to empathize with such a wide variety of beingscats, birds, dogs, dead men, vicious men, blind men, old ladies, a woman in labor, the poor, and so onis the modernday equivalent to Odysseuss capacity to adapt to a wide variety of challenges. Blooms compassion often dictates the course of his day and the novel, as when he stops at the river Liffey to feed the gulls or at the hospital to check on Mrs. Purefoy. There is a network of symbols in Ulysses that present Bloom as Irelands savior, and his message is, at a basic level, to love. He is juxtaposed with Stephen, who would also be Irelands savior but is lacking in compassion. Bloom returns home, faces evidence of his cuckold status, and slays his competitionnot with arrows, but with a refocused perspective that is available only through his fluid capacity for empathy.

Parallax, or the Need for Multiple Perspectives.Parallax is an astronomical term that Bloom
encounters in his reading and that arises repeatedly through the course of the novel. It refers to the difference of position of one object when seen from two different vantage points. These differing viewpoints can be collated to better approximate the position of the object. As a novel, Ulysses uses a similar tactic. Three main charactersStephen, Bloom, and Mollyand a subset of narrative techniques that affect our perception of events and characters combine to demonstrate the fallibility of one single perspective. Our understanding of particular characters and events must be continually revised as we consider further perspectives. The most obvious example is Mollys past love life. Though we can construct a judgment of Molly as a loose woman from the testimonies of various characters in the novelBloom, Lenehan, Dixon, and so onthis judgment must be revised with the integration of Mollys own final testimony.

Motifs.Lightness and Darkness.The traditional associations of light with good and dark with
bad are upended in Ulysses, in which the two protagonists are dressed in mourning black, and the more menacing characters are associated with light and brightness. This reversal arises in part as a reaction to Mr. Deasys anti-Semitic judgment that Jews have sinned against the light. Deasy himself is associated with the brightness of coins, representing

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wealth without spirituality.Blazes Boylan, Blooms nemesis, is associated with brightness through his name and his flashy behavior, again suggesting surface without substance. Blooms and Stephens dark colors suggest a variety of associations: Jewishness, anarchy, outsider/wanderer status. Furthermore, Throwaway, the dark horse, wins the Gold Cup Horserace.

The Home Usurped.While Odysseus is away from Ithaca in The Odyssey, his household is
usurped by would-be suitors of his wife, Penelope. This motif translates directly to Ulysses and provides a connection between Stephen and Bloom. Stephen pays the rent for the Martello tower, where he, Buck, and Haines are staying. Bucks demand of the house key is thus a usurpation of Stephens household rights, and Stephen recognizes this and refuses to return to the tower. Stephen mentally dramatizes this usurpation as a replay of Claudiuss usurpation of Gertrude and the throne in Hamlet. Meanwhile, Blooms home has been usurped by Blazes Boylan, who comes and goes at will and has sex with Molly in Blooms absence. Stephens and Blooms lack of house keys throughout Ulysses symbolizes these usurpations.

The East.The motif of the East appears mainly in Blooms thoughts. For Bloom, the East is a place
of exoticism, representing the promise of a paradisiacal existence. Blooms hazy conception of this faraway land arises from a network of connections: the planters companies (such as Agendeth Netaim), which suggest newly fertile and potentially profitable homes; Zionist movements for a homeland; Molly and her childhood in Gibraltar; narcotics; and erotics. For Bloom and the reader, the East becomes the imaginative space where hopes can be realized. The only place where Molly, Stephen, and Bloom all meet is in their parallel dreams of each other the night before, dreams that seem to be set in an Eastern locale.

Symbols.Plumtrees Potted Meat.In

Episode Five, Bloom reads an ad in his newspaper: What is home without / Plumtrees Potted Meat? / Incomplete. / With it an abode of bliss. Blooms conscious reaction is his belief that the ad is poorly placeddirectly below the obituaries, suggesting an infelicitous relation between dead bodies and potted meat.On a subconscious level, however, the figure of Plumtrees Potted Meat comes to stand for Blooms anxieties about Boylans usurpation of his wife and home. The image of meat inside a pot crudely suggests the sexual relation between Boylan and Molly. The wording of the ad further suggests, less concretely, Blooms masculine anxietieshe worries that he is not the head of an abode of bliss but rather a servant in a home incomplete. The connection between Plumtrees meat and Blooms anxieties about Mollys unhappiness and infidelity is driven home when Bloom finds crumbs of the potted meat that Boylan and Molly shared earlier in his own bed. much of the public drama in Ulysses, though it happens offstage. In Episode Five, Bantam Lyons mistakenly thinks that Bloom has tipped him off to the horse Throwaway, the dark horse with a long-shot chance. Throwaway does end up winning the race, notably ousting Sceptre, the horse with the phallic name, on which Lenehan and Boylan have bet. This underdog victory represents Blooms eventual unshowy triumph over Boylan, to win the Gold Cupof Mollys heart.

The Gold Cup Horserace.The afternoons Gold Cup Horserace and the bets placed on it provide

Stephens Latin Quarter Hat.Stephen deliberately conceives of his Latin Quarter hat as a
symbol. The Latin Quarter is a student district in Paris, and Stephen hopes to suggest his exiled, anti-establishment status while back in Ireland. He also refers to the hat as his Hamlet hat,tipping us off to the intentional brooding and artistic connotations of the head gear. Yet Stephen cannot always control his own hat as a symbol, especially in the eyes of

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others. Through the eyes of others, it comes to signify Stephens mock priest-liness and provinciality.

Blooms Potato Talisman.In Episode Fifteen, Blooms potato functions like Odysseuss use of
moly in Circes denit serves to protect him from enchantment, enchantments to which Bloom succumbs when he briefly gives it over to Zoe Higgins. The potato, old and shriveled now, is an heirloom from Blooms mother, Ellen. As an organic product that is both fruit and root but is now shriveled, it gestures toward Blooms anxieties about fertility and his family line. Most important, however, is the potatos connection to Ireland Blooms potato talisman stands for his frequently overlooked maternal Irish heritage.

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