Kate Chopin’s work, The Awakening, and Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, were written at a time when men dominated women in every aspect of life. Edna Pontellier, the protagonist in The Awakening, and Nora, the protagonist in A Doll’s House, are trapped in a world dominated by men. The assumed superiority of their husbands traps them in their households. Edna and Nora share many similarities, yet differ from each other in many ways.
Two main similarities of Edna and Nora are that they both have an awakening and are like caged birds without freedom; one main difference is that Edna lives in reality and Nora lives in a fantasy world. Other similarities are: each protagonist seems happy about her marriage in the beginning, is controlled by her husband, and has a secret. Despite all the similarities, the two protagonists differ in several ways: Edna does what she wants while Nora dreams about what she wants; Edna has a mind of her own while Nora seems to be a scattered brain wife; and Edna stops taking care of her children all together while Nora cares for the children on and off.
An image of a green and yellow parrot in a cage occurs throughout The Awakening; the parrot represents how Edna Pontellier is trapped in her marriage to Leonce Pontellier. During that time period women were expected to stay at home and perform household duties, take care of their husbands, and take care of their children; women were not supposed to be educated and did not hold a career. Edna realizes she does not want to perform the expected duties of a woman because she is not happy just being a wife and mother. In the beginning of …
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…n reality. Ibsen and Chopin both wrote stories that represent the oppression of women in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century; The Awakening and “A Doll’s House’ are realistic writings that show society’s treatment of women.
Works Cited and Consulted:
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym et al. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. New York: W. W. Norton
Comparing Beloved and Night
Comparing Beloved and Night
The two novels I am writing about are “Night” by Elie Wiesel and “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison. Beloved tells about slavery and an ex-slave mother’s struggle with a past which is projected as the haunting of her people. It tells the story of Sethe, a mother compelled to kill her child, rather than let the child live a life of slavery. Toni Morrison uses ghosts and the supernatural to create an enhanced acceptance of the human condition and the struggled survival of the Black American.
The novel is set in Ohio in the 1880’s. The Civil War had been won, slavery had been abolished, however, the memories of slavery still remain. Although the story itself is fictional, the novel is based on real events. The events are based on the trial in Cincinnati of Margaret Garner, who with her husband, and seventeen other slaves (Kentuckian) crossed the Ohio where they supposedly found safe shelter.
When it was discovered that they had been pursued and surrounded, and her husband overpowered, Margaret knew that any hope of freedom was in vain. She refused to see her children taken back into slavery. Without delay, Margaret quickly took hold of a butcher’s knife which was laid on a table and cut the throat of her young daughter. She then attempted to kill her other children as well, then herself, but she was overpowered and held back before she could follow through. She was arrested and put on trial on the grounds that the child she killed was the legal property of the owner.
In Beloved, when a new proprietor takes over Sweet Home (the slave farm), Sethe, escapes the brutal beatings she now endures in an attempt to go from Kentucky to Ohio. When the pr…
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…took part in the holocaust had no other choice. They had families to take care of and home lives just like the rest of us. For example, I believe that many of the soldiers who took part in the Holocaust were forced through military responsibility or face treason or death. These soldiers have to live with themselves knowing they killed millions of innocent people. When an order is given, an order must be carried out. Many soldiers had no choice, but to kill, or be killed.
We are all human beings. We all have feelings, and families whom we love. Sometimes the force behind the brutality is too powerful to disobey, and people (soldiers, the white man, the Americans and Hiroshima, etc., etc.) have no choice but to obey, or face the consequences. In the military you don’t question an order; you just do it (as in Othello and Billy Budd).