“What animal walks on all fours in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs at night?” The famous riddle of the sphinx that has been pondered for many years; it is a universal issue that affects all people of every nationality, ethnicity, religion, or geographic area. We, ourselves, are the answer to this puzzle and yet we fight this explanation with every tool possible. We avoid it, refuse to admit it, read about it, joke about it, and deep down we often dread growing old.
We know that this is an issue in every time period and is addressed by many writers. Growing old does not change, but each age has its own way of dealing with the old. This paper specifically looks at Homer’s Odyssey and all the portrayals of old age in this epic poem. I will also look at You’re Only Old Once, by Dr. Seuss as a modern example, even though humorous, of old age.
Homer’s Odyssey is a text that informs us about many components of the ancient world. We can look to this epic poem as a resource on relationships, attitudes, and actions of ancient Greece and the surrounding area. It represents all the values, customs, and feelings that this culture honored. The specific way we will look at this ancient writing is through the study of gerontology; the following questions might be asked. What was the attitude towards aging and the elderly? How was aging represented in this work? Finally, how is aging viewed by different genders, classes, and age groups?
Old age is seen through out the poem, and is represented in many different ways. The first time old age is addressed is when Athena comes into the house of Odysseus to see the environment the suitors have created. Th…
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…om,” where they inform him of all the pills he must take. The catch is that he can not leave until he can repeat al the instructions.
This brings up another factor, and that is the social class issue. Some of the older characters are in the lower class, which tend to increase the level of insult. Homer has different characters like the suitors insult others because of their class and age. Dr. Seuss has the doctors ask about the old man’s financial state more than once and ask him to sign for all the bills.
So in conclusion attitudes towards aging has not really changed through the ages. We all want to grow old gracefully and live to a ripe old age. Maybe someday we will beat that sphinx’s
Works Cited
Homer. 1989. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage Classics.
Dr. Seuss. 1986. You’re Only Old Once. New York: Random House.
Essay on Women in the Plays of William Shakespeare
Women in the Plays of Shakespeare
By paying close attention to the woman’s part in Shakespeare’s plays, we can see his works with a new perspective. But we must remember that we are examining a male dramatist of extraordinary range writing in a remote period when women’s position was in obvious ways more restricted and less disputed than in our own period. Sandra Gilbert writes in The Madwoman in the Attic that literature is defined as a mirror held up to society and nature, “the mimetic aesthetic that begins with Aristotle and descends through Shakespeare implies that the poet, like a lesser God, has made or engendered an alternative, mirror-universe in which he actually seems to enclose or trap shadows of reality” (Madwoman 5). While some artists do not necessarily duplicate in their art the “realities” of their culture, they may exploit them to create character or intensify conflict, or struggle with, criticize, or transcend them. Shakespeare, it would seem, “encompasses more and preaches less than most authors, hence the centuries-old controversy over his religious affiliation, political views, and sexual preferences” (Lenz 4). His attitude toward women are equally complex and demand as much examination.
As we begin to study the female characters, we must overlook the male superiority that patriarchal misogyny implies in the literature of his era, as evidenced in many studies. In “Shakespeare: on Love and Lust”, Charney explains the stance taken by critics such as Janet Adelman in “Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest”, and Kahn’s “Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare”. He claims that these two authors, as many others do, view Sh…
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… mother, wife, nor England’s queen” The Roles of Women in Richard III”. The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Galye Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980.
Park, Clara Claiborne. “As We Like It: How a Girl Can Be Smart and Still Popular.” The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980.
Schoenbaum, S. “The Life of Shakespeare.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies. Ed Stanley Wells. Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Sandra Gilbert. New York: Norton and Company, 1996.
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