Fire and Brimstone

If "Pilgrims and Puritans literally believed that all humankind was stained by Adam's fall,", one has to wonder how much further they would cast their judgments on modern society.

One such Puritan, Jonathan Edwards, condemned many for their lifestyle choices, including "wicked, unbelieving Israelites,". In his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, there are several statements he makes that alludes to the belief that humankind is inherently tainted, like "The use of this awful subject may be for awakening unconverted persons in this congregation [...] That world of misery, that lake of burning brimstone, is extended abroad under you,".

To further scare his congregation into compliance, Edwards goes on to describe how the wicked among them shall be punished, "There is the dreadful pit of the glowing flames of the wrath of God; there is hell's wide gaping mouth open; and you have nothing to stand upon, nor any thing to take hold of; there is nothing between you and hell but the air; it is only the power and mere pleasure of God that holds you up,".

A sermon delivered by Edwards in the 21st century would not have the same impact as it did in 1741, because many of the modern populace believes in a more forgiving God than the angry torturer described in detail in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. In 1741, perhaps churchgoers believed that if they had one sinful thought or committed one sinful deed, then God would come down upon them with all of the wrath he could muster. In today's world, people adhere to a moral code, but not one that is so restricted based on fear of retaliation from their God. Hopefully, modern individuals adheres to a moral code because they know it is the right thing to do, God or no God.

Anything but Savage

Although John Smith’s early accounts of the Native Americans painted a picture of savage animals, actual history accounts dispute most of his biased findings. One need only read The Constitution of the Five Nations (or The Great Binding Law) to see how civilized the Native Americans were.

Nature was prevalent throughout The Great Binding Law. At times, nature served as a source of symbolism that the Iroquois could draw upon to explain certain aspects of The Constitution of the Five Nations:

“Roots have spread out from the Tree of the Great Peace [...] and their nature is Peace and Strength [...] If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations [...] promise to obey the wishes of the Confederate Council, they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree of the Long Leaves.”

One practical role nature played in The Great Binding Law was the opening of each Council meeting. Fire was the representation for the beginning of a meeting:

“When the Lords are assembled the Council Fire shall be kindled, but not with chestnut wood, and Adodarhoh shall formally open the Council.”

In regards to the United States Constitution, the Iroquois system of government was somewhat of an influence. The three branches of government used in the United States was also practiced by the Iroquois:

“The Council of the Mohawk shall be divided into three parties [...] The third party is to listen only to the discussion of the first and second parties and if an error is made or the proceeding is irregular they are to call attention to it, and when the case is right and properly decided by the two parties they shall confirm the decision of the two parties and refer the case to the Seneca Lords for their decision.”

Their democratic system of government impressed such founding fathers as Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, (Iroquois, 2002). When excerpts from Iroquois law were read aloud at the Constitutional Convention, there was one line that was very remarkable, "We, the people, to form a union, to establish peace, equity, and order..." (Mee, 1987, p. 237).

References:

Iroquois. (2007). The constitution of the iroquois nations: the great binding law gayanashagowa. Retrieved on September 30, 2010, from http://tuscaroras.com/pages/history/iroquois_constitution_1.html

Mee, L, C. (1987). The Genius of the People. New York: Harper & Row

Further thoughts on 'A Doll's House'

Upon detailed examination, Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House is filled with complex characters. Each character has a specific function, beginning with Nils Krogstad. For a large part of the play, he fills the role of the antagonist. Later on, the reader gets a glimpse further into his life and feels sympathy for him. By the end of the play, the reader realizes that he is not the antagonist at all, and he finds a happy ending with Kristine Linde.

Kristine Linde is a friend to the main character, Nora. Throughout the play, she gives Nora advice, aids her with her problems, but eventually facilitates the confrontation between Nora and her husband at the end of the play. Without Kristine, Krogstad would not have found his redemption and Nora would not have truly seen her husband for the patronizing scoundrel he was.

Dr. Rank is the family doctor to the main characters. Not only is he the family doctor, but he is a close friend of the family as well. Secretly, he is in love with Nora, even though she is married to his best friend. Dr. Rank treats Nora with respect, sees her as a person and a woman, and does not placate her like a child. He is everything her husband is not, and a symbol of what she could achieve in a marriage where both parties treated one another as equals.

The plot of A Doll's House is intricate, changing tempo during certain scenes to create a more dramatic element to arouse emotion and thought from the reader. The scene when Nora begins to dance wildly because she thinks her secret is going to be discovered takes the reader into the scene with all of the detail and rising action. At the end of the play, when Torvald confronts Nora, it is shocking at how he completely turns on her, and in an instant forgives her when he realizes there will be no social or lawful ramifications due to her actions. The scene seems to explode with his anger, then slow down as Nora's own feelings simmer and she calmly explains to Torvald that she is leaving him.

At the end of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, Nora's behavior is understandable. She was living a lie during her entire marriage, and it came crashing in on her and her husband, tearing them apart. They were never right for each other in the first place, because both of them needed to learn more about each other and human relationships. When she makes the decision to leave Torvald and her children, she makes the right decision. The right thing is often the hardest, as the saying goes, and abandoning one's family must be one of the hardest things to do. For Nora, it was necessary for her to leave, because she did not feel she was not fit to be a mother, or even a person. She did not know how to be independent or how to rise above strife. She felt in order to be a better wife and mother, she had to leave, if that makes any sense.

Ibsen has remarked that A Doll's House is more about human rights than women's rights, and I agree with him. The center of the play is Nora, who is treated like she has a child's capacity for intelligence by her husband. Kristine Linde, a friend of Nora's, has led a hard life and feels like she has nothing to live for anymore. Krogstad is a man who was once derelict of all morality, but has found it once again, only to have his reputation threatened. Each character learns and grows over the course of the play, and by the end, Nora knows that she deserves more from a husband. Kristine finds love and a second chance with Krogstad. He in turn finds all the respect and morality he needs from Kristine. Perhaps the overall message of the play is that every human being deserves a second chance and to be treated with respect.

After reading "A Doll's House"....

In the play, A Doll House, one of the main character's Torvald Helmer, can be described as a husband who thinks he is above his wife, both in status and intelligence. Even in the early scenes of the play, it is clear he patronizes his wife, treating her like a child by referring to her as "my little lark" and "squirrel". He will not even allow her to eat macaroons, though she does in secret, because he believes it will ruin her teeth. That is the sort of admonishment a parent expresses to a child, not a spouse.

By the end of the play, Helmer has not changed in personality at all. If anything, his ugly nature is revealed once he learns of how his wife borrowed money without his consent. Though his wife did what she did to save his life and spare his pride, he was not anywhere near grateful. Instead, he was only worried about their reputation, his own predominantly. As he berated her, he painted a picture of how he really saw his wife, irresponsible and weak.

Nora decides to leave him and children to find out if she can be a person, not just a 'irresponsible and weak' wife and mother. The marriage she describes, one where both partners are not strangers, can discuss serious matters, and treat each other as equals is not one that Helmer would be capable of sharing. Perhaps, after a few months or years without his wife, he would come to see what it is he truly lost, and he would be willing to change.

While reading A Doll House, there were two symbols that I found predominant: money and the letter from Krogstad that sat in the mailbox. For the wife, Nora, money was an object symbolizing the love and easy life she wished on her husband and family. Her husband had received a prestigious raise at the bank, and soon their money woes were to be forgotten. Thus, the stress-free life Nora envisioned would finally come to fruition. Love was also equatable with money because Nora took out a loan for her dying husband in order to nurse him back to health. It was a loan she had no way to pay back at the time, but over the years, she worked hard to do just that.

The letter Krogstad left in the Helmer mailbox, detailing of Nora's loan and her forgery, was a symbol for the end of the Helmer marriage. Nora and her friend Mrs. Linde delayed Torvald from reading the letter for as long as they could, but it was a like a ticking timebomb in the mailbox, waiting to set off an emotional and truthful display of what the Helmer marriage was truly composed of.

Analysis of Four Different Poems

In the poem, My Last Duchess, Robert Browning constructs a sinister tone by implying murder was committed in such casual tones: "I gave commands/Then all smiles stopped altogether." At first, the narrator in the poem seems to describe a portrait of a woman he loved, but by the poem's end, the reader is well aware that "[the duke] refers to his last duchess as an object, as a possession that has been appropriately added to his prized collection," (DiYanni, 2008, p. 514).

The connotation of the word daffodils differs from its denotation in William Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. While a dictionary describes daffodils simply as yellow flowers, in his poem, Wordsworth personifies the daffodils to make the narrator's loneliness apparent to the reader. He does this by describing the daffodils as "a crowd", "a host", and seeing the daffodils "dance".

The effect of Elizabeth Bishop's recurrent use of white imagery in the First Death in Nova Scotia is one that illustrates the finality felt by the narrator over the death of Arthur. She describes his casket as "frosted cake", his countenance as "white, like a doll, and his final resting place: "roads deep in snow".

Shakespeare plays with metaphor and meaning in his two poems, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day and My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun. During the poem Shall I compare thee to a summer's day, the reader knows that the narrator is in love because he uses a summer day to describe the object of his affection. He also vows that their love will last forever, an "eternal summer" that "shall not fade". Simile is further employed in My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun with the line, "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head."

References:

DiYanni, R. (2008). Literature approaches to fiction, poetry, and drama [2nd Ed.]. New York: McGraw Hill

Elements of Poetry

Symbolism and allegory are two intricately linked aspects of poetry. Symbolism is a tangible object that represents another aspect beyond its literal meaning, (DiYanni, 2008, p. 536). Allegory is when the events, characters, and places in the narrative contain a symbolic meaning, (DiYanni, 2008, p. 537). Emily Dickinson’s poem Because I could not Stop for Death is an example of an allegorical poem. It has plenty of instances of symbolism, but the places described in the poem and the personification of death are the two important symbols to consider, therefore setting it apart as an allegorical work of literature.

Lines 9-13 of the poem could be a representation of the narrator seeing all the central events of her life or human life in general before she dies, or before the narrator and death pass “the Setting Sun/Or rather—He passed Us.” One more example of the allegorical nature of Dickinson’s poem would be lines 17-20, when she describes “The cornice—in the Ground.” The cornice could represent her own grave.

Syntax is the grammatical way in which the words come together to create a feeling, (DiYanni, 2008, p. 542). Towhomitmayconcern by Sonia Sanchez is a poem brought to life because of the use of syntax. The words are spelled out how the narrator would sound them out; in effect the reader ‘hears’ the voice of the narrator with lines like “ima gonna stake you out”.

Rhythm and meter are two elements of poetry that both describe the flow and measure it as well. The prevailing meter in Her Kind is iambic pentameter. Most of the poem's lines contain ten syllables, with two syllables per foot. To keep the poem moving, the author Anne Sexton variegates from ten syllables per line, to eight, nine, and five. Altogether, the poem has a lilting quality to it, primarily due to the author's use of caesura and enjambment. The run-on lines pull the reader’s eye down to read more the poem, and each pause sets the necessary rhythm for the poem to follow.

Langston Hughes accents his poem I Too to create a pattern and tone in each line. Every line seems a proclamation and every important as the one the precedes it: “But I laugh/And eat well/And grow strong.”

DiYanni, R. (2008). Literature approaches to fiction, poetry, and drama [2nd Ed.]. New York: McGraw Hill

Irony and Symbols in Literature

Irony and symbols are two literary objects that an author can use to add depth to a story. While irony has many definitions, the three that are most interesting in the literary sense would be dramatic, tragic, and situational. Dramatic irony is when the reader knows of developments to the story that a main character or characters are unaware of. Tragic irony is employed when characters of the story display actions that are contradictory to their words, or vice versa, with the audience being fully aware of the faux paus, (Hutcheon, 1994, p. 13). Situational irony is a type of irony that exhibits results that are wholly at odds with what was expected to happen.

Whereas irony can have several meanings, symbol has only one: an inanimate object, picture, or word that becomes a representation of another concept, such as a heart drawn on a note might represent love towards the recipient.

D.H. Lawrence uses the symbol of the rocking horse in his short story The Rocking Horse Winner to show the situational irony that occurs between the mother and son. The rocking horse is an escape for the son, Paul, a way to see beyond himself to get what he wants. Due to his mother's own obsession for money, soon that is all Paul wants. Unlike his mother, Paul does not want the money to satisfy himself, but he seeks instead to gain the favor of his mother with money. Ironically, she married for love, but when that withered away, she was left a bitter woman bent on filling her void with material possessions. She could not even find within herself love for her children, lavishing upon them material things, but never love. Paul came to understand that being lucky was synonymous with being rich, two things that his mother lacked but needed in order to be happy. 

Using the rocking horse as an omniscient force, he won plenty of money, but it seemed his mother only wanted more and more. Paul became sick with his quest to 'see' the winner of each derby race, eventually leading to his dramatic death. Although he made his mother rich at the end of the story, it appeared that the only thing she cared about was her dying son and not money. The mother felt love too late to save Paul, and Paul amassed a wealth he had dreamed of at the cost of his life.

Jumpa Lahiri employs the symbols of clothing and food in Hell-Heaven to foreshadow the decisions her main characters will make later in the story. In the beginning of the story, the young Pranab Kaku is drawn to a stranger simply because she is clothed in a fashion familiar to him. Her clothes and way of cooking reminds him of home, thus making him feel safe and cared for. Even so, he falls in love and marries an American girl, shunning his Indian ways. However, after twenty-three years of marriage to the American, Pranab Kaku cheats on her with a fellow Indian woman, a married woman no less. While Pranab Kaku thought he would be happy assimilating into American culture, it was evident from his actions in the beginning of the story that he would only be happy with a woman from his own culture.

Another situational irony present in Hell-Heaven is the dissatisfaction in the marriage of the narrator's parents. Their marriage was arranged in India, and so they did not love each other. Over time, and through Pranab Kaku's indiscretion and divorce, they develop an affection for each other that is akin to love. One other instance of situational irony in the story is how the narrator's mother is jealous of Pranab Kaku's American wife Deborah at first, yet when Deborah is emotionally destroyed over her husband's philandering ways, the narrator's mother is the friend she chooses to turn to.

References: Hutcheon, L. (1994). Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge

Using Point-of-View

The voice behind a story is called point of view.

Point of view is the perspective from which a story is told. There are a variety of ways to employ the use of point of view. For example, an author may choose an objective approach, using 'he' and 'she during storytelling', and using 'I' only in conversations. Such narration is known as third-person point of view.

Second-person point of view is when an author refers to the audience as though they are part of story, saying "You get up in the morning, and there you are, perfectly happy!" It is hard to properly use second-person point of view without interrupting the flow of the story, and so, it is rarely used in literature.

However, other authors might describe the story's events from a first-person point of view, using several 'I' statements to that effect. Popular novelist Stephanie Myer used the first-person point of view for two of her main characters in her series of Twilight books. One main character explained major plot points, and another main character went on to narrate the remainder of the last book in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn.

In William Faulkner's short story, A Rose for Emily, point of view has an even more diverse outlook. His story is told in a plural point of view, also known as alternating point of view. The whole town narrates the story, with the word 'we' used to describe the collective narration of A Rose for Emily: "One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair." Any point of view in a story that derives from the norm can be called alternating point of view, like when two types of narration are used in the same story, switching from third to first-person point of view.