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.

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