It reflects Henry James irony towards George Odger. Henry James is scornful towards George Odger’s humbleness by saying that George Odger is a useful human being. “It was
In Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People”, O’Connor utilizes the analogy of good country people as a representation and critique of the ignorance of society. To do so, O’Connor presents the sense of superiority certain characters possess, resulting in them becoming ignorant to the truth of the world that is around them. In doing so, O’Connor challenges common perceptions of society in never questioning those who appear inferior to one, yet are still capable of unimaginable things. Through the examination of the characters of Mrs. Hopewell and Joy, or Hulga, and their interactions with good country people in Mrs. Freeman and Manley Pointer, superiority will be shown to cause one to become ignorant of the true nature of others; hence, leading
It’s clear that he has no feelings of sorrow for this family as he says things like: “ *About her death* Will be on the news tonight, I reckon. That 'll be good. No, that 's not good.” and: “She 's what the kids would call a slut, which is a terrible thing to say about someone who 's just died, but apparently there 's no denying she was one.” He is portrayed in a feminine and over-dramatic with endless amounts of hyperbole.
In Louisa May Alcotts novel “An Old Fashioned Girl” the main character, Polly Milton, finds herself struggling against a man versus society conflict, as she confronts the rich first class society that surrounds her. The fourteen year old country girl who ventures into the city to visit her good friend, is constantly being told she is old fashioned, poor, and too simple for the city. The basis of the conflict is that all the people Polly encounters during her time in the city, expect her to look and behave like the rest. When Polly cannot do this, people begin to tease and mock her all because she has no wealth.
[You would be grieved] if you did know as much as I [do], when people cry out day and night – Oh! That they were in England without their limbs – and would not care to lose any limb to be in England again, yea, though they beg from door to door. For we live in fear of the enemy every hour, yet we have had a combat with them … and we took two alive and made slaves of them. This was his situation of his life, and by this quote it is pretty obvious that he wasn’t in a happy situation. Therefore the tone of his letter was feeling sorry for himself and craving that his parents to save him from being an indentured
“My family has lived here for better than a hundred years. My grandmother planted these roses, and my mother tended to them, just as I do. I’ve watched my town grow” (Jackson 188). She thinks she has an advantage and that it is her town because of her pedigree; however, just because a past family member had a “head” in the town doesn’t mean that the youngest one, in this case Miss Strangeworth, have the right to write mean letters to townspeople. Miss Strangeworth demonstrates the traits of being an outsider by making herself different than others in the town.
Henry James in the funeral article of Lippincott’s Magazine from July 1877, issues a negative tone on describing the people attending, but is being positive about Mr. George Odger. The diction of James is agitating for the people that are present yet magnificent because it’s the funeral of an honorable man, who defended the poor. The occasion caused Mr. James talking “indecent “about the low class people, calling them “dregs” of “itinerants”. He is discriminating the poor and insulting them.
From these meagre earnings, as well as food, basics like candles, salt, fuel, clothes and linen had to be paid for, and then there was the rent. With families crammed into the first developments of ‘blind back’ houses, the precursors of back-to-back housing, built around the edges of yards and courts behind the main streets of the town, their fronts facing each other across a small courtyard, as the adjacent properties were similarly developed, the blind back houses became back-to-backs, the living conditions and legacy of which is discussed in Chapter 4. Scantily furnished with few possessions, except for some basic furniture and cooking utensils, the space would have been inevitably cramped in the face of economic necessity and the absence of any effective birth control; many were close to destitution in a climate of overcrowding and deprivation, living in filthy conditions where cholera outbreaks were frequent (and indeed a convenient circumstance employed by Mary Bateman to cover one of her later poisonings). Playing on such notions that it was bad luck for an unmarried girl to sit on the surface of a table, because it was believed that she would never be married, to the rocking of an empty cradle inviting the birth of another child (which may or may not have been a blessing,
Those who are more privileged believe that those under them need to be saved and that they are all “addicts, muggers, paupers, and crazies” (33). In The Corporation, Tom Kline, the CEO of Pfizer is shown “bettering the community”. He interviews residents about the new Pfizer subsidized housing development, much to the annoyance of the residents. This is also seen in Oryx and Crake: “…The three of them were all from the pleeblands, they had gone to Martha Graham on scholarships and they considered themselves superior to the privileged, weak-spined degenerate offspring of the compounds, such as Jimmy” (292). This passage illustrates the people of the pleebland’s distain for the people of the compounds.
Gentillesse, the the capacity for a being to act compassionately and graciously, was seen as a characteristic of the noble class (Brown 175). In fact, gentillesse was a concept based on both “wealth and social distinction” as well as “character and behavior,” and these two parts were thought to be almost impossible to separate (Carruthers 286). Being an aristocrat was, therefore, a necessary condition for gentillesse; those at the cusp of nobility were not thought to have this characteristic as they were not at the top of the social hierarchy. Yet, the Franklin, a member of the landowning class but not a noble, explores the presumed relationship between the attribute and the high-class. In the “Franklin’s Tale,” the Franklin constructs parallel
Instead of kindly donating, he spits out a crude and evil response saying “Let them die, and they better do it quick to decrease the surplus population” and “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” referring to how the workhouses/prisons could be the poor’s ‘home’. However, at the end of the play, with the help of three spirits and his dead business partner, he changed into a caring, energetic man with a love for
The setting in “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” continues to convey the theme that women have been oppressed by society. Mabel faces oppression in the small english town where the story takes place. She explains that being a women does not matter as much when a family has money, but when they are poor she has to walk down the streets with her eyes low and avoid eye contact as she buys the cheapest item in every store (Lawrence 458). This shows that when a woman is seen as being represented by someone with power, in this case it is her father, then they are given a little respect. However, when a women is looked at just as herself and not as a rich man’s daughter she is not seen a colleague to men but as an object that is to be pitied.
Both the Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus confront the place of the working class and their interests in society during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, respectively. While the interests and attitudes of the working class shifted in accordance with the greater societal changes in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, their lower economic and social status stayed relatively the same. By comparing the actions of Marlowe’s working class characters to the poor shepherds of the Wakefield cycle in similar situations, one is able to see their differences in ideals and values, as well as their similarities in social status and exploitation. Firstly, in comparison, the working-class counterparts
Firstly, Orwell explores the theme of poverty through the use of imagery and repetition in order to give his writing a very intricate and memorable description. In this first section Orwell
Darcy is an extremely wealthy aristocrat. He is proud, haughty and extremely conscious of class differences. Darcy is first introduced in the story with arrogance which offends the local citizens he snubs. As the narrator says, the people at the ball are disgusted by his proud manners, because he only talks to his friends and does not wish to be introduced to anyone in the room. His haughtiness is also well demonstrated in his response to Mr. Bingley when he tries to persuade him to dance.
