Pearl Hester: The Most Transcendental Character

The Rebelling Belle in Katherine Anne Porter’s Old Mortality When one hears about the American South, one of the first things that come to mind is the Southern Belle. With their elegant dresses and their unmistakable charm, the belles have definitely left their mark on history. But were all the belles accepting their position within the Southern society?

Annette Kolodny in her essay, “Unearthing Herstory”, explains the concept of engendering landscape and its effects on American society. Kolodny believes the “vocabulary for the experience of the land-as-woman” (611) was a result of the settlers’ fantasies of America nature. She argues that because of the beauty and fertileness of the land led to “an abstraction of the essential femininity of the terrain” (607). Moreover, the inaccuracy of explorers also contributed to this fantasies, for their documents painted a picture of America as a paradise, thus presenting them the false picture (607-608). Therefore, the settlers labeled the New World as a Mother, who brings life source and happiness, or a woman.

In this essay I will discuss the interactions of nature relating to Enkidu, dreams and gods. As in the epic they are portrayed as obstacles for Gilgamesh. Natures onward movement seems extremely linked with the character of Enkidu. Enkidu was created as a wild man, he had “long hair like a woman’s.”

A scrutinization of “Identity” by Julio Noboa, reveals the powerful subject of freedom, and the dichotomy between the rugged individual vs. society. Based on the title, I’d anticipated that the content revolved around what defines a particular person’s identity. This free verse poem consisting of five stanzas is an extended metaphor, which speaks of two types of people in society: “flowers” and “weeds”. Rather than being a flower trapped in a pot, “Let them be as flowers/but harnessed to a pot of dirt”(Noboa 177), the speaker prefers to be a weed, living an unfettered existence of freedom and wildness. Incorporation of bold imagery successfully invokes the reader’s imagination, “Wind wavering above jagged rocks/to be swayed by breezes” (Noboa

Also, Faulkner uses the house to represent Emily metaphorically as decomposing and change-resistant. Faulkner also uses a rose to symbolize irony. Whereas roses represent love, Miss Emily never actually comprehend the actual meaning of love. Furthermore, he uses the strand of hair to symbolize the sometimes-perverse acts that individuals undertake in their quest for contentment. The discovery of the strand of hair is also predicted when the narrator explains the bodily decline of Miss Emily.

When writing, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” I fashioned the character, Ichabod Crane, to tell my version of the famous legend of the “headless horseman.” Making Ichabod a school teacher in pursuit of the affection of a beautiful woman, gave a realistic perspective to one of my favorite legends of Sleepy Hollow, New York. I also wanted to reiterate that folklore has its place and that we mustn’t be overcome with superstition as does Ichabod. Their purpose is solely for amusement and occasionally impart wisdom. I wanted to write about how incorrectly distinguishing fact from fiction.

Through the flower motif and the character development of Angela Vicario,Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in his novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, disapproves the expectation that women are to conform to man’s desires. Marquez uses the flower motif by symbolizing women’s virginity, while also disapproving how men thought of women negatively. Flowers have always been a symbol of a woman 's sexuality and virginity. Marquez adds on to this idea in his novel by the mention of flowers in normal situations.

The Fault in our Roots From the Garden of Eden with the sinful temptations of the devil, to the rose in the Beauty in the Beast urging Adam to find love, nature continually acts as a motivator in the relationship between plants and character development throughout popular works of literature. William Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Macbeth follows the protagonist Macbeth as he progresses from a cowardly individual to a depraved ruler. In Macbeth, Shakespeare uses plant imagery to display the trajectory of monarchal power, exemplifying the cyclical nature of absolutism. Through the mention of metaphorical seeds, Shakespeare foreshadows the advancement and atrophy of Macbeth’s power.

Evil is all around even in good it is just portrayed differently. Through reading the story”The Possibility of Evil” by Shirley Jackson, it is evident that Miss Strangeworth follows not only a outward social value system, but also an inward social value system. Her belief system may have been a result of a family tradition. She makes it known that she is the only “Strangeworth left in her town” (Jackson 4) and that she has many duties, Furthermore, Miss Strangeworth says that due to her being the only Strangeworth left, it is her duty to do away with the towns evil. Strangeworth tells tourists who stop to view her roses that her grandmother planted them.

Through the fragilely innocent yet blank nature of a flower to the all seeing eyes of a dilapidated billboard to the ethereal beam of green light reaching into a wispy past, symbolism adds remarkable depth to an otherwise physically shallow novel. The genius of Fitzgerald's use of symbolism in the Great Gatsby is most apparent within the description and manners of the character the Daisy whose careless nature rules her behavior like a child. Nearly every other word in the prose is rife with oceans of connections and visual appeal necessary when writing symbolically. The author's considerations for the subtle yet poignant nature of symbolism combined with its tendency towards subjective readings lead the Great Gatsby towards its

In the short story “The Possibility of Evil”, Shirley Jackson use several symbols that illustrate more than the reader can interpret aside from their physical appearance. A symbol that depicts more than what it is would be Miss Strangeworth rose garden. Her rose garden not only symbolizes her classy side of things but also her heritage and the importance she takes in her last name. The garden also depicts her personality showing who she is and what she believes to be true taking the place of a form of deity through her actions in the story. Another symbol that appears to show more than what it is Miss Strangeworth

Like other Southern women authors of the early twentieth century, Hurston does not categorically reject the association of women and nature, but reconstructs that bond as empowering and active in contrast to the passive identification with the tamed nature of the pastoral garden. In Their Eyes , one important way that Hurston counters the pastoral ideal of the middle landscape is by incorporating elements of Afro-Caribbean Voodoo that undermine the initial separation of humans and nature on which the pastoral myth depends. Replacing the polarized categories of culture/nature, male/female, and subject/object with a more fluid, relative, and interdependent model, Hurston envisions a more egalitarian society of communal values free from the ideology of dominance that characterizes the masculine gaze on a feminized landscape of the male pastoral tradition. She also suggests in her best-known novel that the acquisitive values of white-dominated society fosters an alienating conception of nature as something distinctly “other” estranging people from a natural world regarded as little more than an amalgamation of commodities.

To finish, the last symbol I will be focusing on Is nature. Nature is a symbol that encompasses the characters in this book but also is a character in the book. Nature first makes its appearance on page 107, “…the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down, and uprooted most unmercifully.” (Scarlet Letter) In this line Hawthorne writes to introduce the symbol of nature, you see nature being compared to as humans.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s iconic novel, The Scarlet Letter, is not only a blunt critique of Puritan society but also something of a transcendentalist manifesto. An avid proponent of the American transcendentalist movement during the 1800’s, Hawthorne used his writing to disseminate this ideology to the general public. Transcendentalism was an artistic and philosophic ideology that placed emphasis on the individual and was critical of social conformity. As a result, transcendentalists denounced organized and institutionalized religion because they thought individuals ought to create and follow their own moral compass rather than submitting themselves to others’ interpretations of the divine. Owing to this aspect of the philosophy most transcendentalists

Triads of Characters and Theme Author Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter with a handful of characters and symbolic objects that truly influence the theme of this novel. Many important pairings and triads are involved through Chapter 8 of his novel, but perhaps the most important of the inventory of well connected triads is the one which relates to the theme of the novel. The triad of Hester Prynne, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and Pearl best helps the reader comprehend Hawthorne’s theme of sin.