Depending on the perspective, this could be seen as something Rochester echoes in Jane Eyre, ‘Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family;—idiots and maniacs of three generations!’ (249). The second reading of madness is one more commonly explored in literature as a theme to emphasize the devastating effects of losing one’s identity or past. In Colonialism and Cultural Identity, Hogan writes about how identity is separated into two parts according to Lacan theory: practical identity and reflective identity. Practical identity, Hogan writes, is ordinary, habitual, or confident individual action, but individual action interwoven with other individual actions, including those of others (83). In conjunction with practical identity is reflective identity.
The Lee’s story shows how this idea was the root cause of Lia’s ultimate death. On one hand you have her family who, through their culture believed that what Lia had was spiritual. The clash of cultures and understanding lead to the difficult situation between the family and the doctors. “Whether you find these traits infuriating or admirable depends largely on whether or not you are trying to make a Hmong do something he or she would prefer not to do. Those who have tried to defeat, deceive, govern, regulate, constrain, assimilate, intimidate, or patronize the Hmong have, as a rule, disliked them intensely” (Fadiman 26).
Barbara Creed (2009) notes that “the place of the abject is where meaning collapses,” the place where one is not (p.128). It is not easy to understand how a mother takes a saw and cuts deliberately her own baby that she indeed loves as the baby itself is a reflection of the mother’s own self. Yet, Sethe does so as her ego experiences an abject state that transforms her being into a strange mother. Creed maintains that the abject threatens life; that “it must be radically excluded from the place of the living subject, propelled away from the body and deposited on the other side of an imaginary border which separates the self from that which threatens the self”(p.111). Creed’s observation asserts the grim nature of the abject in which a person experiences the collapse of their
The author connects the illness of the main heroine with the illness of the society that she lives in very different levels. Her soul is like a radio that can receive the waves from the stations, the bleeding wounds of the XX century. She can catch the signal from hunger of Vienna, from Kiev occupation, Saint Petersburg, and Odessa, but one signal is very strong, the Baby Yar station's streaming never ends from the beginning till the end of her life. The pain in her chest and ovaries, the nightmares, fantasies filled with sex and death, poems presenting in their own way the holy act of creation and taking a life, dire visions, they all started here, from the end of her life. The last day of her life determined all the previous
In Anne Fadiman’s book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, two cultures clash with each other in the struggle to save Lia Lee, a Hmong child refugee with severe epilepsy. Although Lee and her family live in the United States, and thus receive medical care from Westerners, her family believes that Lee’s condition is sacred and special. The following miscommunications, both culturally and lingually, between the American doctors and the Lee family leave Lia Lee in comatose at the end of the book. However, Lia Lee could have been saved if the Lee’s had a better understanding of the American doctors’ intentions, and the American doctors understood the Hmong culture. Essentially, the tragedy of Lia Lee can be attributed to the clash of American and Hmong cultures at both the surface and sub-surface level.
Around the turn of the 20th century, the Lost Generation was born. They came of age during World War I and as a whole became disillusioned and lost their naivety due to the senseless slaughter they saw in the war. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Morrison explores the harmful effects of slavery on not only the escaped slaves, but on there children, who are often overlooked. Denver is the protagonist of the story, she is the daughter of Sethe, an escaped slave who is terrified of her past demons returning. Because of her fears, Sethe shelters Denver to an extreme degree.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, discrimination is the “unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex.” Paulina Salas, the female protagonist of Death and the Maiden, is a character that has endured the worst discriminatory excesses of the Pinochet regime; raped and denied her political voice. While Dorfman sets his play during the transition from dictatorship, there are still signs of discrimination evident in the Escobar household and the wider society of the play. Death and The Maiden explores the unrelenting past lives of the victims that lived under a dictator’s shadow, whom are unable to attain justice through the characters such as Doctor Miranda and Paulina’s husband, Gerardo. By revealing the dynamics of the relationship between these three characters, I will argue that Dorfman reveals and criticizes the restrictions placed upon Paulina to have social participation. Through this essay, I will specifically explore
John Bowlby 's attachment theory established that an infant 's earliest relationship with their caregivers decides the development of the child, this bond between the infant and his caregiver has a big influence that remains throughout the child 's life. Poor attachment develops negative growth in which the infants have not maintained trust with their caregivers and that will lead to mistrust later in life. The classic gothic novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley describes the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and his creature as a critical relationship which is full of darkness, obscurity and climacteric. In my paper I will argue, that the monster 's crimes are implemented as a reaction to the lack of relationship with a caregiver when he was created. This will be supported with a reference to attachment theory.
Mukundan’s mother is a victim of male cruelty and rejection. Her sufferings are revealed through Mukundan’s thoughts, dreams and hallucinations and they are so vivid and powerful that his very existence is shaken by such haunting thoughts. The inability and indifference of the younger generation, on whom women place their hopes to challenge physical and psychological abuses of the powerful, shatter them. The last words of his suffering mother, “Take me with you, son. I am so unhappy here” (TBM 31) haunt him
This expression of rebellion against the colonizers and their routes is in the book really steered at prospective specialists who treat Nan, who was separated from everyone else and defenseless, terribly at hospital to diagnose her ailment to demonstrate their capability. Notwithstanding, a deeper and analogical perusing focuses to a rational feedback of imperialism. The methodology, implies and their general impacts in bringing the colonized race in the book of sally Morgan my place the impact of colonialism has on Aboriginals regarding mimicry, ambivalence, hybridity and the ensuing components of character emergency on one hand and of Aboriginal "nationalism" on the other will be dissected in connection to feeling of having a place and personality. The white power has a vital part in My Place, which is to manage the lives of Aboriginals by means of different strategies, laws and their requirement through the police; and in Nan and Arthur’s chance, race was the main "classification for overseeing and adjusting Aboriginal people. the Aboriginals different and average legitimate status encouraged avoidance, control and control as a different class subject to exceptional laws and extraordinary organization, which demonstrates that the law was