Robyn Schiff’s A Woman of Property is a study concerning the darker powers along with their everyday domestic insurgencies. Several American poets/poetess have for a long time sought to ingather symbols from their daily lives, from its whine gratifications as well as from shallow-end disappointments to help depict, communicate, and to impress certain notions in the minds of their readers. Among these poets/poetess is Robyn Schiff. In the context of Schiff’s writings, motivation may be considered as a light switch in a room that is in darkness. However, Schiff’s poems more deliberately try to blur the brightness of a fancy that is a little incisive. The poems, in this third volume of her poetry work, promise to save her from uncertainties, …show more content…
Take an example of the repetitive sentences from the “Nursery Furniture” poem:
Nod does mean sleep, but only as a pun on the state Cain fled to after slaying
Abel—a waking sleep part denial, part self-righteous, a neutralizing hallucination of
North Carolina I rock in- to inhaling the off-gassing batting, bare heels rhythmically worrying a loose staple behind the rigid skirt at chair-bottom where coarse temporary fiber as permeable as loose landscape fabric partitions against interior interior where an involuting spring grinds the slow industrial rattle I recorded for Alison and played back over the telephone. Just like any other collection of poems, the “Nursery Furniture” takes as its motivation certain routine daily act of upper-middle-class privilege, consumerism, domesticity, or homeownership. In this section of the poem, the orator is expecting the arrival of a new chair from a nursery furniture store referred to as “Land of Nod.” The anticipation leads the orator into the extremely associative hypotactic sentence quoted above. Through the quotation, a reader is able to follow Schiff’s mind’s movement from the “Nod” word to the killing of Abel and the somewhat equally violent “industrial rattle” of the orator’s flawed rocking chair. This leads the reader to Alison who is depicted as the Land of Nod’s manager to whom some sections of the poem are
In “It’s a Woman's World,” Eavan Boland utilizes several literary techniques to reveal the poem’s complex conception of a “woman’s world.” Boland sheds light on the static nature of a woman’s role in society, which sparks their desire to overcome the societal limitations that is put upon them by men. Through her sarcastic title, use of personification, and critical tone, Boland is able to expose both genders stereotypical responsibilities and to convey society’s desire to silence women’s outrage against their role in this world.
In America, millions of people are affected by poverty. High-class members of America and companies take advantage of these lower class individuals. Lower class individuals who are able to find a job usually work for less than minimum wage and experience poor working conditions. These lower class workers do not deserve the lifestyle they must deal with. Low class individuals not only have to struggle with finding employment but also have to worry about the U.S. government mistreating them. Whether someone is a low class immigrant or U.S. born citizen, it is evident people in America treat their lower class citizens poorly.
“Harrington Ave.” by Cynthia Katz is a photograph in the University of New Hampshire Museum of Art. The person sees two tree-trunks that inosculate into one trunk at the base. This single trunk goes into the wilted pine needle covered ground, looking like a typical late fall day. The two trees are surrounded by a wall of chopped wood on the left and right side of both trees; even between the two trees and above the shared trunk there is a pile of chopped wood, creating balance and symmetry.
In Julia Alvarez’s poem “On Not Shoplifting Louise Bogan’s The Blue Estuaries”, the poet uses poetic devices to convey the speaker’s discovery of a poem that catches her attention so much that she feels a rush of excitement that wants to hold on to as long as she can. She discovers about herself how captivated she can be from a poem and how she would even shoplift to keep the rush. The exciting tone is revealed through the entrancement of the girl.The smooth, calming imagery shows how impacted she was by the poem and how uncertain she was about her situation. The selection of detail shows how the book was unique and how she eventually saw who she was becoming.
The novel The House on Mango Street is filled to the brim with women who are unhappy and unsatisfied with their lives. Readers meet wives who are destined to spend their lives in the kitchen, mothers who waste away cleaning up after their kids, and girls who are stuck in a hole that they can’t escape. Through Sandra Cisneros’s use of literary devices such as motifs, symbolism, and imagery, we are able to learn that the women end up in these situations by conforming to femininity, and we find the theme of women are often held back by their own gender roles.
There has been a common theme in several pieces of literature read and analyzed this semester; some of the authors convey the struggle of home in their works. It should be noted that the authors this essay will analyze are people of color, adding another complex layer to the idea of a home. The short stories and poems of authors such as: Langston Hughes, Zitkala Sa, and Sandra Cisneros each express the uncertainty, longing, and issues for what a home means.
When writing a collection of poems, most poets chose to focus on maintaining certain themes throughout their literature and Cornelius Eady is not an exception. Cornelius Eady’s collection of poems in Brutal Imagination focus on issues such as racism, family crisis, internal conflict, and death. The first part of the collection circles around a servant who works for Susan Smith and is the caretaker for her children. The story centers around the perspective of the servant who is also the overarching narrator. The story describes old version of United States when racism was still bluntly present and affected individuals identities and financial opportunities. Based off the information presented in the collection, the servant can possibly be male. The general plot follows deeply into the difficult life of the male servant through examining the issues he faces. The first poem within the collection set-ups the rest of the story with context for the readers giving them a few expectations about what they should look forward to reading further. Eady draws the reader through integrating an origin for the male servant and his connection to Susan Smith’s family.
In the collection of vignettes, The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros develops the theme that people should not be devalued because of their financial circumstances through metaphors of classism, the motif of shame, and the contrast between minor characters Alicia and Esperanza’s mother. Esperanza, the protagonist, is a Mexican-American adolescent living in the rural Chicago region. She occupies a house on Mango Street with her father, mother, two brothers, Carlos and Kiki, and little sister, Nenny. Mango Street is filled with low-income families, like Esperanza’s, trying to adapt to their difficult circumstances. Esperanza realizes it is difficult, but she dreams of leaving her house and Mango Street altogether.
People always say read the book before watching the movie, but are they that different? Roald Dahl’s, “The Landlady” and Herbert Wise’s film adaptation of the short story are comparable because they have many similarities, but also differentiate slightly. The Landlady is about a boy named Billy Weaver who arrives in Bath, England and looks for a place to stay. He stumbles upon a Bed and Breakfast and decides to go there. Billy thinks the Landlady of the Bed and Breakfast is very welcoming, but also strange. Later, when she invites Billy down for tea she talks about the two guests who were previously there awhile back, Mr. Muholland and Temple. She also talks about her hobby of taxidermy. When Billy sips the tea, he tastes bitter almonds and then the story ends, leaving the readers knowing that the Landlady poisoned him with Cyanide. The film is very similar for many reasons; for example, the plot, the setting, and the theme.
Valerie Martin’s Novel Property is an engrossing story of the wife of a slave owner and a slave, whom a mistress of the slave owner, during the late 18th century in New Orleans. Martin guides you through both, Manon Guadet and her servant Sarah’s lives, as Ms. Gaudet unhappily lives married on a plantation and Sarah unhappily lives on the plantation. Ms. Gaudet’s misserableness is derived from the misfortune of being married to a man that she despises and does not love. Sarah, the slave, is solely unhappy due to the fact that she is a slave, and has unwillingly conceived to children by Ms. Gaudiest husband, which rightfully makes Sarah a mistress. Throughout the book, Martin captivates the reader and enables you to place yourself in the
The objects people keep in their homes can tell a story about who they are or were. Each item possessed by the residents of a house is evidence of how these people may have lived. Ted Kooser’s poem “Abandoned Farmhouse” takes the reader on a walkthrough of the remains of a farmhouse where a poor family once lived. In “Abandoned Farmhouse,” Kooser selects seemingly insignificant relics left behind by each family member to illustrate who these people were and how they lived. The picture he paints is a bleak one and reflects the impoverished life which the residents lived within this now lonely and desolate building.
Gender roles is the main theme of The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Gender roles are the roles or behaviors learned by a person in relataion to social norms. In The House On Mango Street Espreanza Alicia, and Sally are well-founded examples of gender roles. They are such great examples due to the fact that they are dominated by men in their culture.
The property rights of women during most of the nineteenth century were dependent upon their marital status. Once women married, their property rights were governed by English common law, which required that the property women took into a marriage, or acquired subsequently, be legally absorbed by their husbands. Furthermore, married women could not make wills or dispose of any property without their husbands' consent. Marital separation, whether initiated by the husband or wife, usually left the women economically destitute, as the law offered them no rights to marital property. Once married, the only legal avenue through which women could reclaim property was widowhood.
“She walks, she talks, she cleans, she works, she IS, but she is NOT, all at once. She is here, but part of her is elsewhere for eternity” (Anonymous). This quote by an anonymous person illustrates a woman who is rooted in who she is but dreams to be someone else. She dreams to be another person, far away from her dreary life. Sandra Cisneros establishes that many young girls within the Hispanic culture represented in The House on Mango Street are forced into roles they do not wish to take, resulting in a loss of identity and ultimately, a sense of powerlessness in the girl without anyone to show her how to be powerful.
The children are the ‘we’ of the first half of the poem. They “loved it” (5) when the mother kicked out their father and were “glad” (1) at the result of divorce. When their father lost his job they “grinned” (4) and were “tickled” (line 7) with pleasure as they watched their father’s world crash down around him. The sympathy conveyed through the narrative sits with the mother and children during the first half of the poem. As the daughter begins to speak in present terms, and the “you” (1,3) suddenly is now “father” (17), the poem undertakes a dramatic shift. Sympathy begins to surface, from the reader, for the “bums in doorways” (18) who begin to take on a victimized persona with their hands depicted as useless “flippers” (21) attached to their “slug” (19) bodies. It is not to say that the speaker has forgotten the cruel insensitive man that she recalls in the first part of the poem, but the father is now not the only villain and the mother and children are not the only sufferers.