Beauty In Crispin Sartwell's The Six Names Of Beauty

Given these points, Claudette’s exposure to St. Lucy has made her confined on the way she talked and acted unlike before when she was wild, exuberant and carefree. She changed from overturning dresser drawers to the point that her own mother couldn’t even recognize her. As a end result, she cared more about her appearance and she started to filter her actions and words. Therefore, St. Lucy had stripped away Claudette’s personality and her culture identity, replacing both of them with set expectations that were placed onto her.

Meursault’s unending days in prison confirms his realization of meaninglessness of life. For Meursault, the days in prison “ended up flowing into one another” seeming endless, symbolizing he was trapped. In prison, he understands where his life is headed and the meaninglessness of life, “For me it was one and the same unending day that was unfolding in my cell and the same thing I was trying to do” (81). This shows how life is same thing over and over again and just a series of events and choices for

When Mariette arrives, she is instructed to abandon the words ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ as everything will now be ‘ours,’ even including herself, she would now be considered ‘ours’ (Hansen. 24). She is also given instruction that grand displays of pride are not permitted following any successes she may have, and that despite her natural beauty and youthful appearance at her time of admittance, she shall not “tempt the sin of pride with perfumes or rouge or time misspent at the mirror” (Hansen, 18). After some time spent at the convent, Mariette is criticized for being her so-called misbehavior during her time at the convent, “‘Our postulant has been too proud. She has been a princess of vanities. She hopes we will praise her for being pretty and fetching and young’” (Hansen, 88). The Sister’s take their collectivistic group dynamic very seriously, and consider Mariette’s beauty and behavior as threatening to their style of

In addition, Meursault’s sensory experience of life, his physical pleasures and in-the-now perspective, is a demonstration of living life to the fullest. The absurdist must live life passionately, putting all of one’s weight into existence by not wasting time or energy on the ethereal or ephemeral. The fact that Meursault does not want to think about religion, even as he awaits execution, shows how the ideal absurdist would live life: loyal to one’s own being until the end – not to a father in the sky, or to an abstract hope. Meaning of one’s life must come from one’s own creative efforts. Meursault’s indifference to spiritual matters – and even sensory matters that are in the distant past and are therefore unimportant to him – is used to emphasize the passion for the present that Camus decided the absurd hero should have. So it is not so much that Meursault is totally indifferent, he is just indifferent to things outside of the now.

In Part 1 of the novel, Meursault does not fully grasp the significance of life because of his absurdist way of life. Camus presents Meursault as a person who does not live life, but reacts to what life presents him. Meursault is incapable of understanding the metaphysics of the world due to his lack of emotions. The greatest understanding of Meursault is through his own mind; instead of being subjective, he is objective. “Behind them, an enormous mother, in a brown silk dress, and the father, a rather frail little man I know by sight” (22). His thoughts include “note-taking” details about his environment with an

The core idea of Albert Camus’ philosophy of absurdity centralizes upon the idea that humans exist in a meaningless universe, and follows that humans must simply accept this fact to live life to the fullest. In addition to this absurdist notion, Albert Camus also uses The Stranger to show how humans still strive to create superficial meaning to fulfill their own personal needs. Through the experiences and interactions in Meursault’s life, Camus illustrates that in spite of how events in life follow no rational order, society attempts to futilely create meaning to explain human existence.

After Maman died, Meursault met his girlfriend, Marie. She was as beautiful as he could imagine and he loved her company. As most people who possess very strong feelings for

When beginning to read this novel,we do not have much information about Meursault and his life, it is hard for us to judge his personality and his actions. When Meursault heard of the passing of his mother through a telegram, whom he had placed into home

The common denominator in the "Lais of Marie de France” is the most unifying ideal which is suffering for the sake of true courtly love. In the prologue Marie wrote, “when a truly

In the book, “The Stranger” by Albert Camus describes a rather a dispiriting outlook of life. Implying that human existence has no rational meaning, and we see this outlook through the main character Meursault: who is detached from the world and has the mindset of a psychopath. The story heavily revolves around death from beginning to end. It will make readers think twice about life in a dark way. The way Meursault feels makes readers feel the same: having a vacant emotion, and because of that, I found the book to be unusual and yet intriguing. It went into so much depth of the meaning of life and death.

In the beginning of the story, Meursault is unnerved by his mother’s death and quickly moves along in his life. In fact, Meursault seems unemotional during most of the book. The existentialist part of Meursault finds it difficult to know what love is. For example, when Marie asks if Meursault loves her, he replies that “[love] didn’t mean anything but that [he] didn’t [think] so” (Camus 35). This lends itself to the question of what love actually is. Is love spending time with people you care about, or is it a myth that society has taught us to believe in? Meursault would argue the latter as his relationships with both his mother and Marie don’t involve much emotion. Another instance in which Meursault exhibits existentialist behavior is when he shoots the Arab on the beach. What drives Meursault to shoot is not the Arab drawing his knife, but rather the intense sun and the sweat running down his face. During the days after the shooting, Monsieur Meursault doesn’t understand why he needs an attorney. It is easy for him to understand; he commits a murder, and he is ready to face the consequences for his actions. There’s a lot of meaning hidden in the novel’s title. Part of the existentialist attitude is the idea of alienation, and Meursault is essentially a stranger to the world around him. He never truly has a solid relationship, whether it be with his family, his

Monsieur Lantin, of Guy De Maupassant’s, “The Jewelry” is a man married to a woman who he became infatuated with over the influence of others, resulting in their marriage, and her eventual untimely death; shortly after her death it is revealed that she lived a mysterious life with her not-so-fake jewels. Madam Lantin’s character is revealed from the perspective of her husband, by way of Maupassant using third person point of view, consequently making her a flat character. Monsieur relies upon his wife to conserve his ever so quaint lifestyle. Monsieur is that of a dynamic individual, in the sense that he has the ability to adapt to life by a swayed decision making method, usually resulting in their misplaced value in his happiness. Based on the context in this short story, it is safe to say that Monsieur takes life at face value, is critical of two of his wife’s habits, and eventually becomes overwhelmed with skepticism concerning his emotional and financial life.

Society has a common held notion that death is something tragic and that everyone must express some sort of grief or sadness, but Meursault is different in that he does not even pretend to be sad. He is so far removed from society’s expectations that he is truly seen as an outcast. Alongside this lack of grief, he has no remorse for killing an innocent man, and does not seem to reciprocate the love that Marie, his fiancé, has for him. These emotions are primal and fundamental to the human species, and for the most part act as a societal unifying factor. He is rejected by his peers, but also makes no effort

The internal conflicts established in “The Necklace” were a result of Madame Loisels perception of happiness. Because of her ungrateful and dejected views on life, she didn’t realize nor recognize true merriment. In the text, Guy De Maupassant shows how Madame “..was one of those pretty and charming girls born as though fate had blundered over her, into a family of

Her persistent mindset of wanting and needing more, is how her internal conflict developed. All of Madame Loisel’s issues relate back to her internal fascination with becoming incredibly rich and valued by her peers. The text states, “She had longed so eagerly to charm, to be desired, to be wildly attractive and sought after.” (1) Madame Loisel’s mindset was simply set on materialistic things and being respected amongst her peers. Even throughout the years, her idea of ‘perfection’ never changed a bit. The story reads, “But sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she sat down by the window and thought of that evening long ago, of the ball at which she had been so beautiful and so much admired.” (5) Ten hard and stressful years later, Madame Loisel is still under the impression that everything she has must be beautiful and valued. This situation expresses irony because although she is beautiful, she still feels a desire to receive expensive things. The text states, “She was one of those pretty and charming girls born, as though fate had blundered over her, into a family of artisans… She suffered endlessly, feeling herself born for every delicacy and luxury.” (1) Although she is beautiful