Assignment 2: Discuss the theme of entrapment and desire for freedom in the Bird in the House by Margaret Lawrence
Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House, is a collection of short stories that chronicles a young girl’s journey from the innocence of childhood to the experience of adulthood. The daunting world of knowledge, pain, turmoil, injustice and cruelty is revealed by slow degrees to finally unveil existence as we know it. Existences that we willingly embrace yet are simultaneously repelled by. A number of themes and sub themes are established in the novel, but perhaps the most prominent is the theme of entrapment and the desire for freedom.
Physically, socially, emotionally and spiritually we are all bound by
certain
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The house imparts a hardness to its maker galvanizing him with an impenetrable surface. The house can never be a home, it is a monument; a gravestone for its maker, defining him and entrapping him. Grandfather Connor is incapable of showing any emotion, any kindness, any sense of understanding. Only for a brief instant at his wife’s death does his facade crack but almost immediately it resumes the “carved” nature his family knew so well. Vanessa tells the reader “Grandfather Connor would walk around the Brick house as though it were a cage” . It is a cage because he has made it so. “From his cave the angry crunching against the cement floor would reverberate. His primal passion is conveyed through the use of words like cave and bear yet the reader is reminded that the brick House was one of the first of it’s kind and a symbol of modernity.
Nobody can survive in the brick house; people either die or move away.
Aunt Edna marries Wes and moves away but she hesitates. The world outside is almost daunting to her after years of bondage. The brick house has imparted some of its hardness to her but it’s a facade. Beth doesn’t desire freedom. Vanessa and Roddie will get out. Beth had her freedom ‘when Ewen was alive’ that could never be taken away from her.
“It’s like battling your head against a brick wall. He’d get his way in the end. He always does.” The Brick house like Grandfather Connor is immovable. But Grandfather Connor
Joseph Plumb Martin was born “upon the twenty-first of November, in the year of 1760” (Martin 6). His grandparents raised him on their Connecticut farm. Inspired by the Battles of Lexington and Concord he decided to enlist into the army. He was eager to help for the patriotic cause. In June of 1776, at the age of 15, Martin was able to enlist but didn’t want to sign up for a long enlistment. Soldiers at the time were enlisting for a year’s service but he did not like that and thought it was too long a time for him for the first trial, “I wished only to take a priming before I took upon me the whole coat of paint for a soldier” (Martin 16). Orders soon came allowing men to enlist for six months so Martin enrolled in the Connecticut
Quite literally, a brick house. The location of which a lot of the story happens. Owned by Vanessa’s grandfather. “Looked huge and cool from the outside… inside it wasn’t cool at all.” Could possibly represent Grandfather Conner’s cold, ignorant, arrogant attitude and demeanor.
John Smith is one of the most famous people in American literature history. He was a dedicated man to his country of England, and wanted nothing more than to claim America in the name of the king. During his adventures to the new land he encountered many new things and people including a young Native American woman named Pocahontas. He also wrote many journals enticing people to want to come to America. This shall tell you the story of John Smith from his journeys as a young man all the way to when he finally came to America, and how his writings still influence people to immigrate to America still today.
The narrative piece written by Frederick Douglass is very descriptive and, through the use of rhetorical language, effective in describing his view of a slave’s life once freed. The opening line creates a clear introduction for what is to come, as he state, “ the wretchedness of slavery and the blessedness of freedom were perpetually before me.”
If this story had been told from a first person point of view, the reader my not have gotten this in depth of a description of the setting. Without the reader understanding that the house was boarded up and abandoned, to the point where it seems
Frederick Douglass once said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning” (Think Exist). Frederick Douglass, a man born into slavery overcame numerous obstacles to eventually become a chief abolitionist as well as a diplomat. Frederick Douglass got his hands on a book entitled “The Columbian Orator” and introduced himself to the word abolitionist. This sparked his interest and set off a fiery passion for freedom. Douglass realized that slaveholders used ignorance as a tool to enslave their subjects; slaveholders did not want slaves to have the capacities of reading and writing.
In Frederick Douglass' autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, he writes about the inhumanity and brutality of slavery, with the intention of informing white, American colonists. Douglass is thought to be one of the greatest leaders of the abolition, which radically and dramatically changed the American way of life, thus revolutionizing America. Douglass changed America, and accomplished this through writing simply and to the point about the "reality" of slavery, told through the point of view of a slave. In a preface of Douglass' autobiography, William Lloyd Garrison writes, "I am confident that it is essentially true in all its statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing
Slavery separated families when children were young and took advantage of childbearing women, leading to a long-lasting detrimental effect on African American family unity. Although slavery is commonly known to have taken place in 18th and 19th centuries, family values from slavery have trickled into recent times, as spoken of Barack Obama in (date). Well after the historic end of slavery, pieces were written about the distorted family values between previously enslaved families, one being The Family Relation, as Affected by Slavery by Charles K. Whipple. Although some slave masters may have chosen to keep families together, that was not the case for Frederick Douglass. Separated from his mother during childhood, having a master that could
Education is heavily valued in the United States. Frederick Douglass was an abolitionist and activist in advocating for equality in public education in America. In “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, he describes his life as a slave and the conditioned he endured in order to become a free man. Education is a prominent theme throughout the narrative. Douglass constantly faced the conflict of becoming literate and abandoning it entirely. As a child, his master showed great disapproval of his learning to read, which he then understood that education had value. This encouraged Douglass and he learned to read by other means. By becoming literate, he further understood slavery and the despondency of his and other slaves’ position.
Frederick Douglass has finally managed to run away from one of his masters to become a free slave, but yet he feels fear and paranoia. As he runs away, he contemplates all the possibilities of him getting caught by slaveholders or even turned in by his own kind. And it upsets him having to pass all the houses and food, but he has no shelter and starves with no food. This in fact heightens the intensity of his fear and paranoia because he is more likely to be caught with no where to hide and having no energy to run because he is starving. In The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, he utilizes things such as parallel syntactic structure, paradoxes, figurative language, and caesuras to help portray his feeling of
The definition of reform is to make changes in something; socially, politically, or economically, to improve it. One of the world’s most prominent writers, Thomas Carlyle, said, “Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.” According to Carlyle, the action of reforming is not easy to do for yourself, let alone for a whole nation of people. While many revolutions have tried, only a few have successfully reformed the people around them. Such innovators include Frederick Douglas, Charles Darwin and Steve Jobs.
Mary Lawrence Masters created the 3 story brick building, that was used as a work space and a home!
The house smelled of food constantly, and always bustled with activity. It was only a two story, square, clay house,
F.) Why was reestablishing oxygen flow to Joseph’s body so important? What processes would be affected by the lack of oxygen?
Nevertheless, it was his excellent leadership skills, his instinct for making beneficial wartime decisions, and motivational speeches, which inevitably lead to the success of Great Britain in World War II. Britain and the world free of Hitler and the Nazis looked to Winston Churchill for leadership. Because of his soldier's training, his historical knowledge, and a statesman's beliefs that had filled his mind for a long time, he considered the burden of leadership to be very light. Many still regard him as the greatest British leader of the last century.