Explore how the theme of secrecy is presented in ‘The woman in white’

Stephen Mallatratt’s adaption to play of “The Woman in Black” portrays the story of a man named Mister Kipps, who is a solicitor who has been sent to an abandoned home in the East of the country in order to collect the legal papers of a recently deceased woman. However, the audience learns that the woman living in Ell Marsh House was haunted by a spirit known as The Woman in Black. Being based in the turn of the previous century, the play tackles the themes of how the fear of the unknown can transform a man of science into a man fearful of the dark and every single creek; and how the concept of revenge can cause an embittered woman to seek vengeance and claim the thing she lost: Children. The play is set during the time where superstition was surpassed by science and where a rational explanation was being required for how everything occurs but how science can be destroyed by the unexplainable…

“The Haunted Palace” is one of Edgar Allen Poe’s mysterious and phantasmagoric poems. Written in the same year as “The Devil in the Belfry,” and included in his short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Haunted Palace” is another tale of innocence and happiness now corroded with sorrow and madness. It is fairly easy to say that “The Haunted Palace” is a metaphor for Poe’s own ghostly troubled mind, more than it is about a decaying palace. For in 1839, it was found in a book that the main character in “The Fall of the House of Usher” comes across. In the context of its appearance in “Usher,” it is startlingly clear that this is no fable of earthly decay, but one of mental and spiritual ruin.

The Meaning Of The Title “Our Secret”, A Chapter From “A Chorus Of Stones” by Susan Griffin

The book I would like to tell you about is called Among the Hidden. The author of this book is Margaret Peterson Haddix. In this book, there is a boy named Luke Garner who has never been able to leave his backyard. He has only been able to quickly peak through blinds for fear of being seen. Until the day the workers started cutting the trees down, Luke was able to experience a little fresh air while rough-housing with his brothers in their isolated backyard farmland. The reason for this is because of the population law. The government believed that there wasn’t enough food to feed the growing population, so they made the law that there is only a maximum of two children allowed in each family. That meant that Luke was an illegal third

Before the Narrator enters Roderick’s room, he walks through the house and describes it. The Narrator sees the darkness in the house when he notices, “ the ebon blackness of the floors” (Poe 297). He describes a gloomy black floor to give a description of uneasiness and terror for the reader to attribute to the whole house. The Narrator also describes a feeling of a ghost in the house among trophies that are moving, “trophies which rattled as I strode” (Poe 297). This feeling of terror is created for the reader to imagine when he or she felt objects moving, scaring him or her. The rattling that the Narrator notices is something that the reader relates to feeling further creating a single effect for the

A particular question that is seldom pondered over and yet is capable of carrying so many doubts within it: who are we? Who are we as a society who can do the things we do? Who are we who can suffer from them? Award winning poet and essayist Susan Griffin confronts these distinct questions in her work titled, “Our Secret”. Griffin believes that a basic understanding of the things that play a part in the growth of an individual is essential to understanding who we are. The way a child is raised dictates how that child is going to become later on in life. One of the distinct highlights of Griffin’s essay was her use of describing the progress of the V1 rockets in World War II. Griffin studies the aspects of human nature by using these missile developments as a metaphor to symbolize the raising of children and the factors that can influence a growing individual. One of the prime figures that Griffin uses pertaining to these growing individuals was Heinrich Himmler, leader of the Nazi secret police. Griffin uses Himmler as an example to demonstrate how big of a role a parental figure can play in the development of a person.

As the nameless narrator is approaching the house, he says , “I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.” (pg. 21). The house looks gloomy, mysterious, and is disintegrating, yet still strong. From what the narrator has seen, the reader can see that the house has a power over the people that enter and live inside. Considering this, at the beginning of the story the narrator is completely rational, but he also senses something peculiar. When the narrator goes into the house he finds the inside just as mysterious and eerie. Subsequently, he enters the house to see his friend Roderick, he notes that his friend is not looking so well. Roderick lists out his symptoms saying, “I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror. In this unnerved, in this pitiable, condition I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the phantasm, fear.” (pg. 27). Furthermore, the narrator also notes that Roderick seems to be fearful of his own house. Pretty soon Roderick comes up with a theory saying the house isn’t healthy, just as the narrator was thinking at the beginning of the story.

One of the most controversial topics concerning Muslim women’s rights is the idea of the veil. It is believed by some Muslims that the veil is an Islamic obligation that all Muslim women must adhere to. But nowadays, the veil can have different meanings that are not necessarily religious. In her article “Reinventing the Veil,” Leila Ahmed addresses some of the different meanings that the veil can have. Marjane Satrapi explores one of those meanings in her animated autobiography Persepolis (2008). In Persepolis, Marjane tells the story of her rebellion against the Iranian Islamist regime that takes over Iran, oppresses women, and forces them to wear the veil. What was interesting to me was seeing Marjane wear the veil without being oppressed, although she does not believe in it, and is being forced to wear it. In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi escapes being a subject to the Iranian Islamist ideology by establishing her individual identity through transforming the veil from a means of oppression into a means of feminist rebellion.

Susan Glaspell’s one-act play, Trifles, weaves a tale of an intriguing murder investigation to determine who did it. Mrs. Wright is suspected of strangling her husband to death. During the investigation the sheriff and squad of detectives are clueless and unable to find any evidence or motive to directly tie Mrs. Wright to the murder. They are baffled as to how he was strangled by a rope while they were supposedly asleep side by side. Glaspell artfully explores gender differences between men and women and the roles they each fulfill in society by focusing on their physicality, their methods of communication and vital to the plot of the play, their powers of observation. In simple terms, the play suggests that men tend to be assertive,

A review of the house itself suggests that an architectural hierarchy of privacy increases level by level. At first, the house seems to foster romantic sensibilities; intrigued by its architectural connotations, the narrator embarks upon its description immediately--it is the house that she wants to "talk about" (Gilman 11). Together with its landscape, the house is a "most beautiful place" that stands "quite alone . . . well back from the road, quite three miles from the village" (Gilman 11). The estate's grounds, moreover, consist of "hedges and walls and gates that lock" (Gilman 11). As such, the house and its grounds are markedly depicted as mechanisms of confinement--ancestral places situated within a legacy of control and

In “The Fall of the House of Usher” the story starts with the narrator saying that he is overcome with a feeling of gloom upon first seeing the house. He compares the windows to vacant eyes. The narrator goes on to tell how the house appears to him but then tries to explain it away as his overactive imagination.

A person’s home should be more than a place to shelter them from the elements. It should be a place where one could express him/her self freely and not have to worry about any harm coming to them. In the play Trifles Mrs. Wright lived in a house that was anything but calm. In block eleven,

Though set in entirely dissimilar countries at different points in history, Margaret Atwood’s ‘Alias Grace’ and Hannah Kent’s ‘Burial Rites’ possess significant comparisons. Both for instance, are fictionalized historical novels following the tribulations of a female protagonist convicted of murder and both have been widely acclaimed for their incredible literary style which merges classic poetry, epigraphs, folklore and historical articles with fiction. The most striking parallel between each novel that can be drawn, however, is the way in which authors masterfully craft the stories of untrustworthy, cunning and deceptive criminals to elicit sympathy from their audiences. Readers of the novel and secondary characters alike are gradually pulled into sympathising with ambiguous and untrustworthy female leads, Grace Marks (Alias Grace) and Agnes Magnusdottir (Burial Rites). Despite the heavy suspicions of others and a lack of evidence to support their claims of innocence, these characters present artfully manipulated features of their defence stories to provoke empathy, sympathy and trust from those within the novel, and those reading it.

reader feel a sense of dread and despair because unlike the house the reader knows the owners

The existence of a “dark double” abounds in many literary works of the Victorian Era. These