Joseph Campbell's Film: Sacrifice And Bliss

While visiting Alto do Cruzeiro in 1965, Hughes noticed women were indifferent concerning the death of their children. Infants born dead or “waiting to die” is a common occurrence in Alto do Cruzeiro. The women of the community became use to experiencing these tragedies and decided it would be easier to cooperate with Gods plan. If an infant is born “waiting to die”, the mother will usually leave the child to die. Having this kind of attitude towards dying infants has a powerful impact on maternal thinking and practice. Already knowing that an infant will not survive makes the women less loving and nurturing. When an infant actually survives, the mother has a difficult time raising the child. Children born in this area “lack traditional breast feeding, subsistence gardens, stable marriages, and multiple adult care-takers that exists in the interior.” Since single parenting is the norm, woman are forced to leave the infant at home, many times by itself. The women cannot carry their child with them at work or by the river. They can not leave their child with the older children because if they are not in school they are working as well. Also, since women earn a dollor and day, they can not afford to hire a baby

Learning to die is a technique of setting your mind into a state that allows you to focus on what is at hand and not what could happen or what might happen, Scranton learned this technique while in Baghdad. He learned of this technique from a Samurai manual that required “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Instead of fearing the end, I owned it” (126). He didn’t fear the possibility that he might die, by removing this fear he was able to concentrate on the danger he was currently facing. Which allowed him to act quickly without hesitation, upon having this control he could use it to save his fellow soldiers from their own demise. Upon learning this technique he could face dangerous situations without fearing his possible end “if by setting ones heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the way” (126). To have the freedom Scranton is talking about is to be free of the fear of dying, everyone has this fear, from the moment we wake up in the morning till the time we go to sleep and you can even fear it in your sleep. He gained this freedom by living his life as though he was already dead, if you live like you are dead then why would you be afraid of death when you already are. Scranton believes that learning to die is a sacrifice, which you can’t gain this ability without making the sacrifice to release yourself from all things that hold us to the lives we currently live. Scranton made the ultimate sacrifice in order to not let fear control him, this is what Scranton wants all of us to do in order to survive what is ahead of

That job has very little honor in this community. “Three years, Three births and that’s all. After that they are Laborers for the rest of their adult lives, until the day that they enter the House of the Old… The Birthmothers never even get to see new children” (p. 22). Today, some women decide to become surrogate mothers of other women’s babies because of several reasons, such as sympathy for the couples who cannot have children of their own or financial reason. However, to carry other women’s children gives surrogate moms great senses of responsibility. They writhe in not only soreness of body, but also agony of mentality. The psychological pain by giving their babies to other women is greater than that of body. Thus, some surrogate mothers refuse to give up their babies sometimes.

The father knows that his dream of knowledge and university will never be fulfilled, and consequently, tries to accomplish this goal through his children. In doing so, he also sacrifices his relationship with his wife who despises him and his “room and all it stood for” (MacLeod 266). They both try to maintain a positive atmosphere in the house, regardless of their differences, by working hard to raise their children. As the only boy in the family, the narrator idolizes his father and eventually begins to believe that “it was very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations” (MacLeod 274). As a result, the narrator promises to help and protect his father until he dies, and the father, in return commits to the ultimate sacrifice of death to set his son free. The author is showing that true love goes beyond life itself and that no sacrifice is too great for a parent in order to give their children the chance of a better life. By implementing the seed of knowledge in his children, the father knew that his sacrifice is not in vain,

Scheper-Hughes provides a controversial breakdown of the mothers' evident lack of concern to the death of their babies as not a repression of grief, but as a plan for endurance. The mothers, by allowing themselves to form attachment to only the babies who have already verified their capability to survive by doing so during early infancy, these women can increase the existence odds of their strongest children. Modern ideas about "mother love," and about mother-infant bonding as a naturally occurring process that in general occurs in the first few moments of a baby's life, are the cultural result of the statistical differences which allows women to give birth to just a few children, each of which she may be expecting to raise to adulthood.

3. If a life is valued based off the future possible contributions then a fetus’s life is more valuable than the mothers’.

giving birth, life by giving are often used as agents of sacrifice in their meaningful role in

“How ironic --- he waged war against the English for ten long years and then died in his bed like anyone else” (Dumas 2). Dantes was speaking to Monsieur Morrel about Captain Leclere’s death. I took a particular liking to this quote because no matter who we are or what we do in life, we all end up in the same place. “Joy sometimes has a strange effect: it can oppress us almost as much as sorrow” (Dumas 18). Dantes said this to Danglars and Caderousse.

Does hope really demolish one from achieving the best or is hope the fuel that ignites one’s ambitions? According to Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun, one can only be successful if they give up all hope of succeeding. In her article, “Start Where You Are”, Chodron shares her perspective on Buddhism and how giving up hope is the solution to all problems. On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson advocates hope by persuading his nephew in a letter to always strive to become better. These two authors provide readers with two very different views on how one could live an exceeding life.

Many tragic events have occurred throughout history that lead to the protection and advocacy of children, for example in Greece, during ancient times, infanticide would be legal and even enforced under certain cases like illegitimate or deformed children. Children would be sold into slavery or be put to work if families needed the extra income. Unwanted European newborns were discarded without penalty and children were pushed into adulthood as quickly as possible. “Owing to the high infant mortality rates of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature… it was suppressed. Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product. A child was a born and died and another took its place” (Tuchman, 19778, p.50).

3)     When the narrator stated that “courage is no good” he would be able to defend his statement from his other statements referring to death. Technically he says we aren’t supposed to fear something we can’t

The next minor claim Willis presents is that the life of an unborn child is less valuable than that of a woman who already has a history and has experienced life. According to Willis, a woman has more worth because she has “feelings, self-consciousness, a history, social ties” (2005, p. 515). By having to carry a baby, all of these important parts of her life are in jeopardy of being harmed (Willis, 2005). The concern Willis expresses for a woman’s life changing

In the 1939 movie classic, The Wizard of Oz, the Cowardly Lion is on a quest for the wizard to give him courage. He is afraid of everything and anything. However, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle believes that courage is possible for all individuals. To gain courage one must have the inner qualities that will guide the courageous. The most important part of these qualities is to come to terms with death itself. Also, there are views of courage that are falsely perceived because they appear to be parallel with one another; nevertheless they are still very different.

270) If a mother had already come to cerebrate that her child wasn’t going to live, it was very arduous for her to do anything to preserve the child, even if the quantifications needed to preserve the child were simple. Scheper-Hughes learned, “the high expectancy of death, and the ability to face child death … engendered patterns of nurturing … the survivors were nurtured, while stigmatized, doomed infants were left to die.” (p. 342) Women in the Alto categorize child death into roughly three groups: natural causes such as diarrhea or disease, deaths resulting from the evil ocular perceiver, sorcery or other magic, and the ill-fated hopeless cases categorized as “child sickness” or “child attack.” These folk diagnoses avail the mother to decide if an infant is worth her inhibited nurturing resources.

The film Spirited Away was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, produced in anime by Studio Ghibli in Tokyo, Japan, and released in 2001 (Sparknotes Editors). The film Spirited Away was very popular around the world and received the Best Animated Feature Film at the 75th Annual Academy Awards becoming the first anime film to win an Oscar (“Credits and Awards”). One of the reasons for its success is that it accurately represents the idea of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth or hero’s journey. The film has all of the elements of the monomyth: the call to adventure, a supernatural aid, a threshold into another world, mentor characters, the road of trials, an abyss and a revelation, a transformation, atonement, a crossing back over the threshold to the regular world, and apotheosis.