Ostracism In The Fifth Child

Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement begins at the wealthy Tallises’ estate in Southeast England during the 1930s. Mrs. Tallis has agreed to care for her younger sister Hermione's children as Hermione and her husband are getting a divorce Although the children have only been with the Tallises for two days, the nine year old twins, Jackson and Pierrot, are already unhappy and want to return to their home. In this passage, McEwan emphasizes the disconnection between the child world and adult world through the use of dialogue and the twins’ point of view.

The narrator of Jamaica Kincaid’s Girl, who is implied to be a mother, reveals much of her worldview through the story’s dialogue. In this dialogue, she both instructs and scolds her a girl who is implied to be her daughter. The instructions that the mother imparts to her daughter in Girl offer a deep insight into what the mother believes is good for her. In teaching these lessons, the mother is preparing her daughter for what she believes is her daughter’s future. Thus, these lessons are setting the expectations that she has for her daughter within her world.

“The happiness of the wicked passes away like a torrent!” This quote from Jean Baptiste Racin summarizes The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne in one sentence. The novel’s main focus is on three main characters and how the sins they commit affect their lives in the strict Puritan town of Boston around the year 1642. Hawthorne was very knowledgeable of his Puritan ancestry and shows it by incorporating some important thoughts and traditions into this story about sin and confession. Throughout the novel, the physical, social, mental and emotional changes that result from sin in the lives of the characters are never positive and the outcome of their spiritual battles are not always good; but the author makes it perfectly clear to us that concealing sin is not wise.

“What have you been judging from?” asks Henry Tilney after Catherine Morland supposes his father to be his mother’s murderer (Austen 197). When confronted with a critic who asserts that the same Henry is not only an imposter pretending to act as the narrator’s mouthpiece, but also the antagonist in Catherine’s story, the reader may ask the same question. To answer, Northanger Abbey critic Tara Ghoshal Wallace argues that Henry’s relationship with Catherine, and with women in general, is akin to the narrator’s oppressive relationship with the reader. More specifically, Wallace reveals how the narrator and Henry both tend to reduce and manipulate the target of their oppression. However, Wallace pollutes her analysis with her own propensity to dismiss readers who view Henry’s character differently, to assume that all readers begin the novel with the same expectations of Henry, and to baselessly allege that the psychological effects of oppression she finds in Catherine also exist in the readers.

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville were well acquainted with one another and wrote a series of letters back and forth for a time. Their friendship has been seen as “one of the most famous in American literary history” (Hayford 435). Both authors have received a lot of attention as two of the more prominent writers of the nineteenth century and their names are often thrown together in criticism of that era. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous novel is likley The Scarlet Letter while Herman Melville is both famous and infamous for the long descriptions of Moby Dick. Criticism often compares these two authors and these two novels, studying symbols such as the sea or themes such as revenge. What is less explored is the particular use of children in both of these books. Each of these books feature a childish figure who brings forward the themes and concerns in the novel and the children of both novels are presented in a similar light.

   The dialogue, action and motivation revolve about the characters in the story (Abrams 32-33). It is the purpose of this essay to demonstrate the types of characters present in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” whether static or dynamic, whether flat or round, and whether portrayed through showing or telling.

We as human beings know from a young age the difference between right and wrong. We also know that the choices we make have consequences. In the book The Scarlett Letter there are two characters, Hester and Minster Dimmesdale who both made wrong choices. They both dealt with the consequences of their actions differently. While one accepted the wrong choices that were made; the other hides it and never really accepted punishment for what they did. In this paper I will continue to talk about Hester and Minster Dimmesdale and their wrong choices but I will discuss their punishment they received and what they could have received from making those wrong choices. I will also talk about how society today sees adultery and give an example of someone who choose to make the same wrong choice and how that affect them.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the values of a puritanical society are tested against the sins of its members. The result is a collection of contradictions and paradoxes among the novel’s central characters. Two contrasting characters, Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth, are especially tied together under the effect of the original sin within the novel. The original sin is adultery, involving Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale to the detriment of the condition of Roger Chillingworth. The sin drives these two characters, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, into direct opposition. Yet at the same time, these characters mirror each other in their experience and response to the sin, even though they take completely separate paths to reach the same place. Sin, thus, serves as a powerful medium by which the two characters are so intimately connected. It induces similarities in two very different characters and forces the hand of fate to link them in surprising ways. Dimmesdale and Chillingworth both contrast and echo each other in a case of apparent contradiction. Together they dramatize the coercive power of sin. Bound together by a single transgressive event, their responses mark them so similarly that they become alter egos of one another.

The human desire for passion, secrecy, and retaliation noticeably impacts the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay in Nathaniel Hawthorne's thought-provoking novel, The Scarlet Letter. In a colony built on hyper critical beliefs especially in regards to pleasure, characters such as Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth break the conformity of the religious Puritan beliefs. The Scarlet Letter portrays several different themes that readers can identify with while reading the book. One prominent theme depicted in the book reminds readers that people must recognize responsibility for their actions or endure the consequences.

Because Hawthorne intends to criticize the hypocrisy and oppression within the conformist community, his downcast and disconsolate illustrations expose the strict and relentless mandates of Puritan ideology. “But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, [...] it might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping post [...] or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man’s fire-water had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest.” (Hawthorne 47). By portraying an array of very different types of people such as the servant, child, and Indian, all of whom are subjected to Puritan law, Hawthorne laments the fact that anyone- if convicted by the orthodox Puritans- can be punished. The illustration of a child being whipped in public because his own parents turned him in is sickening; it fully envelopes Hawthorne’s view of unfair and repulsive treatment of nonconformists and sinners. Similarly, the visual description of an Indian being “driven with stripes”, or in other words, being chased with a whip, once again accentuates the

The relationship between Ben and his mother in the fifth child was one of the most different of stories I have personally read. Ben is the character that changes the entire family’s perspective on life and changed them as a family as well. One of the quotes found in the book are “Ben, do you remember that place you went to in the van? “ Solidifying the fact that Ben was neglected for the longest time because he was extremely different from all the other children in the perfect family, but his mother eventually had to take control of the situation as she realizes that she neglected her own child without even trying to because he was different, but he was not different enough to be kept in the institution. As Harriet realizes she must get him out of an insane asylum since he does not actually belong there but back at home with her and the family so that she could take care of him as she would any of her other children. But somewhere after

Imagine living in a city where the two most important items are a prison and a cemetary. Back then, many Puritans have strived to become the perfect Catholic; if they did not complete this objective, they would be sentenced in prison and possibly killed. This gloomy idea was also described in one of the most popular historical fictions ever written. A favored illustration of Gothic Romanticism, The Scarlet Letter, is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s critically acclaimed depiction of Puritan society. This consists of an exploration of isolation and hypocrisy through Hawthorne’s rich characters and their complex inner psychological turmoil.

Throughout all of American Literature, authors have used different techniques to relay a message to the reader, one way being by depicting how the community’s influence on the protagonist shapes the protagonists’ development. In The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, authors Hawthorne and Miller, respectively, use the social norms in Puritan society to express a common theme by portraying the positive and negative moral changes in characters. In Puritan society, individuals believed they were carrying out “God’s work”, creating a society where compromise was rare and harsh punishment was inflicted upon those who made mistakes that were deemed immoral to society. Because of the strict nature of the Puritans, acting in a manner that was completely out of the norm in Puritan society caused society to look down on those individuals. These characteristics of Puritan society are reflected throughout both The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, in which both the protagonists and antagonists react differently; the protagonists attempt to atone for their sin because of the guilt they are unable to overcome while the antagonists do not attempt to atone for their sins and experience negative moral changes. Throughout Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Miller’s The Crucible, the depiction by both authors of protagonists who experience moral changes as a result of guilt originating from their committed sins, indicates the recurring theme in American literature that characters who exhibit

Bullying and Ostracization of children has become a significant problem in schools. “School bullying statistics in the United States show that about one in four kids in the U.S. are bullied on a regular basis.” (“School Bullying Statistics”. (n.d.)) According to Merriam-Webster online dictionary (2017), bullying is “to tease, hurt, or threaten a smaller or weaker person”, and ostracization is “to not allow (someone) to be included in a group”. Many children are picked on or completely excluded or shunned from peer activities. When a child is bullied or ostracized it can lead to low self-esteem, emotional issues, and in extreme situations death. There are different types of bullying such a verbal and physical. There are many anti-bullying movements already in play trying to reduce bullying within school settings. By reducing bullying and ostracization the school environment will be safer, more productive, and more enjoyable for all students. There are several techniques to reduce bullying and ostracization of children in school. I believe that the best approach is to start at an individual level. We need to teach children to accept and respect each other on a personal level. Requiring students to work with and spend time with other students who they would normally not associate with and removing students from their regular groups and having them get to know other students without the influence of their group are a couple

The Fifth Child is the masterpiece of Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing. Lessing herself described it as a horror story, but we can also put it into the genre of social –psychological novels. She declared: '' I hated writing it. It was sweating blood. I was very glad when it was done. It was an upsetting thing to write - obviously, it goes very deep into me somewhere.'' It is a brilliant novel which deals not just with the social aspect of family life in England at the end of 19th century but with human psyches in general.