Lusus Naturae Sparknotes

In “The Birthmark”, a short story by Nathanial Hawthorne, the use of the archetypal conflict Nature vs. Science, the character of Damsel in Distress, and the symbol of the Incurable Wound show how easily beauty is overlooked in the endeavor for perfection.

One of her first fears was that she was playing with her doll and took the ribbon out of her hair and wrapped it around her doll's neck while holding the ribbon at the end swinging the doll around showing her fear of being hung. After that happened her parents got worried so they called in a physiatrist. Later on, she started not eating the food her mother cooked for her all she would eat is packaged things like potato chips, and all she would drink is coke cola. Then her physiatrist was told that by the mother and he explained to her she was afraid of being poisoned. As her mother wept Bridges father saw a picture of Jesus on the wall and took it to her mother. He said nobody really knows what Jesus looks like but they all say they serve him because they all assume that he's white. So they took that photo down for good because no one really knows what Jesus looks like or what color of skin he has it shouldn't

Settings and characters in the book are described using allusion and personification; this creates imagery which helps the reader understand what is happening in the book. The main character, Lily Owens, describes her version of Mother Nature, “She[Mother Nature] looked like Eleanor Roosevelt.”.

This interpretation, however, disregards the only true primary resource that exists in relation to the girls affliction, written by Hale in 1702. As stated above by Hale, the symptoms were "impossible to do so themselves". So this proposition is not actually backed with historical sources.

epilepsy. But Minty thought the visions had a divine meaning since she and her family were all

The poem Revelation, by Liz Lochead, is a gripping story about a chance encounter that leads the reader into a deeper understanding of the poem’s underlying theme. The poem focuses on a girl who is visiting a farm and is given the opportunity to see a bull that is kept out of sight. Lochhead manages to grasp the reader’s imagination by the use of word choice, sentence structure, imagery and personification. This allows the reader to visualize the recurring theme of sexual awakening within the poem. Liz Lochhead, creates a deeper understanding of the poem’s theme by her word choice, which helps explain the events leading up to the young girl’s encounter with the bull. She uses the word ‘threshold’, which describes the girl standing at the opening of the barn. The word has connotations of a crossover from innocence to experience. At this point in time the girl is standing at the edge of purity, about to step over to the other side revealing something unknown to her. This describes to the reader that she has reached the stage in her life where she is ready to be exposed to her sexual awakening and the evil that is prominent in the world. The writer then builds on this motif by the way she structures the poem in the lead up to the girl meeting the bull. In stanza one she adds ‘the hot reek of him. Then he was immense’. The use of the caesura adds a dramatic effect to the poem causing the reader to pause, instilling fear. It makes the reader realise that this isn’t just a chance encounter after all, as it has a great impact on the young girl. From this one encounter the girl remembers the bull’s overwhelming smell & body heat.

The author starts the book with the story of her aunt. This story was a well-kept family secret being that her aunt’s actions were of great disappointment to the family. The “no name woman” as the story names her, was forgotten by all her family because she had a child that was not from her husband. This story gives a clear

In the book Leo Africanus it is a fictionalized biography of a real person, Hasan al- Wazzan. Hasan and his family were forced to flee to Fez, where he grew up and became a very well-off merchant. The book really gives a clear picture of his family life as a child, his education, his marriages, his travels, and his bitter- sweet reminiscence of exile.

Sin, a dark and powerful force, twists the soul and warps the mind to the point where it leaves society with unconquerable difficulties in everyday life. Nathaniel Hawthorne, quite successfully, uses literature to its full potential in order to express sins presence in life. He uses the short story, “The Birthmark” to express this theme. In this story, a man by name Aylmer for the first time sees a small defect in his otherwise beautiful wife, Georgiana. When Aylmer mentions it to her, she feels hurt, but it does not seem to affect her self-image. However, as time went on, the birthmark started to bother her causing her to believe she was flawed and in need of fixing. With the assistance of Aylmer's servant, Aminadab, Aylmer creates a miracle drug that would cure his wife of her imperfection: the birthmark. The possibly deadly drug incites fear in her husband; however, the blemish on her face troubles her, as well as her husband, to the point where she believes her life means nothing unless she could get it removed. After much meticulous preparation, the wife takes the cure. At first, everything seems well as her birthmark faded, however soon everything goes wrong, and Georgina has a terrible reaction. Soon after taking the cure she dies, leaving Aylmer heartbroken and alone without his wife. In, “The Birthmark,” Nathaniel Hawthorne brings to light sin’s presence in society through the use of allusions, symbolism, color, and beauty.

Portrayed as spiritual and intellectual in contrast with his crude laboratory assistant Aminadab, Aylmer becomes disturbingly obsessed with a birthmark on his wife’s countenance. The plot of the short story revolves around the man’s attempt in removing the mark, which results in the death of Georgiana. In the very beginning of the story, the audience discovers through the narration that Aylmer views his wife’s birthmark as more than a congenital, benign irregularity on the skin. In reality, the primary reason why he becomes severely obsessed with the birthmark is because in his eyes, the mark symbolizes something. Aylmer proceeds to further clarify his inner thoughts by replying to his wife, “This slightest possible defect, which we hesitate whether to term a defect or a beauty, shocks me, as being the visible mark of earthly imperfection” (Mays 340). Although Georgiana is initially mortified and even goes as far to question the existence of the marriage between them, the narration later sheds light and explains that the precise reason why Aylmer is excessively bothered with the birthmark is because he regards Georgiana as virtually the embodiment of perfection. As a consequence, perceiving a flaw on his wife’s image that clashes with the concept of her beauty inevitably leads him to feel aggrieved and begin to judge the birthmark as a dangerous blemish residing on her skin.

Lucy Westenra, signifying the stereotypical victim, of “unequalled sweetness and purity,” symbolises the change in feminine identity within the story after she shows deviant traits, transforming from her previously repressed tender character into a strong sexual demon.

During a time never directly stated, a young girl suffers from Porphyria and goes through a journey of self-discovery and acceptance in the short story, “Lusus Naturae” by Margaret Atwood. The reader never learns the narrator's name, and she is only known as Lusus Naturae, or “freak of nature” (Atwood p.263). Diagnosed by a foreign doctor, the young girl seems to be forever cursed and becomes a burden to her family and shame to her village. The narrator guides the reader along her life and adventures after the falsifying of her death, and the peregrination of being alone and acceptance of her fate. Throughout it, Atwood uses different elements of figurative language-including symbolism and irony- and the first-person narrative. A theme of how self-discovery can be an independent, and lifelong journey can be inferred because of these.

in this stage where girls develop “penis envy”, the solution is to obtain the father’s penis (sexual desire) through identifying with the mother and mimicking her in order to replace her. Emily fails to resolve the conflict in the phallic stage because she was unable to identify with the same-sex parent. We can only hypothesize that the mother may have abandoned her or died during this time so that there was no same-sex parent to identify with. Failure to identify with the mother led to the failure of successfully obtaining the penis, and the failure to understand through psychosexual competition with the mother for the father, that all women do not and cannot possess a penis. Emily then begets a nonnegotiable necessity to have a phallic figure around in her life, and if she can’t, a possession of the “penis” herself. Emily’s submissiveness to letting her father control her romantic life can be interpreted as the need to have her father’s phallic figure around but when her father died, the phallic figure was “castrated” from her. The realization of the temporality of this kind of possession may have triggered the need to permanently have control over the possession of the penis in the form of a phallic figure. This may explain the poisoning of Homer, a “big, dark, ready man, with a big voice”, in the ultimate attempt to obtain the “penis” and finally, however perversely, resolve the penis envy. Emily herself is transformed—and tragically— into somewhat of a

Instead it is a gift. For instance, “…I told her about the little man and she gave me a hug and said everyone had bad dreams and not to be scared of them – they were just dreams, and they couldn’t hurt me” (21) expresses the interactions that Lisamarie encounters with the spirit world that she can not yet understand due to the dismissal from her mother Gladys. Later, Lisamarie’s curiosity influences her to seek the reason behind her visions and has the following conversation with her Ma-ma-oo, to define what is occurring: “…Ah, you have a gift, then. Just like your mother. Didn’t she tell you about it?... When Gladys was very young, lots of death going on. T.B. Flu. Drinking. Diseases. She used to know who was going to die next. But that kind of gift, she makes people nervous, hey?” (153).

In this essay, I will be while answering the questions from prompt one, “How and why does the protagonist's attitude toward her own situation change over the course of the story? How and why does she paradoxically become more alive and powerful after she “dies”?”, to complete Journal Assignment One. I will be discussing the short story by Margaret Atwood, titled “Lusus Naturae”.