Stand By Me Themes

This story takes place in a dystopian world. "Shatter Me" follows 17 year old Juliette Ferrars, a young woman with a deadly touch. She's been locked up in an asylum for three years, until one day she is given an offer to leave, but if she does, she is to be used as a weapon. I found this to be a very interesting book. It was well written and had a strong female character who did not have to depend on the male characters to save her all the time. One of my favorite characters was Waren, the young, handsome leader of the Reestablishment and also the antagonist of the book. It's scary how he could easily represent someone in our world. He is one of those villains you love to hate. I found that one of the themes was "Embrace who you are." In the

In the 21st century, many women, myself included, take for granted that we can wear whatever we desire and say what we want, in public, without the fear of being thrown in jail. However, that was not always the case. While the fight for the continued advance of women’s rights rages on, women of the 19th century lived a very different life than the one, us women, lead today. The feminist agenda was just emerging on the horizon. One particular woman was preparing to do her part to further the cause of women’s rights: Sarah Willis Parker. Parker was better known by her pen name, Fanny Fern. After facing and overcoming extreme adversity, she made the decision to start writing. To understand how truly ground breaking Fanny Fern was, we need to understand that in a 1997 edition of an anthology of American satire from colonial times to present, Fern was the only woman writer from the 19th century in that text. Her satiric style and controversial subject matter was just what the oppressed needed to gain some support and give them a voice.

Mrs. Turpin in Flannery O’Connor’s short story Revelation, is a prejudice and judgmental woman who spends most of her life prying in the lives of everyone around her. She looks at people not for who they are, but for their race or social standing. In fact, Mrs. Turpin is concerned with race and status so much that it seems to take over her life. Although she seems to disapprove of people of different race or social class, Mrs. Turpin seems to be content and appreciative with her own life. It is not until Mrs. Turpin’s Revelation that she discovers that her ways of life are no better then those she looks down upon and they will not assure her a place in Heaven.

Mary Flannery O’Connor is considered one of the most successful short story writers in history. She composed her works during a period of prosperity and economic boom following World War II. Although the economy was thriving, the 1950’s were a period of struggle for women’s rights, as well as other minorities. (Digital History) Based on her success, one could conclude O’Connor exceeded all barriers against women during the fifties. Flannery O’Connor’s life experiences based on her faith, her novels, and the time period of the 1950’s contribute to her unique writing style.

The pleasant lady comments on how good the weather has been lately and Mrs. Turpin replies that is good enough weather for white folks to pick cotton if African Americans decided not to pick cotton for the white folks. Mrs. Turpin begins to say that now neither white folks nor black folks want to pick cotton and she says it’s because black folks feel like they should be equal with white folks. Readers can only conclude that Mrs. Turpin is a bigot from her statements within this section of the book because she implies that black folks have their place and white folks have another place in the world. It is almost like Mrs. Turpin regards herself as higher up in society because she is white and believes that black folks should be her subordinates.

Religion is a big influence in Flannery O 'Connor 's writing. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” stresses the idea of good and evil. This can also be viewed at the evil in Christ. The story is set in the early 1900s. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” begins with a woman and her disabled daughter sitting on their porch and she notices a man walking towards their home. The man, Mr. Shiftlet, sees an old car that he wants. The old woman, Lucynell, is also craving something and takes the opportunity to achieve it. By her use of symbols, imagery, and irony, she reveals that there is corruption within Christ.

Turpin sees herself as “a respectable, hardworking, church going woman” (394), however her high moral values are overshadowed by her condescending demeanor. She believes that she is a good person and deserving of her category, as she expresses, “some of the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and Claud” (388). Mrs. Turpin, who is ultimately consumed by her preconceived notions about social hierarchy, thinks she knows everything about a person based on class and race. For example, when the “white trash” woman in the waiting room spoke about not being able to feed her son and mother anything, but coke cola and candy. Mrs. Turpin thought that she was lazy to cook and that there was nothing you could tell her about people like them that she didn’t already

During the nineteenth and twentieth century there was a number of changes made in America. Woman were looked at as less than back then and to a certain degree they still are today. There was a number of women that died or went insane because of the standards that they had to meet in order to be considered good women. In this research paper I will talk about the experience of the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper and Blanche DuBois from the story A Streetcar Named Desire. It will be shown within these pages how the moral and societal standards for women were far different than they were for men, and how the standards changed over the years. Furthermore it will be shown how this effected the women of those two stories.

Though this Southern Christian white woman is superficially pleasant and well-mannered, she conceals her ugly thoughts of class stratum cognizant of what is below her pedestal. A church going woman who treats slaves fairly, she believes her time volunteered and philosophy of doing things for others are enough to sanctify her ugliness on the inside. The omniscient narrator observes that “Mrs. Turpin felt at awful pity… it was one thing to be ugly and another to act ugly” (473) Ironically, Mrs. Turpin is the one who acts ugly. Arrogant about her station in life, when faced to choose between “a nigger or white-trash” she would plead with Jesus to “let [her] wait until there’s another place available” (472). Silently judging others she is pleased to not be anything less socially acceptable than she already is, and often occupies herself at night classifying people. Mrs. Turpin believed that you “had to have certain things before you could know certain things;” this consequently places her on a higher plane (474).

According to Elizabeth Lowell, “Some of us aren't meant to belong. Some of us have to turn the world upside down and shake the hell out of it until we make our own place in it.” Sometimes what every situation needs is an outsider to flip the script and create a new outlook on everything. In Shirley Jackson’s novel, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” the speaker, Merricat, is an outsider of society on many levels, such as mental health, gender, and that she is an upper class citizen in a poor area. Although Merricat is mentally unstable, her outsider’s perspective criticizes the social standard for women in the 1960s, indicating that social roles, marriage, and the patriarchy are not necessary aspects in life such as it is not necessary to have the same outlook on life as others.

Turpin’s standards in her eyes. The readers can see through Mrs. Turpins thoughts and views how brutal and harsh she really is for example, when Mrs. Turpin is talking to herself and asks herself a question “If Jesus had said to her before he made her, there’s only two places available for you. You can either be a nigger or white trash, what would she have said?” Mrs. Turpin answers with “All right, make me a nigger then- but that don’t mean a trashy one. And he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro-woman, herself but black.” (416).

Flannery O’Connor, undoubtedly one of the most well-read authors of the early 20th Century, had many strong themes deeply embedded within all her writings. Two of her most prominent and poignant themes were Christianity and racism. By analyzing, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” these two themes jump out at the reader. Growing up in the mid-1920’s in Georgia was a huge influence on O’Connor. Less than a decade before her birth, Georgia was much different than it was at her birth. Slaves labored tirelessly on their master’s plantations and were indeed a facet of everyday life. However, as the Civil War ended and Reconstruction began, slaves were not easily assimilated into Southern culture. Thus, O’Connor grew up in a highly racist area that mourned the fact that slaves were now to be treated as “equals.” In her everyday life in Georgia, O’Connor encountered countless citizens who were not shy in expressing their discontent toward the black race. This indeed was a guiding influence and inspiration in her fiction writing. The other guiding influence in her life that became a major theme in her writing was religion. Flannery O 'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a Catholic family. The region was part of the 'Christ-haunted ' Bible belt of the Southern States. The spiritual heritage of the region profoundly shaped O 'Connor 's writing as described in her essay "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" (1969). Many

Turpin did. Somehow, we have to right the wrong, and clear our conscience, come to grips with it and learn to live with how we are, or change. Mrs. Turpin was one of the lucky ones; she saw a vision in the sky, which helped clear things up for her. “A visionary light settled in her eyes, she saw the streak as vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire: upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling towards heaven. There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting, clapping, and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others, with great dignity; accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense. They alone were on key” (331). “Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away” (332). Ultimately, Mrs. Turpin was shown that no matter what she thought of herself or how she judged others, God makes his own decisions and in the end, it may surprise us all, just as it did Mrs.

“Everything That Rises must converge”, by Flannery O’ Connor is sometimes considered a comical but also serious tale of a grown man named Julian, who lives with mother, who happens to be your typical southern woman. The era unfolds in a couple years after integration begins. Throughout the story, O’Connor impresses us with her derived message in which people often resist to growing away from bigotry towards self-awareness and love for all humankind, which is so necessary for life to converge in equality. O’Connor has a distinctive style of writing that expresses this message through characterization, conflict and literary devices.

An important relationship between characters in the film “Stand by me” Directed by Rob Reiner is the relationship between two characters, Chris Chambers and Gordie LaChance. We gain an understanding of this relationship through the use of dialogue, different camera shots, music and the parallel between Teddy and Vern.“Stand by me” gives us the story, narrated by adult Gordie, about a particular Journey involving four childhood friends, Teddy, Vern and Chris that happened in the summer of 1959 and that his outlook on life forever.