The film “The Proposition” directed by John Hillcoat is set in Australia in the 1800s. The film is about the police being after the Burns’ brothers because of a crime they committed. Captain Stanley gives the middle brother Charlie a proposition. It is for him and his younger brother Mikey to be free if he kills their older brother, Arthur. The job is a hard and dangerous one and Martha, Captain Stanley’s wife is not fan. Mrs. Stanley feels that her husband should not be in the field, he does not put her first, and it has taken a toll on them both. I feel that Mrs. Stanley tried hard to be there for her husband, but he often pushes her away. I believe that she feels unwanted and devalued sometimes. First and foremost, from the first scene, I could tell that Martha Stanley is a fragile woman. Her husband is in a job that does not make her comfortable. She wears her heart and feelings on her sleeve but her husband sometimes does not acknowledge it. Throughout most of the movie he had an apathetic attitude, especially towards his wife. Martha finds out that her friend Eliza Hopkins is raped and murdered and she is not happy at all. When she asks questions about it, her husband brushes her off but she is very persistent. Martha finds her way to the police station and makes sure that she puts her foot down. One scene in the movie shows Martha and Captain Stanley having a conversation and it is revealed that she knew her friend was pregnant. The fact that she
Through the exchange of letters between Lt. Jimmy Cross and the center of his infatuation Martha in “The Things They Carried”, he allowed himself to become more obsessed with the thought of her. The letters simply state the events Martha encounter in her daily life, lines
At the beginning of the short drama, “Trifles,” Mrs. Peters, the sheriff’s wife, is painted as timid and submissive wife. She willingly submits herself to the responsibilities she has as a wife. As the play unfolds, Mrs. Peter’s submissiveness begins to diminish. Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale work together to uncover the murder of Minnie Wright’s husband. When the women find the evidence, they refuse to share it with the men. Mrs. Peter’s character transforms into a more confident individual over the course of the play.
Martha also weighs upon Lt. Cross' actions (or lack thereof). Early in the story, the reader can see how Martha is a distraction during troop movements. Tasting the letter from Martha does not directly distract Lt. Cross from his duties, but it does lead the reader to believe that she is too often the focus of his
Love is a powerful force, and Lieutenant Cross sometimes gets lost in his musings while thinking of Martha. O’Brien writes: “His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing.” Like any sane person in his situation, Lieutenant Cross wants to escape – to anywhere else but the war. The war brings terrible experiences – fear, death, hunger, and pain beyond imagination. The only way that Lieutenant Cross can endure these things is by escaping to an imaginary life with Martha. Although to her, he is little more than a friend, to Lieutenant Cross, Martha represents innocence, perfection, and a world free from war.
Martha is the first women we meet in the book. She is pretty much the typical stay at home war girl. She writes letters to Lt. Jimmy Cross, they met at a college in New Jersey but nothing sparked between them besides a friendship. There isn't any hope of them ever being together but Jimmy Cross still thinks about her constantly everyday. In one particular letter she sends him a good-luck-pebble. "Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline and carried it in her breast pocket for several days" (8). Jimmy Cross reads the letter spends hours wondering who she was at the beach with, if she was with a man, if they were a couple. When the women sent letters home, it really helped keep the morale of the soldier's. Although Martha continues to kind of mislead Jimmy when she signs the letters "love." "Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open" (12).
From beginning to end, Susan Glaspell’s 1917 short story “A Jury of Her Peers,” has several repetitive patterns and symbols that help the reader gain a profound understanding of how hard life is for women at the turn-of-the-century, as well as the bonds women share. In the story two women go with their husbands and county attorney to a remote house where Mr. Wright has been killed in his bed with a rope and he suspect is Minnie, his wife. Early in the story, Mrs. Hale sympathizes with Minnie and objects to the way the male investigators are “snoopin’ round and criticizin’ ” her kitchen. In contrast, Mrs. Peters, the Sheriffs wife, shows respect for the law, saying that the men are doing “no more than their duty”. However, by the end of the story Mrs. Peters unites with Mrs. Hale in a conspiracy of silence and concealing evidence. What causes this dramatic transformation?
Separate but equal. A phrase that kept many African American citizens separated from white Americans for an extensive amount of time. While the phrase may sound like it could potentially be a good thing for African Americans separate was never equal. In the movie Separate but Equal, what originally started out as a request to the school board in South Carolina from one of the African American schools turned into one of the biggest court cases in the United States history known as Brown V. the Board of Education. This court case eventually led to the fair treatment of all African Americans over ruling the previous court case Plessey V. Ferguson which established the grounds of segregation under Separate but equal.
"Then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder is Martha was a virgin." He recognizes the ideas that she may not be a virgin, and even acknowledges that there are other men in her life. Jimmy knows that Martha has many boyfriends, and when he receives a picture from her in the mail, wonders who the photographer was. He treasures the picture and takes it everywhere with him, and yet the small shadow in the picture of the man taking it seems to be his focal point. He wants to focus purely on his unrequited love for Martha, but he can't. He seems to force himself to understand that she does not actually love him. She will never be his, and he knows that somewhere inside him, but continues to imagine that the love that she signs at the end of her letters is really a romantic love.
Stanley is a character in this play, whose perspective is clearly reality based. Since Blanche’s outlook on life is fantasy based, there is a lot of hostility between the two characters. Stanley is the one that always exposes the lies that Blanche is always hiding behind. He is constantly trying to get her to accept his perspective. When she finally begins to understand him, it’s too late. With such a huge change, she loses her mental state. Her personal beliefs get interchanged between fantasy and reality, to such an extent, that it seems as if she no longer realizes what is true or what is malign.
According to the text, I took Stanley to be this misunderstood yet lovable man who only wanted the best for his wife Stella as well as their marriage. Yet after watching the play, I sensed no sympathy for Stanley at all, as the play did display him as an abusive man who needs psychotic help even. I argue that Stanley is an abusive man verbally and physically because in the play he shoves Stella and also uses his words to emotionally hurt her. I initially understood Stella to be a woman who loved her husband yet remained strong through her husband’s time of collapse. I also noticed more sympathy for Stella, as she constantly accepts Stanley for the way that he is and loves him in spite of his dangerous ways.
Stanley is portrayed as someone who is responsible for working for the family, and as a dominant husband. Stanley sees himself as the provider and head of the household. He sees Stella's role as a homemaker, who stays at home, cooks his meals, and generally takes care of him. As such, he also expects Stella to respect him. “[He heaves the package at her.
Jimmy Cross shows his emotions towards Martha right at the beginning of the novel by sharing to us the following:
He desperate attempts to reinvent her self in front of Steila and Stanley ends up with her sympathizing with her self and allowing them to pick up on her disturbing past. On Stanley’s behalf they end up rejecting her like she rejected her husband and shortly enough she slips into her own insanity.
For he “wanted Martha to love him as he loved her” but she didn’t and that can hurt quite a lot (101, O’Brien). The sadness of unrequited love can be the heaviest thing imaginable at times. The hoping for love makes it even worse, but Lieutenant decided that
A year later, his father remarried a woman from “hell” and she was one of the reasons why Stanley became destructive. She was selfish and only cared for her and her seven children. She physically and emotionally abused Stanley by severely beating him many times and blaming him for senseless things. She also neglected him and his two other siblings while she gave her children the best of everything with Stanley’s father money. For example, his stepmother would save food and feed her own children and let Stanley and his siblings