Superficiality In Perfume By Patrick S�skind

The short story“The Necklace” by Gui de Maupassant follows Madame Loisel and her husband who are living in the middle-class during the rise of the middle class in Paris, France.There are many different examples of irony throughout the short story, demonstrating Maupassant's talent at commenting on the society in which he was immersed in. The theme of “The Necklace” is revealed through the character Madame Loisel, irony, and symbolism.

Throughout the story “Perfume” by Patrick Suskind, Grenouille is presented as an outsider who is a product of both social and moral decay shown through his birth, description of the setting and description of Grenouille’s characteristics.

The style and color of Daisy’s clothing, as perceived by Nick, is indicative of the early 20th century ideal of the old-moneyed, wealthy woman as a being of purity

During Flaubert’s lifetime, the Revolution of 1789 and the autocratic reign of Napoleon were recent memories. With the revolution came the end of the feudal system and a rise to a new group: the bourgeoisie. This group was made up of merchants, capitalists, and other professionals who did not inherit their fortune and were not born into the nobility. Emma and her husband belonged to this group. Her disappointments in life stemmed from her dissatisfaction with the lifestyle of the French bourgeoisie. She aspires to be a part of the aristocratic lifestyle of the nobility; a lifestyle more sophisticated, refined and glamorous than her own. The bourgeoisie craved the same treatment as the nobility, and were constantly attempting to exhibit their wealth creating tastes that were often characterized as gaudy. As a member of the educated elite with inherited money, Flaubert despised the moral conservatism, rough manners, and unsophisticated taste of this new class. Frustrated by the mediocracy of rising middle class, Flaubert uses Emma’s disgust with her lifestyle to convey his own dislike for the bourgeoisie. Emma felt the full suffering of the middle class as "the appetites of the flesh, the craving for money, the melancholy of passion, all blended together in one general misery” just like France’s

Gazing at beauty does inexplicable things to the human mind, it is uncontrollable and difficult to maintain stability. In the story A&P by John Updike, Sam and his co-workers are engrossed by the three girls in the grocery store. One could say, the opposite sex holds the power of desire.

In his 1984 novel Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins presents a narrative that rivals the often fantastical tales told in myth. Using classical mythology as a foundation, and, in particular, providing a loose adaptation of The Odyssey by Homer, Robbins updates and modifies characters and concepts in an effort to reinforce the importance of the journey of life and the discovery of self. Like the ancient myth-makers, Robbins commands the reader’s attention with outrageous situations and events while at the same time providing characters that the reader can relate to and learn from.

Imagine a world where everyone is born ugly and there’s nothing you can do about it; not until your sixteenth birthday. In this futuristic fiction novel Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, kids live their whole life seen as ugly until they turn sixteen and get an operation that makes them pretty. Tally Youngblood has always dreamt of becoming pretty, until she meets a girl named Shay. Shay runs away to live a life like we do in present day without hoverboards, talking bridges, and surgeries that define how you live your life. Tally must follow Shay and betray her new friends, or risk never becoming pretty at all. It’s amazing how easy it is to visualize, connect, and question throughout this story.

In the dystopian novel The Uglies by Scott Westerfeld teens are forced to live in a society consumed by the high standards of beauty. The teens in The Uglies live in a town called “Uglyville” up until the age of sixteen where they go to live in “New Pretty Town”. Once the teen turns sixteen years old, they are forced to undergo a surgery that changes their entire demeanor just so that they fit into societies standards. Much like teens today, the teens in The Uglies face the obstacle of doing what it takes to be deemed “pretty”.

In constructing this short essay, I will first start off by touching on Tartuffe and how the writing was purposefully catering to the aristocratic. I will then shift to the analysis of The Country Wife. Finally, I will show the middle class society from The London Merchant breakdown. I will also be using specifics from Tartuffe, The Country Wife and The London Merchant, to show the shift from an aristocratic to middleclass society effected the drama. That being noted, I will begin with Tartuffe.

The work of Lawlor and Day are similar, as both identify the lack of understanding of how Consumption became a positive aesthetic norm during this period. Both point to Sontag and Foucault as a starting point, which correlated social class with aesthetics, but did little to discern why this correlation existed. Day and Lawlor differ in how they answer this question and what aspects of the Consumptive aesthetic they decide to focus upon. Day heavily relies upon material culture, to create a deeper understanding of the physical development of illness metaphor within western culture. Whereas Lawlor, primarily focuses on the intellectual aspect of understanding illness, by rejecting that the metaphors of disease are automatically inherent to the disease itself. Rather, certain aspects of the disease were selected to represent the illness, to legitimize the morality of the upper social classes which were heavily impacted by the disease. Hirschhorn is more of an outlier, he is not concerned with the metaphorical understanding of illness, but rather, the epidemiological story of Emily Dickenson, which is more sympathetic with the traditional historiography of Romantic Consumption. The Consumptive Aesthetic is inherently linked to social metaphor and understanding of disease, but the existence of social metaphor should not be taken at face value. The work of the authors mentioned, prove that humanization and deconstruction of the Consumptive Aesthetic is important in deconstructing social perceptions of illness and the permissibility of

“In a world that was theirs it was almost a regulation always to wish for more than you could have.” Such a world had only just arrived during the early nineteen sixties—with a surge in economic output, an increase in the average income, and the commercialization of mass-produced consumer goods—following the Second World War. This was a time during which France, in particular, transitioned from a class-based, limited-consumption culture to a consumer society in which individuals defined their positions and self-worth based on the possessions that they owned. Georges Perec’s novella Things: A story of the Sixties details the rise of this wealthy consumer society and the various industries that made it possible, through the story of a young couple in their twenties striving to attain an idealized life-style, while hoping to somehow escape what they consider to be a bourgeois trap.

In his novel, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo identifies the principle social evils of French society through the actions and qualities of his characters. By depicting each of his characters’ struggles through destitute and oppressed measures, Hugo is able to identify the social errors of 19th century France. The fact that characters such as Valjean, Javert, Fantine, and Cosette, attempt to rise above poverty and redeem themselves indicate that such inequalities did, and still do, exist to this day. Through the use of feminist ideals and the criminal injustice system, Hugo attacks the principle social evils that each of his characters face in Les Miserables.

As a German writer, the reason for which Patrick Suskind wrote his critically-acclaimed novel, Perfume, in a French setting, about the French, is questionable. However, candidate answers lie in the setting of the novel itself. Mid-18th century France, which is adjacent to Suskind’s Germany, harboured not only a national, but global revolution of politics, economics, and social norms through the French reforms. This had plentiful influence on all aspects of Prussia since the late 17th century (when Germany was known as Prussia) to the present. This stepping stone to a change in practicality lied in the French Revolution and the change of identity that it instilled upon the populace. An exploration of Grenouille and perfume in Perfume reveals their symbolism of the critical transition from religious prominence, to humanistic considerations, to nihilistic extremes that ensued national and global chaos after the French Revolution to represents its influence on Germany and its constituent populace.

The novel, Perfume- Story of a Murderer, is set in eighteenth-century France. The eighteenth-century was a significant period in French and European histories alike, as it marks an important era of change known as the Enlightenment. Also known as the “Age of Reason”, the Enlightenment saw, among other things, a rise in individualism across European societies. This notion is naturally apparent in Patrick Süskind’s novel and particularly in its main character, Grenouille. From his birth to his trip to becoming a journeyman and pursuing his personal goal of becoming the best perfumer, Grenouille is the embodiment of many changes that are characteristic to Enlightenment individualism such as the introduction of inborn rights and increased social

In the 18th century, European society put an emphasis on social standing; each social class was expected to act differently, thus affecting the way one would get treated and the amount of opportunities available to them. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, food imagery and the way each character acts towards food reveals the distinctions between the various social classes and, more importantly, the mediocrity of the French bourgeoisie. However, Flaubert chooses not to focus on all of the social classes, but solely on the characteristics and mannerisms surrounding the middle and the high classes. Revolving the novel around middle-classed characters who represent the middle class, Flaubert criticizes the bourgeoisie through their desire to escape