The Characteristics Of Conformity And Passivity In 20th Century Literature

There are now equal rights between men and women due to education being available almost worldwide. Having a more knowledge of the world makes beliefs varied so there’s a more diverse audience the film caters for. These differences in time periods impact the way each source was created and how the creators changed it for audiences. The purpose of adapting the play is so modern audiences are able to understand and relate to the play by giving it modern elements. The purpose of this essay is to compare the film to the original play of Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and how the two sources are different and similar to relate to the audiences they are targeting.

The thesis statement above attempts to examine the role that Elizabeth Bennet plays in the novel as she goes against the women’s idealistic views. This article will help justify my thesis statement in how Greenfield expresses the oppression that women go through and how they lack to see the discrimination they are faced with daily.

The American Dream has always been the unattainable idea of a perfect life, often causing disorder when it is not realized. In response to society’s unrealistically high standards, and the human desire to be accepted, people shape their existences to fit within the quixotic ideals of society. The ubiquity of this conformity is demonstrated by its omnipresence as a theme in American literature. The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, along with Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, demonstrate how these perspectives of social mores are centered on the prevalence of the unrealistic views of normality. The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 features a fictional and futuristic firefighter named Guy Montag. As a firefighter, Montag does not put out fires. Instead, he starts them in order to burn books and, basically, knowledge to the human race. He does not have any second thoughts about his responsibility until he meets seventeen-year-old Clarisse McClellan. She reveals many wonders of the world to Montag and causes him to rethink what he is doing in burning books. After his talks with her, the society’s obedience to the law that bans knowledge, thinking, and creativity also increasingly distresses him. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury shows conformity in the futuristic America through schooling, leisure, and fright.

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.

The focus of this paper will be to compare and contrast the works of two playwrights. The works that will be considered are Molière’s The Would-Be Gentleman and Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro. Both considered comedies, Moliere’s is a short play that tells the tale of Monsieur Jourdain, a tradesman who desires to become a gentleman. Beaumarchais’s play, second in the Figaro trilogy, follows the series of event prior to Figaro’s wedding. Figaro and his companions scheme to ensure that his marriage occurs smoothly. Furthermore, the plays are dated 100 years apart from each other, and they deal with the representation of social hierarchy, social mobility, and gender roles in various ways. With that in mind, they become good sources to compare and contrast the changes in society that occurred within those 100 years. This paper will compare both plays to examine how Molière further endorses the social values and ideas of his time, while Beaumarchais’s presents a shift in attitude towards those values and challenges them.

The usual Orwellian dystopia of a big-brother state and censorship is often compared with Fahrenheit 451’s content; however, I believe the two perspectives and purposes of George Orwell and Ray Bradbury to be very much different (as Bradbury states in the interview in the back of the book).I chose to write about the theme of conformity and individuality and what Bradbury was communicating through his characters regarding that topic. As a result of that choice, I have found Captain Beatty to be a perfect character to focus on in order to argue that: Although there may be arguments stating that the society Bradbury depicts is one of mindless collectivism, Captain Beatty’s interactions with Montag and the holistic behaviour of the people illustrate the dangers of a highly individualized society devoid of positive conformity. The source of this textual analysis will be the book, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

The comparative study of texts and their appropriations reflect the context and values of their times, demonstrating how context plays a significant role. Virginia Woolf’s novel modernists Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Steven Daldry’s post modernists film The Hours (2002), an extrapolation, explore the rapid change of social and philosophical paradigms of the 20th century, focusing on women whose rich inner lives are juxtaposed with their outer lives. They place the characters in their respective context, to respond to, the horrors of the consequences of war and AIDS and the vagaries and difficulties of relationships, sexuality and mental illness. Through their differing intertextual perspectives the film and novel represent similar values, within different contextual concerns.

The ongoing relationship between the literary movements of modernism and post-modernism is encompassed by the intertextual relationships between Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”. These relationships communicate the inadequacy of previous writings to convey trauma, cultural crisis and the deep fragmentation within their respective societies. The immediate context of these social dialogues creates a clear division between each text, however the intertextual similarities between minor and major characters create an effective parallel to traverse decades, years, months and days. This is in order to assess the lasting impacts of society on an individual’s desire to escape either physically or metaphorically.

Katherine Mansfield’s short story, Miss Brill, is a well-written story of an elderly, unmarried woman in Europe. In Miss Brill, Katherine Mansfield uses stream-of-consciousness point of view to show alienation and loneliness, appearances and reality, and Miss Brill’s perceptions as she attempts to make herself fit in with the park goers. Miss Brill is an older lady who makes a living teaching English to school children and reading newspapers to an “old invalid gentleman” (Wilson 2: 139). Her joy in life comes in her visits to the park on Sunday where she is notorious for “sitting in on other people’s lives” (Wilson 2: 140). It is there that her ritualistic, monotonous journey that Miss Brill refers to as a “play” takes place.

Before the 20th Century, literature was pretty straightforward; the narrators were reliable, the timelines were linear, and the perspective was clear, but then somebody got the idea to mix it up. This is how we got books such as The Great Gatsby and one of our class texts, Orlando. For some, this was a startling and uncomfortable transition from what used to be considered the, “normal” format which was very up front in terms of structure and voice. Others found it to be more exciting and, while it was still weird and unsettling for those people, it forced people to think more about what the books were trying to communicate, instead of just being handed the message; they had to work for it. This has become one of the leading reasons that societies are encouraged to read; if you read a book that forces you to think, your mind becomes stronger and this promotes an increase in intelligence and creativity.

A social totality is not a concept born of mere delicate measure but of a grand scheme of aspects - of mixed languages and customs in a society or the social and economic class and the way those two intertwine. One of the best ways of defining a concept is to understand what it is not, or in a story, the characters that do not define it. Stories such as Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and “The Garden Party” by Katherine Mansfield both define the borders of the social totalities of their worlds by writing clear characters – Emma Bovary and Laura – that do not belong within that social realm. When stuck in their respective worlds that they grow up in, Emma and Laura believe they understand life because they know their places in the familiarity of what they have always known, but when they become exposed to that breach of their individual worlds, their knowledge is expanded to that of a social totality beyond what they knew. They no longer understand how to fit into their worlds because they do not relate to any of it, leaving them with a sense of discomfort and loneliness, longing for something more.

The genre of comedy, throughout the history of dramatic art has always served to not only entertain audiences, but to make them aware of their own individual flaws, or flaws that exist in society. (Weitz, E.) Comedy has no precise definition, and its boundaries are broad. One function of comedy however has remained the same - to hold up a mirror to the society of the time but through pleasure, inviting audiences to reflect and also providing amusement. Set in the late nineteenth century, the play An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde (1895) epitomises comedy, as both a literary and dramatic genre. Wilde was masterful in his ability to combine aspects of evolved comedic traditions and dramatic conventions to critique Victorian society. Drawing on characteristics of Greek and Roman tragicomedy, the choices in the play’s plot involves elements of tragedy as well as scenes that serve as comic relief and give the audience a sense of finality through a happy resolution. (Bureman, L) Focussing on the upper class stratum, Wilde employs a comedy of manners Molière style, of the Restoration Period in the seventeenth century in the play by combining forms of comedy with aspects of realist drama. The portrayal of archetypal figures such as Lady Chiltern and Lord Goring satirize rigid moral value of the time and expose their hypocrisies, through dialogue involving irony, wit and humour. Elements of farce and disguises characterized by ‘commedia dell’arte’, a form of comedy first developed in

Postmodern literature depicts the degradation of human psyche and the struggle of the man to find his identity after destruction that the World War II caused to the humanity. The war ruined the human values and every human being had lost the sense of moral and immoral. Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot belong to the postmodern literary category that showcase in the most comic and tragic way the pessimistic vision of humanity struggling vainly to find a purpose in their existence. Vladimir and Estragon, Ben and Gus are the hopeless and anxious victims of the war who are controlled from unknown authorities. In this context, the ability to communicate with each other, to take decisions for themselves and to

Waiting for Godot, written by Samuel Beckett, is a tragicomedy about two men waiting for a person or thing named Godot. The play entitles two contrasting pairs of characters, Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky. These sets of characters differ greatly and they create effect of humanity. The main difference between the pair’s relationships would be their dependency on each other, their level of compatibility, and their development throughout the play. Furthermore, both