The Deterioration Of The Ramsay's Summer Home

Learning that Hugh has not been home yet, Deborah rushes off to the mill with food for him, her fatigue vanished in the face of her desire to care for Hugh. It soon becomes even more apparent to infer from Deborah’s “painful eagerness” to please him that she is in love with Hugh (8). In these opening pages we see not only Deborah’s affection for Hugh, but that this affection is merited: for we see also Hugh’s gentle nature as he does what he can to protect Janey and to care for Deborah by sending her to sleep on the warm iron ash until he can take her home at the end of his shift (8). Yet, as Deborah watches Hugh work, she acknowledges that “in spite of all his kindness, . . . there was that in her face and form which made him loathe the sight of her. . . . [D]own under all the vileness and coarseness of his life, there was a groping passion for whatever was beautiful and pure” (9). The initial use of Deborah as a focal character, then, allows the revelation of Hugh as a kind human being who is loved by those to whom he shows kindness; it also establishes his artistic love of beauty and thus strengthens the effect of his kindness to the hunchbacked Deborah.

The last literary device Eugenia Collier exercises to deepen her sensation  of despair and disgrace is diction. Collier influences her words to carve her emotions into the reader, one can sense the feelings of puzzlement and the irascibleness it evokes. For instance, in this quote the reader can grasp Eugenia’s voice through her use of eloquent words “ I indeed lost my mind, for all the smoldering emotions of that summer swelled in me and burst - the great need for my mother who was never there, the hopelessness of our poverty and degradation, the bewilderment of being neither child nor woman and yet both at once, the fear unleashed by my father’s tears. And theses feelings combined in one great impulse toward destruction.” This quotes reveals the emotions the author choice to seal

The Ramsey Summer House remains abandoned during those ten years, decaying slowly, groaning and weeping as it remembers the tenants it once possessed and the movements they made “how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again” (Woolf 1927, 339). The house bore witness to every breath and every argument; it absorbed fluttering eyelashes, clapped hands, and footsteps; drowned in laughter and in tears; the house was enraptured by the Ramsey’s and remembers them fondly as their images haunt its halls (Wisker 2011, 6).

Moreover, the fluidity, represented by the thoughts of the characters, is enhanced by the form of the novel: Mrs Dalloway is not divided into chapters; thus, it does not leave behind a sense of completeness. It is largely intertwined with the narration of Clarissa and that of the other characters and the action largely takes place in the mind. This is presented in form of free indirect discourse: the narrative conveys the thoughts of the selected character. This leaves the readers with an impressionistic story. To demonstrate how different characters bring about unequal messages, here is an illustration from the work: when Clarissa is strolling the streets of London, she and Septimus both see the same car. The vehicle leads them to different thoughts: for Septimus it is seeing in it the power of the modern world, which “was about to burst into flames” (13) or rather the oppressive relationship of technology and war, which ultimately leads to his suicide. He is bound by the internal, his suffering thoughts cannot help but to be captured in the memories of the World War I he fought in. For Clarissa, hearing the noise of the car provokes her to think she has heard “a pistol shot in the street” (12) (which later turns out to be true). By using such a form of representation, Woolf points to the invisible connections of people in a dehumanised, yet technology-bound, world, which create between them a form of interaction that serves as compensation for what Septimus (and

Richardson explains how this confusion was relevant of the historical and cultural context of Austen’s era. Both the Gothic and the sentimental genres were regularly criticised for influencing readers to project fictional elements into real life. As Richardson explains, the Gothic was singled out for condemnation through its ‘thematics of female constraint and persecution and its fictive indulgence in forbidden lusts and passions, and the sentimental novel, with its ideal or ‘romantic’ picture of life and its over-valuation of erotic love as the key to female happiness (Richardson 2005:399). This projection is reflected in Northanger Abbey when Catherine is invited to Northanger Abbey: ‘Northanger Abbey! These were thrilling words, and wound up Catherine’s feelings to the highest point of ecstasy’ ( Austen pp.99-100). The use of ‘ecstasy’ reflects Catherine’s excessive personality and self-transcendence. Catherine’s gothic idealist vision of the abbey and her pursuit of pleasure, signifies her lack of self-directedness in which she dismisses her own control of life and puts herself in the position of the gothic heroine as portrayed in her reading of Radcliffe’s ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’. The prominent role of ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ in Northanger Abbey is highly symbolic in representing Austen’s concerns of the excesses of sensibility and the gothic and how they can distort the reader’s interpretation of life. Barker-Benfield (p.111) highlights how ‘Radcliffe’s Mysteries typically hinted at its apparent dangers but continued to convey its tenets. And no one could prevent readers from identifying with figures the author intended as warnings against sensibility’s ‘excesses’.

Throughout his journey, romantic endeavours cause Ramsay guilt, which he deals with to remain sane and happy. While in Britain, he meets a woman whom he loves, but must abandon, moving on and dealing with the

In which way is sympathy measured? Do we consciously decide who we evoke pity for? Or is it subconscious in which once emphasizes with another being. “Be Careful. Later on you’ll have to decide what sympathy they deserve” (1). Barbara Kingsolver begins the novel “The Poisonwood Bible” by warning the reader to be weary of the sympathy the Price family warrants. The opening of a novel is a handshake, the author’s first impression on us as a reader, and in the opening lines of Poisonwood Bible Kingsolver is quick to grasp the reader's attention. The first interaction is loaded with foreshadowing, symbolism and a dark, brooding tone. Quite similarly the ending of a novel is the author’s goodbye, and provides the reader closure, or lack thereof within a novel. Kingsolver escorts the reader out of the life of the Price family with closure and reassuring. Ruth May echo’s Orleanna in the beginning to leave the reader with erie closure.

Mark Strand’s poem, “Poor North” depicts the life of a married couple facing countless struggles during a harsh winter. It tells of a man working in an unsuccessful store while his wife sits at home, wishing for her old life back. The way the wife copes with her sadness is both intriguing and perplexing. She misses her old life, even though it is described to have not been special; however, the wife may be a person who never feels satisfied or fulfilled by the external world due to internal conflict. Despite the wife’s obvious misery, she stays by her husband’s side and they stroll in the cold together, bracing the wind. As a means of escape from life, she peers into her past in order to find hope in the present.

The narrator comes to the House to aid his dying friend, Roderick Usher. As he arrives at the House he comes upon an “aura of vacancy and decay… creating a pathologically depressive mood” (Cook). The state of the House is daunting to the narrator – he describes it with such features as “bleak walls”, “eye-like windows”, “rank sedges”, “decayed trees”, and “an utter depression of the soul”. These images foreshadow a less than pleasant future for the narrator and his dear friend Roderick. Poe continues to foreshadow the narrators turn of events with a description of the House’s “dark” and “comfortless” furniture. The House becomes a living hell for the narrator as he watches Roderick’s condition evolve and struggles to understand the mystery tying unfortunate events together. However, as the narrator gradually becomes more enveloped in Roderick and the House’s malady, he seems to develop a malady of his own. While the narrator’s illness is less prominent than that of Roderick and his sister Lady Madeline, the sicknesses are one in the same.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall contains one of the earliest examples of marital abuse written in the Victorian Era. It prominently displays women being abused, separated from society and their subsequent solitude. The author, Anne Brontë, did not shy away from certain ‘taboo’ topics, like alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and sexual assault and has been criticised for it, even by her own sister Charlotte. Domestic violence has been around for many years and yet it was, and still is, treated as a forbidden subject that should be handled quietly and without causing a commotion. Anne Brontë does not ignore these issues. She gives a clear look at how someone can change overtime and how the effects of alcohol are not to be taken lightly. The Tenant

The novel Wuthering Heights and the poem “Remembrance”, both written by Emily Brontë, feature protagonists who must cope with the death of their lovers, and in many ways, the two characters are similarly affected by this. The actions and feelings of Heathcliff in the last chapter in Wuthering Heights, however, stand in sharp contrast to the last stanza of “Remembrance”. This contrast demonstrates the personal differences of the characters and how they were affected differently by their losses. Heathcliff, the protagonist of Wuthering Heights, and the speaker of “Remembrance” have different views on love (both before and after death). Consequently, while Heathcliff embraces death in the final chapter to be with his love, the speaker of “Remembrances” learns to stop dwelling in the past.

Austen has set out to save the rising art form of the novel. In this address to the reader she glorifies what a novel should be: the unrestrained expression of words conveying the wide range of raw human emotion. This veneration of the novel is necessary to the development of Catherine's fiction-loving character as it justifies the narrator's right to remain fond of this flawed heroine.

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is essentially the “coming of age” story of Catherine Morland, a sympathetic yet naïve young girl who spends some time away from home at the impressionable age of seventeen. As Catherine matures in the town of Bath and at Northanger Abbey, she learns to forgo immature childhood fantasies in favor of the solid realities of adult life, thus separating falsehood from truth. This theme is expressed in a couple of ways, most obviously when Catherine’s infatuation with Gothic novels causes her to nearly ruin her relationship with Henry Tilney: her imagination finally goes too far, and she wrongly suspects General Tilney of murdering his late wife. The theme is less apparent

Woolf in Time Passes lets Mrs Ramsey slip away in her sleep, gives Prue Ramsey a wedding, then tears her from the novel screaming and bloody as she dies while giving birth, and obliterates Andrew Ramsey in the barracks of France during World War One (Groover 2014, 223). The Ramsey Summer House remains abandoned during those ten years, decaying slowly, groaning and weeping as it remembers the tenants it once possessed and the movements they made “how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again” (Woolf 1927, 339). The house bore witness to every breath and every argument; it absorbed fluttering eyelashes, clapped hands, and footsteps; drowned in laughter and in tears; the house was enraptured by the Ramsey’s and remembers them fondly as their images haunt its halls (Wisker 2011, 6).

There are several possible stresses in Woolf’s life that may be contributing to her depression. One is the stress and isolation Woolf feels living in the suburb of Richmond. Although her husband states that they made to move in an attempt to relieve Woolf’s depression, Woolf herself states that if given the choice between Richmond and death, she would choose death. Another possible stressor in Woolf’s life is the task of writing a novel. Yet another stressor could be difficulties in Woolf’s interpersonal relationships. Woolf expresses that “even crazy people like to be asked [to parties].” Whether Woolf’s interpersonal difficulties contribute to her depression or are a result of it is unclear, however. An additional stressor may be the incestuous relationship Woolf has with her sister. We may not speculate upon a history of abuse in Woolf’s childhood but the nature of Woolf’s relationship with her sister goes against cultural norms of acceptable sexual behaviour at the time, being both incestuous and homosexual. In addition, although some people may not feel distressed at the existence of extramarital feelings for someone, many do. This abnormal relationship may be distressing to