Katherine Mansfield The Fly

1. “It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.” In this quote the author is referring to the rose bush by the prison as being a symbol of the sweet moral lesson offered by Anne Hutchinson, a woman who preached to the Puritans without the male-dominated permission of the Puritan church. Like Hester Prynne, Anne was punished. She was sent to the prison. No matter how small an action is, the culture of a society can respond in rage, loathing disgust, even fear. It is behavior that is learned and passed on through religion and community. In colonial Puritan society people were socialized to be very strict and religious and to punish anyone who behaved in a way that was considered improper. Any kind of sin had an exaggerated evil in the Puritan’s eyes, especially ones regarding marriage and sex. Hester Prynne and Anne Hutchinson are both character representations of women who stood up for the rights of women to live their own lives in a strict society.

Puritans and reformers of seventeenth century England have been given a bad name for their part in history. This is primarily because they were working against the grain and trying to create change in world that saw change as a threat. The time period was turbulent and there was bound to be resistance in a world that was dominated by Catholics and those that had reformed to abide by their King’s law. The puritans of the time were considered extreme and rubbed people the wrong way because they wanted a world that abided by their morals and ethical codes. For this, they took the blame for the misery that many suffered during this age, but as we see in Fire from Heaven, this is not a fair assessment. The Puritans of this time wanted to improve the lives of the people and society as a whole through morality and purity.

Unlike animals, humans are able to observe past the mere monochromatic vision of survival. We have an impeccable ability to desire more than just living to breed, and breeding only to someday perish. Thus, we gradually brush this canvas with the colours of ethics, control, and knowledge. Whether the colours fade or become prominent through time, this canvas becomes our perception of normality and we allow it to justify our actions; favorable or harmful. We, as well as the narrator in the short story The Hunt by Josephine Donovan represent this. However, because of the narrator’s difference in perception, self-indulgence, and greed for power, the story introduces a feeling of infuriation to the reader.

What it did mention though – his “survivors” – served to arouse pity and mourning for his death. However, their statements only ironically reinforce Phil’s meaningless. His “ ‘dearly beloved’ eldest of the ‘dearly beloved’ ” child researched about his father the day before the funeral in a frantic and futile attempt to get to know him. Phil’s youngest child, his favorite, once said that “my father and I only board here,” distancing Phil away from him. Nobody, not even his children, cares about Phil, even on his deathbed. The final nail in the coffin is when his wife fails to “look [the company’s president] into the eye” and honors her husband’s death. Instead, she values preserving her relationship with the company president who will “straighten out the finances – the stock options and all that.” Phil leaves behind no legacy. His life, full of numbers, devoid of meaning, is just like every “company man” - and just like every “company man,” he will be

Dorothy Allison’s essay, Panacea, recalls the fond childhood memories about her favorite dish, gravy. Allison uses vivid imagery to cook up a warm feeling about family meals to those who may be a poor family or a young mother. Appeal to the senses shows this warm feeling, along with a peaceful diction.

I Knew a Woman is about a woman who has more than just beauty. Theodore Roethke explains what he sees in this woman and the joy and pain about loving her. Roethke uses a

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman, is the story of two very different cultures lacking understanding for one another leading to a tragedy due to cultural incompetence. Today in America there are very many different cultures. Health care providers need to be aware of cultural diversity and sensitivity when caring for patients. If a health care provider is not sensitive towards a patient’s culture it can cause a relationship of mistrust to form, lead to barriers in the plan of care, and increase health care cost. The current guidelines to promote cultural competence in the clinical setting include completing a cultural diversity self-assessment, identify the need of the population served, evaluate barriers in the community and practice, educate staff to cultural diversities, schedule longer appointments, clarify limitations, and identify alternatives offered (Cash & Glass, 2014).

This applied theory paper will analyze both the macro and micro analysis of the Novel, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman (Fadiman, 1997). In the book “The Spirit Catches You and Falls Down”, the character Lia illness resulted in a cultural divide between the Hmong culture and the American culture. Throughout this paper both the conflict theory and the family systems theory will be used to examine themes of behaviors among the characters in the text. The family and medical team use the applications of a number of different social work theories to navigate through her illness implementing a number of different strategies to nurse her to health. The author Fadiman explores the Lee’s family

The phases of life are described uniquely in the novel “Shirley.” At first glance, you don’t necessarily think that Charlotte Bronte is trying to describe life, but when you analyze it, it is a beautiful way of describing life and the changes that happen throughout it. Bronte uses personification, hyperboles, and a well written syntax and diction to describe these different phases.

In mocking the organization of a real eulogy, the publisher illustrates her negative attitude towards the death of the working man and the lack of remorse for his departure. The flow of thought in the composition reveals an impersonal tone, allowing characters to remain unimportant and nameless, which is in a satirical contrast to the true sense of loss usually presented by obituaries. Her structure mirrors the corporate mindset that every individual has an ‘expiration date’ - identifying the characters by their age - the “fifty-one-year-old deceased”, the“forty-eight-year-old widow”, and the “sixty-year-old company president” (Goodman line 32). This organization of the characters through numbers showcases the labor addict’s lack of importance to his company - bringing up a major societal problem within corporate America that only sees its workers as statistics. Goodman pokes fun at the sense of fondness and loss created by eulogies in order to reveal the insignificance of the man’s life to the business world - who care more about profits than the lives of their employees.

Holding Onto the Air an autobiography by Suzanne Farrell takes the reader backstage in the dramatic life of the world-renowned Balanchine ballerina. From her childhood in Cincinnati to her retirement from ballet in 1989, Farrell's story is truly a remarkable one. The book describes at length her time with the New York City Ballet as well as her complex relationship with the legendary Balanchine. Although Mrs. Farrell goes a bit too far into the ballet descriptions, her beautiful imagery allows reader to experience the joy of performing on stage.

In On The Run, Alice Goffman focuses on a particular group of young Black men living in a poor neighborhood, struggling to live a “good” and “fair” life. These boys from 6th street are segregated from resources that would be found in more economically advanced neighborhoods. A “resource” that they do run into more than often is over policing in their neighborhood. As they are disproportionately targeted for arrest to fill quotas, this constant behavior and events deemed as a norm (even little children play a game about cops catching and being overly aggressive to Black boys), hinders their process at advancing within American society. Systematic oppression against a minority group slows and puts racial tension progress at a standstill, as they are continued victims of larger forces. What truly works against them once locked up and released, is that they were not given a chance based on race, now it becomes based on race plus their criminal history. People in such situations are left with one option, in order for them to survive and provide for their families, they must do it through illegal activity. Locking people up and returning then into the same environment which had limited resources does nothing to solve larger powers at play. Laws and documents may exist that describe an “equal” and “fair” society, but without action, words seem to hold less value. The Declaration of Independence, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are both documents meant to symbolize

He overwhelms his son by taking control of his future and planning out his life. The boss’s plan for his son is to take over the business which gives the son no other choices or opportunities concerning his future. “Ever since his birth, the boss has worked at building up his business for him; it had no other meaning if it was not for the boy” (Mansfield 508). It seems as though the physical action of the boss smothering the fly is associated with the sufferings that his son has experienced. Both the boss’s son and the fly go through similar yet different forms of suffering throughout their lives. Interestingly, while the fly is struggling to live, the boss utters, “Come on, Look Sharp” (Mansfield 509), just as he would say to his suffering son. Both the fly and victims of wartime fighting (his son) are innocently killed by cruel forces over which they have no control (Schoenberg).

The women of the late sixties, although some are older than others, in Alice Walker’s fiction that exhibit the qualities of the developing, emergent model are greatly influenced through the era of the Civil Rights Movement. Motherhood is a major theme in modern women’s literature, which examines as a sacred, powerful, and spiritual component of the woman’s life. Alice Walker does not choose Southern black women to be her major protagonists only because she is one, but because she had discovered in the tradition and history they collectively experience an understanding of oppression that has been drawn from them a willingness to reject the principle and to hold what is difficult. Walker’s most developed character, Meridian, is a person

However, once more, “there interposed a Fly” (12), interrupting not only the silence but also the narrator’s mind which is trying to calm before the fear of death. This is because, the fly act as the last string the narrator can hold on to, or in other words, the last string that will connect the narrator and the world. With all her possessions assigned to others, the narrator does not own any physical possessions and she is also standing on the margin of losing her life. The sound of the fly buzzing and the sight of the fly flying around the room allow the narrator on the deathbed to know she is still alive and existing in the world as a human being. The fly, when seen from the positive or the optimistic point of view, can act as a symbol of hopefulness, for life existing in the same room with death can be interpreted as fly blocking and stopping the door of death from opening.