Ulysses Embroidered : Re Envisioning And Un Envisioning Myth

Anne Sexton was a junior-college dropout who, inspired by emotional distress, became a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize as well as three honorary doctorates. Her poems usually dealt with intensely personal, often feminist, subject matter due to her tortured relationships with gender roles and the place of women in society. The movies, women’s magazines and even some women’s schools supported the notion that decent women took naturally to homemaking and mothering (Schulman). Like others of her generation, Sexton was frustrated by this fixed feminine role society was encouraging. Her poem “Cinderella” is an example of her views, and it also introduces a new topic of how out of touch with reality fairy tales often are. In “Cinderella”, Anne Sexton uses tone and symbolism to portray her attitude towards traditional gender roles and the unrealistic life of fairy tales.

Despite the differences in context, a comparative study of the poetry of John Donne and Margaret Edson’s play, ‘W;t’, is essential for a more complete understanding of the values and ideas presented in ‘W;t’. Discuss this with close reference to both texts.

‘The Historical Notes’ highlights that Offred’s story of patriarchal attitudes which does not only exist in the past, it threatens the future as well through Professor Piexioto’s dismissal of Offred as a figure belonging to a vanished past and his sexist attitudes. ‘The Historical Notes’ highlights the fact that the objectification of women has a cyclical nature as ‘The Future’ dehumanises and objectifies women, just like ‘The Republic of Gilead’. This is evident through the use of puns, where Professor Pieixoto compares Professor Crescent Moon, the ‘Arctic Chair’, to an ‘Arctic Char.’ The word ‘Char’ is slang for a domestic servant, once again highlighting the dehumanisation of women. The reference of Professor Crescent Moon to the ‘Arctic Char’ fish, belittles the female gender and emphasises the notion of consumption, the recurring idea that women are food, which is continuously used throughout the novel. Furthermore, the ‘laughter’ that follows, exemplifies the fact that sexism is funny and acceptable. Additionally, The Handmaid’s Tale’s ‘homage to the great Geoffrey Chaucer’ who wrote The Canterbury Tales trivialises Offred’s story and undermines the female authorship, thus accentuating the imposition of the male voice. Moreover, this ‘reconstruction’ of her story by men silences the female voice and removes Offred’s authority over her own life story by rending it in a gesture similar to Gilead’s suppression of a woman’s identity. This deconstruction of her story in such a scientific manner sanitises the importance of connecting emotionally to Offred’s story as well as silences the female voice by the dominating male gaze. Therefore, it is evident that through the use of her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood is attempting to warn us against female subjugation in a patriarchal

The themes of loneliness, exile and escape from reality are important aspects that characterize the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. During the 1800s, these aspects differentiated him from other Victorian poets, distinguishing him as one of the most popular poets of the Victorian era. In Tennyson's poems Mariana, and The Lady of Shalott, the artists express loneliness in their isolation from the rest of the world. The following essay will compare and contrast the displays of temporary and permanent loneliness of these artists through Tennyson's use of imagery, repetition, and word painting.

As a senior revising and expanding this essay, I realized how much I have grown as a writer and a student of literature. When I began revising, I realized that the focus of the paper needed to be narrowed and focused more on the play Arcadia, in which Thomasina is the exception to the types of women characters stereotypically

Both the ‘Odyssey’ and ‘1001 Nights’ feature male protagonists who traverse the seas, and the concepts and themes of men seafaring is common throughout most canonical texts. For example, the allusion of Odysseus’ difficult journey is made when a minor male character in Apuleius’ ‘The Golden Ass’ describes his seafaring adventures as being ‘positively Ulyssian’ (‘Ulyssian’ thus being a reference the Roman naming of Odysseus) (pg 29). Furthermore, both texts share themes, such as: seafaring, the supernatural, trials and tribulations, tradition, belief systems, and the geographical setting and pride in the protagonist’s home city play a key role to the overarching plots of the texts in the sense of the protagonist’s endurance and motivation to both leave and return home. Likewise, the supernatural is used to further the plot of both texts.

In the books Candide, The Glass Menagerie, Their Eyes were Watching God, and My Name is Asher Lev written by Voltaire, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, and Chaim Potok, they are all discernibly different stories, yet they all appear to share the common theme of perseverance in varying degrees to find that happiness is not always awaiting them. I have found that the various symbolic language combined with each author’s different style of writing not only makes each story unique, but they also affect each reader’s perceptions.

Since it was originally written in the 8th century, The Odyssey by Homer has served as inspiration to many writers and artists, who tell the story of the lost king of Ithaca, Odysseus. In Book 21 of The Odyssey “The Contest with Odysseus’ Bow”, Penelope, Odysseus’ Wife, decides that her beloved Odysseus will not return and therefore sets up a contest for the suitors to decide who her future husband will be. One portrayal of this contest is in O’Grady’s poem “The Test of the Bow” where the poet describes the act of Odysseus stringing and shooting the bow. Although Book 21 of The Odyssey by Homer and O’Grady’s poem “The Test of the Bow” express similarities in characterization, they differ in diction and tone.

The stories found in Greek mythology are often the subjects of both visual and literary works. The myth of Penelope and Odysseus and their eventful marriage is one such story. Penelope is the daughter of Icarius and Periboea and the wife of Odysseus. Odysseus was sent to fight in the Trojan War the day his son was born. After the war, he angered the gods by not thanking them, so he was lost at sea for ten years after the war while trying to get back to Ithaca. Their son, Telemachus, helps her protect their house from the suitors who are trying to take Odysseus’s throne. In the painting Penelope and the Suitors, John Williams Waterhouse uses the scene where Penelope is being harassed by the suitors to show that she is irritated with the

Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles re-tells the classic tale of The Iliad through the romantic relationship highly speculated between Achilles and Patroclus. In a diachronic approach to historical queer narratives, I will analyze queer identities and representation within literature with an emphasis on contemporary queer narratives. Queer narratives are especially important stories to perpetuate and recognize both historically and contemporarily, as they impose, perpetuate, or upset notions of normalcy. The Song of Achilles solidifies historical queer identities and experiences that have otherwise been absent, overlooked, or erased in the Iliad (and other historical texts). Accurate queer representation is important for understanding the historical past, giving voice, visibility, and validation to queer identities, and recreating identity in the present.

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s, The Coming of Arthur is a long poem that explains a fragment of King Arthurs journey to becoming the king of Cameliard. In this writing the author takes scenes that may require a long description and sums them up in under ten lines, while scenes that need less detailed descriptions are explained in over twenty lines. An example of this would be the stanzas where Arthur and Guinevere get married. These stanzas could easily be summed into ten or less lines but Tennyson decides to take care with his words in this scene and explain all he can. The reason the wedding scene is so heavily descripted is because it is a representation of how far Cameiliard has come and a celebration of its strong beginning. This idea can be explored through events that caused the wedding, the significance of the wedding scene, its hidden symbols in the text and its foreshadowing to a great reign.

An interesting stylistic feature of the story was how it was not written in chronological order. It drifts back and forth from after Lavender’s death to before he was killed, to memories of Martha, to poetic relevant interruptions of lists and weights of the objects and emotions that they carried as soldiers and as

Beautiful women, a hero on a journey, and an enchanting spell that lure men to their death are only a few of the ways Homer, Atwood, and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” entice readers into their works. These stories have so much alike, but they are also very sundry. The three texts emphasize certain things, have the omission of other ideas, and also change some parts of the articles around.

After Ulysses was published, many people thought that Molly was a prostitute because of her sexual frankness, but with time her thoughts were appreciated by her nuance. The problem then came with the arisen of the feminist criticism in the 1970’s, the debate started again. This is known as a big feminist moment in literature, but the truth is that, as some critics point out, sex and how we are seen by men is not the only thing women think at night, it may be in our thoughts, but it is not the only single thing.

While Browning emphasizes on rhyme, Tennyson focuses on the thoughts of the old and retired pirate, Ulysses. He uses words more to convey the message than to follow grammatical rules. He also uses simple words to describe the profound contrast of his retirement to his kingdom, distanced from the adventurous life he once lived. Thus, the structure uses a mixture of flashback and foreshadowing – Ulysses life during the Trojan War, and his son’s life after his (Ulysses’) demise.