Benito Cereno Essay

Slavery means many different things to many different people; to some it may recall a past of unspeakable hardships and tribulations, while to others it may evoke mawkish memories of capitalist ventures and economic prosperity. One thing can be known for certain about slavery: its undeniable impact on the world’s economic growth through its capitalist exploitation of human lives. Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity explores the wide-reaching roots of the slave trade and examines the consequences and

Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the most important authors in the history of American literature and the genre of Romanticism or Dark Romanticism, due to his unique style of writing and his focus upon subjects of Puritan religion and the unknown. I consider Hawthorne an important author, due to the fact that he skillfully and accurately based his fictional writings upon happenings of colonial times, was one of the first authors to display unfortunate outcomes for his characters’ immoral choices according

Suicide in Bartleby and Life in the Iron Mills Life in the Iron Mills and Bartleby are centered on characters who are alienated laborers, looking for means through which they cannot be deprived of their humanity. Hugh Wolfe and Bartleby are both workers who have been victimized by the capitalistic system. As Karl Marx explains, the capitalistic system exploits the laborer and thus robs the laborer of his humanity through alienating the laborer. Both Wolfe and Bartleby become victims

Defiance of Gender-Based Work Ethics in Bartleby and The Yellow Wallpaper      The issue of gender was an influential factor for writers in the 19th century, as Herman Melville and Charlotte Perkins Gilman explore in their pieces. In "Bartleby," for instance, Herman Melville presents Bartleby as an employed scrivener-his service to the narrator is in the form of copying documents. This form of labor is appropriate for Bartleby according to 19th century society, which supported and approved

Herman Melville’s novels, with good reason, can be called masculine. Moby-Dick may, also with good reason, be called a man’s book and that Melville’s seafaring episode suggests a patriarchal, anti-feminine approach that adheres to the nineteenth century separation of genders. Value for masculinity in the nineteenth century America may have come from certain expected roles males were expected to fit in; I argue that its value comes from examining it not alone, but in relation to and in concomitance