Bluebeard

Seamus Heaney’s Blackberry-Picking describes the speaker’s pastoral memories of blackberry-picking, a yearly ritual beginning in the late August. Using a slew of rhetorical devices such as allusion and imagery, Heaney captures the innocence of the speaker’s past self, and innovatively mirror the process of growing up through the duality of two voices throughout the poem. A song of innocence and experience, Heaney presents a third-person perspective on the blossoming of blackberries, before…

identified by Aarne-Thompson-Uther’s (ATU) classification system in tale type A955. Here, the ATU system is used for ease in locating similar tales, rather than a rigid adherence to ATU’s criteria, and is supplemented by Maria Tartar’s grouping of “Bluebeard,” “Fitcher’s Bird,” and “The Robber Bridegroom” variations in The Classic Fairy Tales. ATU has located two prominent variants of the tale: the aforementioned “The Robber Bridegroom” by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales and…

to act in ways he wouldn’t have if he wasn’t so desperate for food. In additional to his hunger for physical food, Wright also hungered for knowledge and literature. This is first exemplified when he begged Ella, who was schoolteacher, to read Bluebeard and His Seven Wives to him. Throughout his entire life, Wright always wanted to learn more, and he had a very keen interest in literature. In fact, Wright even states, “Not to know the end of the tale filled me with a sense of emptiness, loss.…

The Marquis, as he removes his jacket, asks for the keys, finds the bloodstain on the key to the forbidden room, rebukes the girl for her transgression, imprints her forehead with a heart-shaped bloodstain from the key and pronounces her death sentence—Decapitation. He orders her to take bath, put on her white dress and the red choker, and wait in the music room for his telephone call. As she reaches the music room, she finds that though all the servants were given a holiday by the Marquis, the…

Mary Wollstonecraft argues that myths such as the Fall and Prometheus are designed ‘to persuade us that we are naturally inclined to evil’. Discuss this claim in relation to two texts from the course. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ both discuss the nature of evil and whether or not ‘we are naturally inclined’ to it. These two texts both agree and disagree with Mary Wollstonecraft’s claim in various ways. The following essay will explore how these texts…

Cornish author and playwright, Daphne DuMaurier wrote and published one of the most critically acclaimed gothic romance fictional work, namely Rebecca in 1938. The literature classic received quite a jubilant reaction from the public, and thus the novella was a jaunty success among female readers. Nevertheless, criticisms arise among the society due to works’ indisputable disparity to another novella whom has exhibited a tendency towards gothic romance that precedes back to 100 years prior;…

The Courtship of Mr. Lyon and The Bloody Chamber are both based on fairy tales written by Angela Carter. Both of these stories are thought to be inspired by author Charles Perrault’s writings Beauty and the Beast and also Bluebeard. Both fairy tales have similar plots, the usual “good feeling” plots, where a girl is on a mission to find her true love and encounters many men not fit for her along the way and also other trials and tribulations to eventually get to that one knight in shining armor…

the berries were ripe, it then introduces dark words to describe the blackberries, such as “summer’s blood was in it” and “our palms as sticky as Bluebeard’s” create a suspenseful atmosphere. His inclusion of the reference to the sticky hands of Bluebeard (who killed his wives in a fairy tale) creates morbid imagery of blood and hints at the disappointment to come in the following stanza. The second stanza shows the loss of innocence for the speaker and his friends, who can finally see the…

Kurt Vonnegut was academically proficient; he completed his preliminary education from short ridge High School in Indianapolis in 1940. Then he went to Cornell University, where he studied biology and chemistry as a major subject. At Short ridge High, Vonnegut wrote for the students paper, The Echo and he continued his interest in journalism at Cornell, becoming the Managing Editor of the student paper, The Sun. Vonnegut writings are crisp and he is known for his declarative style, much like…

In Black Boy, Richard Wright outlines his own suffering through cruel and abusive treatment by his family and others. He faces physical and emotional hunger which motivates him to make a better life for himself. The novel becomes an examination of the idea of an imaginative escape and how that idea can keep a person practical. Richard Wright’s Black Boy illustrates that using literature as an imaginative escape, even if it’s a false reality, allows Richard to deal with his emotions and make…