Edith Wharton

Darius Smith 11 October 2015 English 242 Instructor Bonds Sinking Into Quicksand Edith Wharton's “The Quicksand” is full of symbols and meanings, but two stand out particularly well in the story: the name of the newspaper, the Radiator and the title of the story itself. The newspaper's name was likely chosen because of the definition of the word radiator. A radiator transfers heat or cold, but usually heat, from one space to another. As explained in the story, Mrs. Quentin's husband (Alan's…

Running on Empty Ethan Palmer is a teenager living in Halifax, Nova Scotia with his father and sister. The death of his mother has caused Ethan’s personality to significantly change and resulted in him struggling throughout high school. To cope with his mother’s death, Ethan uses his passion for muscle cars to escape his reality and suppress his feelings of anger. Throughout the story, Ethan has several confrontations with his father regarding the direction of his life, crashes his car and…

retreats from life into a vision. He escapes his reality to enjoy a few blissful moments in his dream, but never acts to make that dream come true. Harmon Gow says, “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away”(Wharton 6). While having every reason to leave Starkfield and his querulous wife, the man doesn’t. Ethan’s moral and social values combined with his indecisiveness cause him to retreat from life into a vision. Ethan retreats into his vision to escape…

Edith Wharton’s life showed that she was very happy but no one ever knew what happened behind closed doors. The Age of Innocence truly portrays her marriage and how unhappy she was. Her books were very inspirational to other individuals and made an enormous impact on other’s individual lives. Edith Wharton said this very inspirational quote, “I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you 've been doing. It 's a hundred years since we 've met-it may be another hundred before we…

In the essay Pierce uses numerous rhetorical devices and uses them at the right time to make the essay more effective with a condescending diction and a long and involved syntax, which also helped set the conversational tone and serious mood. This essay had numerous rhetorical devices throughout the essay, in fact there is a rhetorical device in the first line, “Once upon a time” (Pierce, Line 1), this is cliche as “Once upon a time” is very used and familiar phase and the reader knows that it…

O Pioneers and Ethan Frome are two classic, exciting novels. Even though the two plots of these stories aren’t much alike, the have similarities so often, it’s eerie. From the cold, harsh winter that the stories take place in, to the fact that they were written 2 years apart (1911 - 1913). These stories were not meant to relate at all, but the more you read, the more similarities you may find throughout both books. I find it funny that the similarities are not more recognised in the reading…

An interesting problem in John Green’s Paper Towns is Man vs. the public. While Margo has disappeared Quentin tries to find her using various clues she has left behind. Before Margo disappears they both go and seek revenge on Margo’s “friends” that night is when Quentin thinks he has seen the “true” Margo. Quentin finds the reference paper towns. He finds out that paper towns can mean an undeveloped subdivision. He finds a subdivision in the area and finds clues that she has been there. He ends…

In Edith Wharton’s novel, The Age of Innocence, Irony is a perpetual theme and appears in many aspects of the plot. The novel is presented through the point of view of an omniscient unnamed narrator, and describes a story of old New York’s reactions to scandal and contradiction. In a society where aristocrat families influence the city, and the powerful dictate the social classes, the idea of innocence is not illustrated. Throughout the first few chapters of the story the narrator makes ironic…

Wharton establishes patterns of imagery by using figurative language — language meant to be taken figuratively as well as literally. In Ethan Frome, Wharton's descriptive imagery is one of the most important features of her simple and efficient prose style. Her descriptions serve a definite stylistic and structural purpose. The figurative language used by Wharton includes metaphors and similes. Metaphors compare two unlike things without using words of comparison. For example, in the beginning…

A well-known novel Age of Innocence is known for its gripping love story, but another gripping feature about the novel is the cover. Looking at the 1920 first edition dust cover of the novel, it informs the reader that the novels author is Edith Wharton. Turning a few pages into the actual novel there is a page informing the readers of: the publisher (D.Appleton and company), publication date (1920) and the country the novel was first published in (United States). All this information gives the…