Elizabeth Gaskell

Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House is a realistic problem play set in the late 1870s in Norway. It is a story about a typical middle-class family of the time of the play dealing with marriage and gender inequality. In Norway in the 1870s, the women grow up and go straight from living with their parents, to being married to someone who is financially stable. Also, the women did not have any real duties or power other than to please their husbands and have children. The family the play focuses on…

Imagine that you are reading a romance novel and never felt the sharp pang of love lost, how would readers like you react to the overall quality of the novel? Authors and directors utilise various literary devices and techniques in order to evoke emotional responses within their readers or viewers. The goal of evocation is to manipulate the audience’s emotion in order to evoke certain responses and reactions. Writers may utilise a character as a focal character who expresses feelings and…

Realism is a literary movement in the nineteenth century and is used in literary works to depict real life of this world that we are living in. When an author uses realism in his writing, all aspects of the works are taken into account; the characters, the setting as well as the themes should portraying the reality of this life. The protagonist in the realist works usually is from common people and is dealing with the same thing as the people at that particular era are dealing with, for instance…

The Power of False Narratives Throughout literature, and even in our own lives, we are poisoned by the false narratives and stories that corrupt our minds and control our decisions. This is the driving force in Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Our protagonist, Scout Finch, makes decisions and forms opinions based on stories she hears that simply aren’t true. This is prevalent among various other major and minor characters in the novel as well. They are also extremely commonplace in…

Word Versus Word Logic can be defined as deductions made from reasoning in line with strong principles of validity. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a good man named John Proctor who is living in an unreasonable society tries to do what he can to save his wife who has been arrested for witchcraft. During the trials, the people of Salem fail to use basic logic and reason regarding guilt, evidence, and the way the executions are carried out during the trials, ultimately leading to an obstruction…

It is astonishing how two completely different characters from two completely different books can be, at the same time, so similar to one another. Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby and Jane Wellington from Uprising are girls who were raised with wealth in their family and grew up with proper techniques that separated them from those who were not as privileged as they were. Although these characters share many similarities within their lifestyle, multiple differences come in place for…

and how the main character Elizabeth Bennet challenged these expectations. Marrying for love, instead of money and convenience, was simply unheard of during this period and that was exactly what Elizabeth strived to do. After meeting Mr. Darcy, an exceedingly proud man, Elizabeth was forced to face her own prejudices against his aristocratic wealth and upbringing. Additionally, Mr. Darcy had to battle with his prideful nature and the opinion he formed against Elizabeth because of her family’s…

Key interactions between characters other than Mrs. Danvers and Mrs. de Winter provide excellent evidence both for the unreliability of Mrs. de Winter’s perspective and a deeper relationship between Rebecca and Mrs. de Danvers. When Beatrice and Mrs. de Winter discuss the relationship between Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca, instead of the usual tension, viewers learn that Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca came to Manderley together and that she “simply adored” Rebecca. This phrasing is particularly important,…

Victorian Era Legal systems and their follies- Close Reading of The Case of Eliza Fenning The Case of Eliza Fenning contests the concreteness of the judicial system during the Victorian era, her guilt would be argued for years after her sentence of guilt and thus her death. This lead to the case that the judicial system needed to be improved, as well as doctors and forensic science. In the text, when John Marshall arrived he automatically constituted Eliza’s illness was due to her eating some of…

The Jersey Devil Myth “History books are filled with the names and dates and events which shaped our world.” (House). Myths are tales that help man to understand and explain their unnatural or suspicious experiences on Earth. The Jersey Devil’s history includes a mother with a drunkard husband getting pregnant for the third time; she curses her unlucky thirteenth son by saying let this one be the devil and later forgets about the curse. When the baby was born it transformed and killed its…