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Differences and Similarities in The Odyssey and Inferno When going through the stories The Odyssey by Homer and Inferno by Dante, you get the feeling of how diverse, yet similar the two stories are. When reading The Odyssey, you find Ulysses trying to get home to his love, Penelope. He has been gone for twenty years, and through those years, he has struggled with good and evil, just like Dante in Inferno. Ulysses finds himself time after time fighting off gods and their children. Dante, struggling with good and evil, works his way through the nine levels of hell. He is struggling to find where his faithfulness lies. He also is trying to find his way to his love, Beatrice. When reading The Odyssey and Inferno, we find many similarities and differences, from the main characters characteristics, to the experiences within religion during Dante and Homer’s times. Ulysses, in The Odyssey, is the hero who has been trying to get home to his love, Penelope, and also his beloved country. He has found himself at war with many different gods and people, including Neptune, who is not yet ...

“My Life had stood †a Loaded Gun †” Feminist Analysis Essay

This poem was written by the American poet Emily Dickinson around the year 1863. It is probably one of the most complex of all Dickinson’s poems because it does not have a single coherent and satisfactory interpretation. This is due to the fact that it exemplifies her technique of the ‘omitted centre’, a device by which the author omits information that is crucial to the understanding of the poem. Nevertheless, the aim of the present paper is not to discuss the manifold possible interpretations of the poem. Its aim is rather to try to explain it or analyze it from a feminist point of view, highlighting how it gives an image of a woman different from the one people are used to, as well as how it inverts the gender roles but accepting them at the same time. The speaker starts by presenting herself as â€Å"a Loaded Gun†, that is as a mortal weapon capable of killing and destroying. This can be understood as the poet’s rejection of the traditional ideas and images about femininity, she is portraying herself as strong and potentially active in opposition to the common ideas of weakness and passivity associated with women. Later on, in the third stanza, she will compare herself to a volcano, turning the possibility of destruction – a contingent fact up until that point – into a reality. So now she is not only telling the reader that she can be active, dangerous, and destructive, but she is actually being it: the previous threat is now an event. This image of the volcano is even more important because it is a common one, used also by Emerson – one of her greatest influences – to refer to the poet. The difference is that whereas in Emerson’s essay The Poet it is a rather benignant image – this of the volcano – used to portray the poet as a power of nature; in Dickinson’s poem it is a burning and destructive force. With this change in the meaning or connotation of the metaphor, she may be telling us that creation, carried out by a woman, is at the same time an act of aggression. This idea is closely related to the reading many feminists have made of this poem, seeing it as an example of how power in a woman can be seen as a danger or even a threat. As for the gender roles one may argue that there is a contradiction in this poem. On the one hand she depicts herself as the active force in her relationship with her â€Å"Owner† and â€Å"Master†. She speaks â€Å"for Him†; she fights for him and defends him from Salceda 2 his foes. It is important to notice how in the fourth stanza she guards his head while he sleeps, thus preferring or putting her role as defender before her role as lover, i.e. her masculine role before of her feminine role. It is better to kill for him than to lay with him. In this poem she is the â€Å"knight in armor† while the male is, as to say, the â€Å"damsel in distress†. But on the other hand, the reader is told at the beginning that her â€Å"Life had stood – a Loaded Gun – / In Corners† until her â€Å"Owner passed† and â€Å"identified† her. That is, she had no identity of herself; she did not exist as an individual endowed with consciousness until he found her. It is also important to notice that the vocabulary used in the first stanza depicts her as an object. Therefore all her representations of herself as the leading figure in the poem, the strong one, the powerful one are, in some way, undermined by the fact that, at the beginning, she is just an object endowed with subjectivity by a real and pre-existent subject – the male character – who then becomes an object himself. The idea that her subjectivity is only one borrowed from him can be clearly seen in that, throughout the poem, her only goal is to defend him, to protect him form his foes who are at the same time hers. Nonetheless, this dependence on a male subject is, if not denied, at least overcome in the last stanza where the speaker presents herself as immortal. Thus, if she will live long before he has died, her existence must be independent of his. If the last part of my analysis seems confusing and even contradictory, it is because the poem itself, as it has already been said at the beginning, is confusing and even contradictory. To sum up I would like to say that, from my point of view, the important point about this poem is how Dickinson’s attempt to break up with the traditional ideas of womanhood and gender roles, since it is based upon the traditional opposition between femininity/masculinity, passivity/activity, object/subject, proves itself in some way â€Å"futile†. One may notice that she is not defending femininity, or trying to posit it higher or at the same level than masculinity, but what she is doing is taking a male position. This may explain why she takes her identity from a man. She is opposing the fact that being a woman entails being passive and defenseless, but at the same time she is saying that her aggressive character appeared only after a man identified her. So, she is not pulling down the differences or the hierarchy existing between male and female, but interchanging the roles. Nevertheless, one should not think that Dickinson’s poem is a failure – from a feminist point of view –, but on the contrary it is a success, since she manages to highlight the difficulty, or even impossibility, of writing at the same time Salceda 3 from and against a preestablished language and a system of thought, which are the very bases of the discrimination of women.

Compare/Contrast Essay Brother Dear and The Charmer

Compare/Contrast Essay The Canadian short stories â€Å"Brother Dear† by Bernice Friesen and â€Å"The Charmer† written by Budge Wilson focus on the struggles and common conflicts between parents and their children during adolescence. Both stories are told in the younger sister’s point of view and show how everyone matures and gains independence throughout and at the end of the story. Friesen and Wilson’s short stories over all focus mainly on the theme of dysfunctional families; which can be represented through the characters, symbolism, and conflict in the stories. Both parts of the family: the parents and the children, play a part in what is considered a ‘dysfunctional family’. In the story â€Å"Brother Dear† the son Greg is expected to stay and†¦show more content†¦Considering how lenient the father was with Zack and allowing him to get away with so much and forgiving him all the time, even if he had expectations for Zack that he didn’t go through with, he probably would’ve used his charm to get out of the situation. The short stories â€Å"Brother Dear† and â€Å"The Charmer† contain symbolism that represents the theme of dysfunctional families. In â€Å"Brother Dear†, when Greg returns home he has garbage bags of laundry with him. The garbage bags could symbolize the fact that Greg has returned home to tell his parents that he didn’t make it to the final exam and he isn’t continuing his schooling, which could be referred to as his garbage that he is dumping off or emptying at his house. In â€Å"The Charmer† Zack’s mother calls him a â€Å"real devil† (Viewpoints 103). â€Å"Devils are considered fallen angels, and can often fool you for a very long time† (Viewpoints 103). So Zack is considered a devil because of how he wrongfully fools his family all of the time to get what he wants, and because he has addictions to gambl ing and drinking. When Greg in â€Å"Brother Dear† is caught flaring his nostrils when Sharlene asks him if he has a girlfriend, Sharlene stays that he is â€Å"hiding something† (Viewpoints 28) when he flares his nostrils. This could symbolize the fact that not only is he hiding something about his relationship status, but he is hiding the truth about how he didn’t make it