In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen skillfully combined the Cinderella theme with the fairy tale of the abandoned princess. Cinderella Fanny was brought up by an unworthy father, but without losing her natural goodness and gentleness. Fanny’s good qualities were in stark contrast to her shabby and dirty home in Puss. In Austen’s first several novels, the heroine’s moral standard is always higher than the traditional social concept, so that she can marry a good man. It is a reward for their good qualities, or compensation for their troubles and sufferings, and such heroines themselves are the yardstick of good judgment and good feelings. But Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, succumbed to the virtues of those around her, such as Sir Thomas, the only father of Austen’s novels to be praised, and Edmund.
Fanny sought the traditional virtues of good manners and religious feeling, and she became an ardent supporter of the traditional moral standards. The book also catered to the praise of many traditionalist critics at the time. In the novel, Austen used the gentle words and deeds of Fanny to express her moral educator’s idea that moral perfection is difficult to achieve and needs to be achieved at the cost of self-restraint and sacrifice. The female voice is required to be static, so her eyes become the most effective agent. Because in the spiritual life of England in the 19th century, the moral sense was very strong. The church and its moral precepts, which dominated people’s lives, evoked not a desire to save souls but a sense of duty.
Therefore, in Mansfield Park, Austen strictly rejected the vigorous spirit of the immoral Mary Crawford, and blindly affirmed the weakness of the holy Fanny who believed in Christianity. This strange and abnormal likes and dislikes are the core of the intention of this novel. Austen made this frightened little daughter from a poor family conquer all people with virtue and finally became the mistress of Mansfield Manor. It shows holiness and greatness, emphasizes the close connection between happiness and virtue, and firmly believes that a good person has the right to develop and fulfill herself according to her own nature and good deeds.
In this novel, through the different treatment of Bennett’s five daughters to life events, Austen shows the different attitudes of the girls from bourgeois families in the villages to marriage and love, thus reflecting the author’s own views on marriage. It is wrong to marry for property, money and status. It would also be foolish to marry without considering these factors. Therefore, she was against marrying for money and against treating marriage as a joke. She emphasized the importance of the ideal marriage, and made the feelings of both the man and the woman the cornerstone of the ideal marriage. Elizabeth, the heroine of the book, was born in a family of small landowners and loved by Darcy, the son of a rich man. Darcy, regardless of family and wealth gap, proposed to her, but was rejected. Elizabeth hated his arrogance.
Darcy’s hubris is actually a reflection of status differences. As long as such pride existed, he and Elizabeth could not have the same thoughts and feelings, and the ideal marriage. Later, Elizabeth observed Darcy’s behavior and a series of actions with her own eyes, especially saw that he had changed his proud and conceited manner in the past, eliminated his misunderstanding and prejudice, and thus concluded a happy marriage with him. Elizabeth’s different attitudes towards Darcy’s two marriage proposals actually reflect women’s pursuit of personality independence and equal rights. This is the progressive significance of the figure of Elizabeth.
From the novel, Elizabeth is intelligent, resourceful, courageous, visionary, has a strong self-esteem, and is good at thinking. Just because of this quality, she has an independent mind on the issue of love, making her and Darcy constitute a happy family. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen also writes about the marriages of Elizabeth’s sisters and girlfriends, which serve as a foil to the heroine’s ideal marriage. For example, although Charlotte and Collins live a comfortable material life after marriage, but there is no love between them. This kind of marriage is actually a social tragedy under the cloak of finery.
An evil mother tries to force her daughter into a harmful marriage. Mrs. Susan was selfish, cruel and manipulative. She abused her children, betrayed her friends, and threw her weight around in horrible ways. Her original marriage plot fails, and Jane Austen fails to punish her for the shame and self-knowledge that the reader expects until the end of the novel. This may be because she is a bit of a fan of this deceitful and dour-headed character herself. After all, Lady Susan wielded power primarily to destroy other people’s homes and to try to torture her own daughter. In this work, Austen seems to divide herself into two parts. On the one hand, she delightedly displays the vital energy of a gifted, Bohemian lady, while at the same time rejecting the sexiness and selfish desires of her heroine’s story.
Mrs. Susan hopes to find another school for her daughter unless she gets married soon. Sympathetic Aunt Catherine had no idea of Mrs. Susan’s intentions, but she suspected that Frederica had had other reasons for dropping out of school than, as her mother claimed, an impatient attempt to escape the teacher’s education. And she believes that if you neglect early education, it will be difficult for children to make up for it when they grow up. Frederica stayed. She had a piano to play, but her aunt seldom heard her play. Similarly, there are many books in her room. But, she says, as a girl who has been running wild for the past 15 years, she can’t read them and won’t. Of course, what she said might be true, and Jane would probably agree with that. However, in this novel, Jane Austen’s purpose is not to talk about educational theory, but to expose the cruelty and hypocrisy of Lady Susan.
From the perspectives of Mrs. Susan, Mrs. Vernon, Mrs. Johnson, Master Reginald and other protagonists, the novel reveals the characters’ relations and ugliness, good and evil, and embodies the writing characteristics of the coexistence of multiple morality and the echo of narrators and their voices.
Austen made a highly realistic discussion of women’s issues at that time. She examines the heroines in the patriarchal society at that time. In that society, the value of a person is based on the ownership of property. Since generations of property went to male heirs, they were at a disadvantage from the start and could only be subordinated to men. As a result, these types of characters appear again and again in Austen’s writings: the assertive father; a mother who is obsessed with her social status and does everything possible to marry off her daughter, well-equipped young men, whose cynicism reflects their superior social position, and marriageable daughters, from the elegant headless girl to the sensible or emotional young woman.
How can a heroine achieve personal happiness through marriage in such a stern, demanding and often hostile world? Austen’s admonition was to use reason to control emotion She argues that emotions are often a dangerous guide to female behaviour. If a man of superior condition, but not of unrequited affections, is to be wooed, the consequences are often disastrous. Either because of his personal preference or because of parental disapproval, the man chooses a better match. These views of Austen are most evident in this first novel. The whole beginning of Sense and Sensibility revolved around the question of fortune in Dashwood’s will, and the want of avarice of Mrs. John Dashwood, who had an annual income of ten thousand pounds.
In the process of dividing up the estate, Austen makes no bones about the opposite characteristics of the two Dashwood sisters. Elinor was a very sensible, calm woman who, though only nineteen, was a good mother’s adviser. She was wonderfully kind and affectionate, but she knew how to hold back her feelings. It was a subject which her mother had yet to learn, and which one of her sisters had stubbornly refused to learn. Her sister Marianne’s talent was in many respects equal to her sister’s. She was inordinate in sorrow or joy. All is well but no discretion. That is to say, Marianne allowed her feelings to dominate her actions, while Elinor would not be swayed by such impulses.
Austen’s intention is very clear. She simply changed the original title of Elinor and Marianne to Sense and Sensibility to emphasize her theme. In this book, Austen shows the contrast between the characters of the two sisters. She narrates most of the stories from the perspective of Elinor’s outlook on life, ethics and social society, thus shaping a reasonable mortal. This is her ideal woman. When they learned that Willoughby had made full use of his superior social position, played with Marianne’s earnest love, abandoned the poor girl Eliza, and finally married the rich Miss Gray, Marianne was fully convinced of her folly, and her mother admitted that her admiration of Willoughby had been imprudent. Reason thus prevailed in both sisters. Austen arranged a happy ending for them. The book begins with comedy, and there is a disturbance in the middle. Marian almost becomes a tragedy, which ends in comedy.
In the Appalachian town of Seville, Tennessee, a 27-year-old young man named Ballard is deprived of his property by the town government for not paying property taxes. He is forced to retreat to the wilderness and gradually degenerates into a pathological killer and necrophiliac. Ballard is an Appalachian native, an oddity to outsiders, an outlier to the local community. After a fire, Ballard went to live in a cave, taking on an increasingly primitive look. He is losing his house, his reputation, his social ties, and his life. Modern civilization gradually retreated backward into the wilderness, to the edge of the world, and finally there was no way back. How does a person become progressively deprived? How could a naked life exist without anything? He was determined to go on, for there was no way back, and the world was as lovely as any other day, but he was riding his mule to death. Child of God is Cormac McCarthy’s third novel, written in a sober, everyday style about murder and mysterious nature. The short, concise and thick sentences are interlaced with long, grotesque sentences, with rich southern Gothic flavor and dark romantic color. Under McCarthy’s indifferent and compassionate eyes, young Ballard’s lonely life was like a cruel and moving wilderness epic, with the exiles singing silently from beginning to end.
The story takes place in the town of Rio Grande river, west Texas, USA, on the border with Mexico in 1980. A penniless former Vietnam war veteran, Llewelyn Moss, came across several dead bodies, a huge amount of heroin and a large amount of cash used to trade drugs while hunting. The dead were gangsters who had been shot in a firefight. Llewelyn immediately decided to leave the scene of the gun drug trafficking money to take home to hide. During the night, the nervous Llewelyn returned to the trading site. So far, sinister gang leader sends out cold-blooded killer Anton Chigurh, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, and Llewelyn launched the killing journey that pursues each other.
Moss gets in trouble for his lust for money, and his experience is representative of the universal human desire, and the constant pain and fear that comes with it. He reflects the good and evil side of human nature. The ending of the characters gives the world a lot of inspiration. People living in today can’t escape the temptation, who also have to face the temptation. Moss’s tragedy is undoubtedly a wake-up call for those who walk on the edge of desire. The most steadfast self-control is a powerful weapon against temptation. Temptation is the test of personal world outlook, outlook on life, values, moral character and other internal comprehensive quality, among which the most important one is virtue.
In the same circumstances, it is virtue that plays the fundamental role in why some people are able to survive and others are willing to perish. Therefore, in today’s society, everyone should strive to improve personal cultivation and self-protection awareness. At the same time, tempering desire is also key in the face of temptation. From the perspective of behavioral science, desire is a double-edged sword, reasonable and moderate desire is the basic psychological motivation to promote the development of social economy. The unrestrained selfish desire and evil thoughts will make people lose the true, the good and the beautiful and become the prisoners of material desire, and even become the root of evil.
The novel No Country for Old Men shows the dark side of American society, such as blood, violence and crime, attacks the anti-civilization phenomenon of excessive material desire and moral decay under the specific social and historical background, and expresses the sense of helplessness through the absence of heroes. Many Americans do not believe in heroes and worship money, indicating that they think money can bring them more security in life. Neither government nor personal heroes can be trusted. However, the author McCarthy still hopes to express his yearning for the peaceful and tranquil past of American society through allegorical novels, as well as his expectation of energetic heroes who can save human lives and souls.
Joyce started out as a poet. Chamber Music was his first work. Critics seem to have reached a final conclusion on it, such as the traditionality of the whole poem, traditional meter and rhyme, traditional image structure and so on. The musicality of the poetry is also widely talked about by critics. This was due to Joyce’s musical. According to the poet himself, every poem can be put to music. The style of the poem follows the romantic style of the 19th century, but it is not without sentimentality. There is also the integrity of the content, that is, the evolution of love and the journey of the soul, two threads that go hand in hand, complement each other, and constitute the emotional tone of the whole collection. And the poetry is stylistically very different from Joyce’s novels such as Ulysses. It is not unreasonable to point out that there is only one voice throughout the thirty-six poems.
For in the reader’s ears the hero is always pouring out his heart to his sweetheart, from infatuation, marriage proposals, happy conjunctions, to a change of heart, treachery, and, at last, solitary and drifting away. But we don’t hear the hero’s voice at the beginning, which would be too abrupt and leave the reader wondering if the hero is lyrically barking up the wrong tree. In other words, a stage should be set for the protagonist to perform first. Chamber Music is about the love story and mind journey of the hero, mainly told by his voice. In other words, the emotional experience between the male protagonist and the heroine is presented to the reader through the consciousness of the hero, that is, the dramatic expression of the emotional experience between them.
James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish writer and poet. He was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and one of the founders of postmodern literature. His works and stream of consciousness had a great influence on the world of literature. He has lived in Paris since 1920. He moved from place to place throughout Europe, teaching English and writing for a living. In his later years, he suffered from eye diseases and nearly lost his sight. His works are complex in structure, peculiar in language and highly original. His main work is a collection of short stories called Dubliners (1914), which describes the daily life of lower citizens and shows the destruction of people’s ideals and hopes by social environment.The autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) describes the psychology of the characters and the world around them with a large number of inner monologues. The masterpiece novel Ulysses (1922) shows the loneliness and pessimism of people in modern society. In his later work, the full-length novel Finnegan’s Wake (1939) borrows the dream to express the ultimate thinking on human existence and destiny, and the language is extremely difficult to understand.
James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland, on February 2, 1882. His father had a strong faith in nationalism and his mother was a devout Catholic. When Joyce was born, the beautiful island nation of Ireland was a British colony, plagued by war and poverty. He had a large family of younger brothers and sisters, but his father favored the talented eldest son and gave him money to buy foreign books, whether the family had enough to eat or not. He grew up at the Catholic church school. Joyce is the youngest of the students. His academic performance is outstanding, and he initially shows extraordinary literary talent. Since the 19th century, the Irish Renaissance movement formed in Dublin with Yeats, Lady Gregory and Singer as the center, and he received the influence directly. Through friends, he was also influenced by the Irish National Independence movement. But what influenced him even more strongly was the emergence of liberal ideas in European literature at the end of the 19th century. Before he graduated from high school, he became suspicious of religion.
In 1898 Joyce entered University College Dublin, where he specialised in philosophy and language. On January 20, 1900, delivered a speech at the Literary and Historical Society of the College on the topic of Drama and Life. On April 1, the Half Moon Review, an English literary magazine, published his review of Ibsen’s work When We Dead Awaken(1899). This article was praised by Ibsen, who was over seventy years old, which encouraged Joyce and strengthened his determination to embark on a literary career. In October 1901, he wrote a self-published essay, The Noisy Times, criticizing the narrow nationalism of Irish theatrical houses.Joyce graduated from University College Dublin in June 1902 with a Bachelor’s degree in Modern Languages. On October 2, he enrolled in classes at St. Cecilia’s Medical School. However, he only studied here until the beginning of November when he gave up his studies due to financial difficulties.
Joyce’s literary career began in 1904 with a collection of short stories called Dubliners. In a letter to Richards, the publisher, he made it clear that the principle of its creation was to write its own chapter in the moral and spiritual history of our country. This, in fact, became his lifelong literary pursuit. In Joyce’s eyes, Dublin was the centre of paralysis in Ireland, a hopeless country under the double oppression and stranglehold of the British Empire and the Catholic Church. In this city at all times there are numbness, depression, reduced act of living drama. Araby, a short story from Dubliners, reveals the charm of the author’s writing and the beauty of his stream-of-consciousness style novels. At the end of July 1906 he went to Rome as a bank correspondent. Since April 1906, the problem of rewriting a collection of short stories called Dubliners has gone back and forth with Richards. A refusal of publication was received on 30 September.
James Joyce began his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Dublin in 1908 and finished it in Trieste, Italy, in 1914, which lasted for 10 years. The novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has a strong autobiographical color. Through the story of Stephen Dedalus, Joyce actually raises the issue of the relationship between artists and society and life. Stephen Dedalus himself was exactly what he was trying to escape from the world of Dublin, which had taken its revenge on rebellious young artists. Ulysses, a novel written in 1922, borrowed the framework of the Ancient Greek epic, The Odyssey and compared it to character Bloom wandering in Dublin for 18 hours a day as opposed to Odysseus’s 10 years of wandering on the sea, giving Ulysses a generality of modern epic. Through the life of these three people in one day, the novel shows their whole history, their whole spiritual life and their inner world incisively and vividly.
Finnegan’s Wake, a novel published in 1939, borrows the idea of the world circulating in four different social forms from the Italian ideologist Vico in the 18th century, and develops a complex content within this framework. The book is a metaphor for the Bible, Shakespeare, ancient religion, modern history, Dublin local chronicles and so on. It borrows a lot of foreign words and even makes up its own words. Through exaggerated association, it describes the history of Ireland and even the whole mankind and the movement of the whole universe. In addition to the above three works, Joyce also wrote the poetry anthology Chamber Music and the play Exiles.
For Ishaan, an 8-year-old boy, the world is a kaleidoscope of surprise and happiness. He is communicating with this strange world in every way he can think of, and at the same time fully enjoying the generous gifts of the earth. However, this Ishaan is a problem child in the eyes of adults. His grades are poor, he is low in the class, and his mind is full of all kinds of weird and evil ideas. After he makes another disaster, his parents send him to boarding school. Ishaan’s new life doesn’t change much, but inside, he’s unhappy about being separated from his parents, when an art teacher named Ram Shankar Nikumbh comes into his life. Different from the rigid teachers we have seen in the past, Ram Shankar Nikumbh advocates that students should retain their own personality and ideas and develop freely.
By exaggerating social order and school rules, Taare Zameen Par shows the audience that each child has his or her own unique talent and is a role that cannot be replaced by others. We can see from the film that every child has something to offer until we find it. Through the example of Ishaan, the film Taare Zameen Par illustrates that the important role played by parents in the education process determines that parents should pay more attention to the real psychological needs of children. Taare Zameen Par directed and performed by Indian superstar Aamir Khan takes a plain approach and lets people listen to the beautiful songs, plus the animation full of children’s interest, allowing the audience to enter the dyslexia world of the young boy Ishaan. With the eyes of the little boy Ishaan, Aamir Khan looks at the deficiencies in the education system, but he does not complain about the incompleteness of the system and the absence of parents in learning. Instead, he provides different thinking perspectives on family affection and education with sincere and inclusive writing.
According to Greek mythology, Athens paid Crete seven virgins every nine years. The children were put into the Minos maze and, no matter how they walked, they died of thirst or were eaten by Minotaur, the monster of the labyrinth. Joyce associated this myth with Finnegans Wake. Finnegans Wake is a maze like the Minos Maze. Joyce created the maze with his own rules, a game he played his own way, in which he no longer had to obey other people’s rules, nor care about their recognition or participation. Just as the fate of children lurks in the Minos labyrinth, so the Finnega’s Wake contains a prediction of the fate of mankind that others may not understand, but will happen as predicted. From this perspective, Finnegans Wake is both a Minos labyrinth and an Eden created by Joyce himself, and also a prophecy about the fate of mankind.
In fact, In Joyce’s mind, Finnegans Wake was a work on a level with the Bible and other human sacred texts that readers must read with awe and shame. Finnegans Wake talks about a letter that the hen is constantly digging. The hen searched all the winding world for a very large piece of writing paper just as the clock struck twelve. The sentence, if read in Joyce’s way of making puns, could also be interpreted as the hen searching through all the complicated polysemous words at the stroke of twelve, looking for a piece of writing paper as big as God. Joyce also makes repeated references to the 6th or 9th century Irish holy book, The Great Book of Gaelic, and the hen digs the letter in Finnegans Wake is a stylistic parody of The Great Book of Gaelic. Historically, The Great Book of Gaelic had been buried like the letter dug up by the hen to protect it from the invading Danes, and centuries later it had been excavated and worn like a letter.
The letter, The Great Book of Gaelic, and Finnegans Wake are the same thing in Joyce’s mind, and if the hen is looking for the letter in a winding world, the reader is looking for clues to the Wake in Joyce’s labyrinth of complex and polysemous words. If the ragged book of The Great Book of Gaelic requires the reverence and patience of posterity, Finnegans Wake demands that its readers devote their lives to a book written, albeit by a contemporary writer. Most notably, Joyce actually regarded his Finnegans Wake as the same holy book as The Great Book of Gaelic. It’s as sacred and profound as The Great Book of Gaelic, and the process of reading it is the same as the process of interpreting The Great Book of Gaelic, the process of interpreting scripture. In this way the reader can understand why Joyce employs such obscure language in Finnegans Wake: Finnegans Wake is Joyce’s use of enigmatic language and content to reveal the mysteries of human destiny like The Great Book of Gaelic.
Mission Viejo Library Teen Voice 