Jude The Obscure

Hello, I'm Emisha Ravani. Writing this blog as response to the thinking activity for the text ' Jude The Obscure' about prominent female characters. 

Sue Bridehead

Sue Bridehead remains a pretty tough nut to crack: even her creator, Thomas Hardy himself questions what, exactly, her deal is.

In Hardy's "Postscript" to the first novel of Jude the Obscure, he quotes a German critic describing Sue as the 'first delineation in fiction of the woman who was coming into notice in the thousands every year – the woman of the Feminist movement…the "bachelor' girl."' In other words, this German critic claims that Sue is the first representation of a new social type of woman becoming more and more common: the unmarried feminist.

In response, here is what Hardy had to say: 'No doubt there can be more in a book than the author consciously puts there.' (Hardy, "Preface to the First Edition")

In other words, it is not that Hardy disagrees with the German critic exactly. Hardy just wasn't intending to present Sue as the first representation in fiction of a feminist. There is more to Sue than even Hardy quite expected—which is a good thing, right? Sue takes on a life of her own in the novel, beyond the strict intentions of her author.

Hardy, like Sue, had some controversial ideas about the institution of marriage, which he uses Sue to voice throughout the novel. However, Sue's complex, frustrating, emotional responses to her relationships with Jude and Phillotson make her much more than a mere mouthpiece for Thomas Hardy to express his social criticism.

Wait, Never Mind About Who—What is Sue Bridehead, Exactly?

One of the most intriguing things about Sue is that she is often described as being like something other than a woman: 'She was not exactly a tomboy, you know, but she could do things that only boys could do, as a rule' . Already, we get the sense that Sue is supposed to stand out among the other women in the novel, that there is something not stereotypically feminine about her.

But beyond whether or not Sue seems womanly by the standards of her time, we find it even more striking that she sometimes appears almost other than human: 'you spirit, you disembodied creature, you dear, sweet tantalizing phantom – hardly flesh at all' . 

Jude's description of Sue in this passage makes her sound like a fantasy, a dream woman. And let's be honest, if this were a fantasy novel, Sue would totally be an elf: beautiful, otherworldly, and distant. What is more, Sue's elf qualities go deeper than her appearance: she also seems to be a shape-shifter when it comes to decisions and emotions.

One minute, Sue wholeheartedly feels one way, and in the next, she completely changes her mind. The best examples of Sue's sudden contradictions probably come from her letters throughout the novel—take, for example, the end of Part Third, Chapter Nine, when Sue absolutely forbids Jude to visit her again. That is, until Part Third, Chapter Ten, when she sends him a letter inviting him to come by. We sometimes get whiplash from Sue's abrupt about-faces.

A Woman Ahead of Her Time

We may not always agree with Sue Bridehead's decisions, but no matter what we may think of her, we have to agree that she is a lady way ahead of her time. Her insight into the ways that marriage will change over the twentieth century is almost dead on—even though she (and Hardy through Sue) are speaking in 1896, before the twentieth century even begins:

I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done ignorantly! I daresay it happens to a lot of women; only they submit, and I kick….When people of a certain later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!' 

In other words, Sue believes that women should be allowed to undo marriages that are clearly mistakes. She's also sure that lots of women feel this way, only they don't say so and Sue does. Unfortunately for Sue, she lives in the late nineteenth century, and the rules of her social environment won't let her live as she wants.

And here's where the social criticism comes in: Hardy clearly sees it as a problem that Sue isn't supposed to get a divorce, and once she does, that she isn't supposed to be happy again with another man outside the bonds of marriage. Jude the Obscure presents a strong argument against the waste and heartbreak that bad marriages can cause, in both women and men.

(By the way, when it comes to bad marriages, Hardy was no peach: his first wife Emma actually kept a diary about all of his flaws as the two of them grew further and further apart.)

We could argue that Sue's tragedy goes beyond the horrifying death of her children. The true tragedy comes in the end, when she entirely changes who she is.

Sue embraces the same rigid religious views that she criticized when she was younger and trying to build her life with Jude. She chooses to pursue a sexual relationship with Phillotson, even though she absolutely does not want to and he does not ask it of her. In the end, guilt forces Sue to transform herself into all of the things she most seemed to hate in her earlier life. Even though she may survive the end of the novel, she's no longer the Sue Bridehead we have come to know and Jude has come to love—and if that's not tragedy, we don't know what is.

Arabella Donn

They Call me a Schemer…

Whew. Arabella is a piece of work. She is so selfish, thoughtless, and manipulative that it's hard to take her seriously as a character in some ways—she's like a cartoon villain or something. Like, if this were a romantic comedy, she'd be Rachael McAdams from Mean Girls. Of course, this isn't a romantic comedy (again, it doesn't get much less funny than Jude the Obscure), so Arabella's behavior gets a lot worse than backstabbing and prom antics.

Arabella tricks Jude into marrying her…twice. In fact, it is almost impossible at times to know when—if ever—Arabella is telling the truth. After all, this is a woman who fakes the dimples on her cheeks:

As the girl drew nearer to it, she gave, without Jude perceiving it, an adroit little suck to the interior of each of her cheeks in succession, by which she brought as by magic upon its smooth rotund surface a perfect dimple.

How are we supposed to trust someone who deliberately lures Jude in with false dimples?

In the end, Arabella plays an enormous role in Jude's and Sue's downfall. She cares nothing about the consequences of her actions, and she cares about no one other than herself. As Jude lies dying, Arabella is already hitting on another man to take his place, and when she finds Jude dead she just leaves him there so she can go to a boat race.

Still, we have to give Arabella credit for one thing: all of her actions in the novel are despicable and deceitful. But she does understand people and the way the world works about a thousand times better than Jude and Sue do. As Jude and Sue crumble, Arabella is just the same as she ever was at the end of the novel. Hardy uses Arabella to suggest that social conventions can destroy idealistic, good people like Jude and Sue—but they can positively benefit hateful schemers like Arabella.

Keep in mind that Hardy gives her the last line of the book. And she uses her last word to take one last bit of glee in Sue's misery while at Jude's funeral. Talk about cold-blooded:

'She's never found peace since she left his arms, and never will again till she's as he is now!' 

Break, Break Break by Lord Tennyson

Summary of Break, Break, Break

In the first lines of the poem the speaker addresses the waves, a technique known as anaphora, he tells them to continue crashing against the shore while also meditating on his deeper thoughts. He wishes that he could express how he’s feeling. While he looks over the water he sees a fisherman’s son yelling and a young sailor singing—life is going on all around him. 

The speaker also notices some larger boats sailing and considers, imaginatively, that they are headed to a better world. Unfortunately, all of these sights can’t distract him from the pain he’s feeling. The poem concludes with a repetition of the first lines and an expression that he’s never going to feel past happiness again. 

Structure of Break, Break, Break

‘Break, Break, Break’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson is a four stanza poem that is separated into sets of four lines, known as quatrains. These quatrains do not follow a strict rhyme scheme but there are some good examples of perfect rhymes, such as “Sea” and “me” in stanza one. In regards to the meter, there are various patterns that change throughout the poem. There are many instances of trimeter, although the stresses change locations, there are other lines with more or fewer syllables. 

Literary Devices in Break, Break, Break

Tennyson makes use of several literary devices in ‘Break, Break, Break’. These include but are not limited to repetition, juxtaposition, and enjambment. The first of these, repetition, is clearly sen through the use of the refrain “Break, break, break” in line one of the first stanza and fourth stanza. It helps create a strong rhythm to the lines, one that mimics the movement of the waves. 

Juxtaposition is seen through the contrast of different experiences. For example, the speaker is in a deep and un-abating depression which is quite different from the sailing who is singing “on the bay” or the ships that he images are going to a better land. 

Enjambment is a commonly used technique that can be seen in this poem in the transition between lines three and four of the first stanza as well as lines one and two of the third stanza.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was an English poet writing during the Victorian period (i.e., during the reign of Queen Victoria, or 1837-1901). Tennyson was one of the most popular poets of his period and was named poet laureate in 1850, after the death of William Wordsworth. He was also given a title and a position in the nobility because of his awesomeness as a poet – "Lord" isn't his middle name; it's his aristocratic title. When he was born, he was plain old Alfred Tennyson. Tennyson deserves props for being a poet – and an incredibly popular one – during a time when the novel was the genre of choice for most people. We often call the Victorian period the "golden age of the novel," and yet here's Tennyson, producing some of the most beautiful poetry ever written in English.

So what made Tennyson so popular? Well, he wrote about a lot of things that are common to everyone: love, loss, grief, and death. You know that old saying, "It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all"? It's not really an "old saying," it's a line from one of Tennyson's most famous poems, In Memoriam. Many of his poems seemed to resonate with readers – people found what he said to seem so universal that lines like this one got taken out of context and repeated until they started to sound cliché.

Tennyson was also interested in some of the major questions of the day – new scientific ideas were being discussed, including Darwin's new-fangled theory of evolution (Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859). Tennyson's interest in science, history, mythology, and social progress – all important topics of debate in Victorian England – is often apparent in his poetry. In other words, there's something in it for everyone, from Queen Victoria herself to the scullery maids who worked in the palace kitchens to us modern readers.

"Break, Break, Break" is a short, sad, lyric poem in which the speaker mourns the loss of a friend or lover, and imagines that everyone has someone to love but him. Sad, right? Well, Tennyson really did lose a friend, and a lot of his sad poetry is about coming to terms with his grief.

Tennyson's best friend from college, Arthur Henry Hallam, died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage while traveling in Vienna in September of 1833. Hallam was engaged to be married to Tennyson's sister, so the whole family felt the loss. Tennyson took years to get over it, composing what some people consider is greatest work, In Memoriam A.H.H., in memory of his friend (the initials A.H.H. obviously stand for Hallam's name). In Memoriam was published in 1850, but Tennyson had been working on it for seventeen years – ever since Hallam died. "Break, Break, Break" was published in 1842, but was written in 1834, only a short time after Hallam's death. Even though Tennyson doesn't come out and say it, it seems like a pretty safe bet that the "vanish'd hand" that the speaker is mourning is Hallam. 

Tennyson wrote ‘Break, Break, Break’ in 1835 and published in 1842. It is often considered to be an elegiac lament for his deceased friend, Arther Hallam (for whom ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ was written).  In ‘Break, Break, Break’, Tennyson delves into themes of death, the power of nature, and change. 

Analysis of Break, Break, Break

Stanza One 

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

In the first stanza of ‘Break, Break, Break’ the speaker begins by talking directly to the waves. This is a technique known as anaphora. He speaks to them although they are unable to respond. The speaker directs them to continue breaking powerfully against the “cold gray stones” of the shore. They hold a gloomy power that speaks to his emotional state at that time. He wishes, in lines three and four, that he could get his tongue to “utter / The thoughts” that are haunting him. He has thus far been unable to express his emotional state. It is too complex, or perhaps too dark, for him to find the words. 

Stanza Two 

O, well for the fisherman’s boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!

O, well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay!

In the second stanza, there is a good example of anaphora with the repetition of “O, well for the” at the start of linesmen and three. This phrase introduces the two different experiences that he sees around him. The “fisherman’s boy,” his “sister” and the “sailor lad” are all experiencing the sea differently than he is. These are good examples of juxtaposition, especially the young man who is singing “on the bay”. He’s finding joy in his life and the ability to express his emotions. 

Stanza Three 

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill

But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still!

In the third stanza of ‘Break, Break, Break,’ the speaker takes note of “stately ships” that are sailing off into the distance. They too are living differently than he is. He hopes that they are going to a new land, somewhere sorrow can’t touch. But, the lovely sight of the ships doesn’t keep the speaker’s mind occupied for long. He is quickly brought back to the experiencing of touching a “vanish’d hand”. Tennyson might have been thinking of the hand of Arthur Hallam, his deceased friend. The voice that is now lost also comes to his mind. It appears that no matter what the speaker does, he can’t escape the memories of the person he lost. 

 

Stanza Four 

Break, break, break

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me.

The fourths stanza begins with the repetition of the line “Break, break, break” which began the poem. He tells the waves again to break against the shore at the “foot of thy crags”. Tennyson used an exclamation point at the end of line two in order to emphasize his, or his speaker’s, passion. 

Despite the power of the waves, the damage they do, or the sights that he sees around him, he can’t get back to the “grace of a day” that happened before his close friend died. Things are different now and that time “Will never come back to [him]”. 

assignment 5

The Renaissance Period

Name: Emisha Ravani

paper: 105 A, History of English Literature - From 1350 to 1909

Roll no: 07

Enrollment no : 4069206420210031

Email id: emisharavani3459@gmail.com

Batch : 2021-2023(M.A sem 1) 

Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

The Renaissance Period

The Renaissance was a period of "rebirth" in arts, science and European society. It was a time of transition from the ancient world to the modern.

The Renaissance typically refers to a period in European history approximately between 1400 and 1600. Many historians assert that it started earlier or ended later, depending on the country. It bridged the periods of the Middle Ages and modern history, and, depending on the country, overlaps with the Early Modern, Elizabethan and Restoration periods. The Renaissance is most closely associated with Italy, where it began in the 14thcentury, though countries such as Germany, England and France went through many of the same cultural changes and phenomena. 

Many historians, including U.K.-based historian and writer Robert Wilde, prefer to think of the Renaissance as primarily an intellectual and cultural movement rather than a historical period. Wilde said that interpreting the Renaissance as a time period, though convenient for historians, "masks the long roots of the Renaissance."

Renaissance" comes from the French word for "rebirth." According to the City University of New York at Brooklyn, intense interest in and learning about classical antiquity was "reborn" after the Middle Ages, in which classical philosophy was largely ignored or forgotten. Renaissance thinkers considered the Middle Ages to have been a period of cultural decline. They sought to revitalize their culture through re-emphasizing classical texts and philosophies. They expanded and interpreted them, creating their own style of art, philosophy and scientific inquiry. Some major developments of the Renaissance include astronomy, humanist philosophy, the printing press, vernacular language in writing, painting and sculpture technique, world exploration and, in the late Renaissance, Shakespeare's works.

The term Renaissance was not commonly used to refer to the period until the 19thcentury, when Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt popularized it in his classic, "The Civilization of Renaissance Italy." 

Historical development

Contrary to popular belief, classical texts and knowledge never completely vanished from Europe during the Middle Ages. Charles Homer Haskins wrote in "The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century" that there were three main periods that saw resurgences in the art and philosophy of antiquity: the Carolingian Renaissance, which occurred during the reign of Charlemagne, the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (eighth and ninth centuries), the Ottonian Renaissance, which developed during the reigns of emperors Otto I, Otto II and Otto III (10thcentury) and the 12thCentury Renaissance. 

The 12thCentury Renaissance was especially influential on the later Renaissance, said Wilde. Classical Latin texts and Greek science and philosophy began to be revived on a larger scale, and early versions of universities were established. 

Characteristics of the Renaissance

The printing press

"The demand for perfect reproductions of texts and the renewed focus on studying them helped trigger one of the biggest discoveries in the whole of human history: printing with movable type. For me this is the easiest and single greatest developed of the Renaissance and allowed modern culture to develop," Wilde told Live Science. The printing press was developed in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. It allowed Bibles, secular books, printed music and more to be made in larger amounts and reach more people.

Intellectual movement

Wilde said one of the most significant changes that occurred during the Renaissance was the "evolution of Renaissance humanism as a method of thinking … This new outlook underpinned so much of the world then and now."

Wilde described Renaissance humanism as "attempts by man to master nature rather than develop religious piety." Renaissance humanism looked to classical Greek and Roman texts to change contemporary thought, allowing for a new mindset after the Middle Ages. Renaissance readers understood these classical texts as focusing on human decisions, actions and creations, rather than unquestioningly following the rules set forth by the Catholic Church as "God's plan." Though many Renaissance humanists remained religious, they believed God gave humans opportunities and it was humanity's duty to do the best and most moral thing. Renaissance humanism was an "ethical theory and practice that emphasized reason, scientific inquiry and human fulfillment in the natural world," said Abernethy. 

Art

Renaissance art was heavily influenced by classical art, wrote Virginia Cox in "A Short History of the Italian Renaissance." Artists turned to Greek and Roman sculpture, painting and decorative arts for inspiration and also because their techniques meshed with Renaissance humanist philosophy. Both classical and Renaissance art focused on human beauty and nature. People, even when in religious works, were depicted living life and showing emotion. Perspective and light and shadow techniques improved and paintings looked more three-dimensional and realistic.

Patrons made it possible for successful Renaissance artists to work and develop new techniques. The Catholic Church commissioned most artwork during the Middle Ages, and while it continued to do so during the Renaissance, wealthy individuals also became important patrons, according to Cox. The most famous patrons were the Medici family in Florence, who supported the arts for much of the 15thand 16thcenturies. The Medici family supported artists such as Michelangelo, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. 

Music

As with art, musical innovations in the Renaissance were partly made possible because patronage expanded beyond the Catholic Church. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, new technologies resulted in the invention of several new instruments, including the harpsichord and violin family. The printing press meant that sheet music could be more widely disseminated.

Renaissance music was characterized by its humanist traits. Composers read classical treatises on music and aimed to create music that would touch listeners emotionally. They began to incorporate lyrics more dramatically into compositions and considered music and poetry to be closely related, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Literature

Renaissance literature, too, was characterized by humanist themes and a return to classical ideals of tragedy and comedy, according to theBrooklyn College English Department. Shakespeare's works, especially "Hamlet," are good examples of this. Themes like human agency, life's non-religious meanings and the true nature of man are embraced, and Hamlet is an educated Renaissance man. 

Society and economics

The most prevalent societal change during the Renaissance was the fall of feudalism and the rise of a capitalist market economy, said Abernethy. Increased trade and the labor shortage caused by the Black Death gave rise to something of a middle class. Workers could demand wages and good living conditions, and so serfdom ended. 

"Rulers began to realize they could maintain their power without the church. There were no more knights in service to the king and peasants in service to the lord of the manor," said Abernethy. Having money became more important than your allegiances. 

Religion

Due to a number of factors — including the Black Death, the rise in trade, the development of a middle class and the papacy's temporary move from Rome to Avignon (1309-1377) — the Catholic Church's influence was waning as the 15thcentury began. The re-emergence of classical texts and the rise in Renaissance humanism changed society's approach to religion and the authority of the papacy, said Abernethy. "[Humanism] created an atmosphere that gave rise to different movements and sects … Martin Luther stressed reform of the Catholic Church, wanting to eliminate practices such as nepotism and the selling of indulgences," Abernethy said. 

"Perhaps most important, the invention of the printing press allowed for the dissemination of the Bible in languages other than Latin," Abernethy continued. "Ordinary people were now able to read and learn the lessons of Scripture, leading to the Evangelical movement." These early Evangelicals emphasized the importance of the Scriptures rather than the institutional power of the church and believed that salvation was personal conversion rather than indulgences or works. 

Geography

Thirsty to learn more about the world and eager to improve trade routes, explorers sailed off to chart new lands. Columbus "discovered" the New World in 1492 and Ferdinand Magellan became the first person to successfully circumnavigate the globe in the early 1500s. 

Science

As scholars studied classical texts, they "resurrected the Ancient Greek belief that creation was constructed around perfect laws and reasoning," Abernethy said. "There was an escalation in the study of astronomy, anatomy and medicine, geography, alchemy, mathematics and architecture as the ancients studied them."

References:

https://www.livescience.com/55230-renaissance.html

assignment 4

Jude the Obscure

Name: Emisha Ravani

paper: 104 Literature of The Victorians

Roll no: 07

Enrollment no : 4069206420210031

Email id: emisharavani3459@gmail.com

Batch : 2021-2023(M.A sem 1) 

Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Jude the Obscure Background

Thomas Hardy's last finished novel, Jude the Obscure, is widely considered to be his best. Hardy explores all the big issues: class, faith, hope, love, sex. In the process, this seemingly simple story of a doomed love affair transcends the Victorian era in which it is set, making it a timeless classic, a universal tale of longing and despair.

Jude the Obscure Summary

Jude the Obscure is the story of a working-class young man from southern England, Jude Fawley, who dreams of someday becoming a scholar at the prestigious university at Christminster, modeled on the world-famous Oxford University.

Before this can happen, however, Jude is tricked into marriage by the seductive, but opportunistic, Arabella Donn, who falsely claims she is pregnant. The marriage soon falls apart and Jude travels to Christminster, only to be denied entry to the university. The classical studies he has pursued all his life, almost entirely on his own, have been for nothing. He has neither the education, nor the money, to become a scholar.

While at Christminster, he meets and quickly falls in love with his cousin, the vivacious and rebellious, Sue Bridehead. She, however, marries Jude's former schoolmaster and mentor, Richard Phillotson, who is cruel to her. Their marriage also fails; Sue and Jude divorce their spouses, but Sue refuses to marry Jude.

Then Jude discovers that he has a long-lost son with his estranged wife, Arabella. Jude's son comes to live with him and Sue. Still unmarried, Sue and Jude bear two more children, but are shunned by their community. Jude loses his job as a stonemason, the family is denied lodgings, and so the five of them embark on a seemingly endless search for work and housing.

Ultimately, Jude's namesake, his son with Arabella, known as Little Father Time because of his grave manner, hangs the younger children and himself, leaving behind a note which says only, 'Done because we are too meeny (many).'

Devastated, Sue returns to Phillotson and a life of religious devotion. They remarry, as do Jude and Arabella. After one more attempt to reconcile with Sue, Jude falls ill and ultimately dies at the age of 30. Arabella immediately moves on in search of her next husband, while Sue lives out the rest of her dreary life with Phillotson.

Jude the Obscure Themes & Analysis

Let's now take a closer look at the different themes and overall analysis of Jude the Obscure one step at a time.

The Struggle of the Victorian Working Class

Jude, though born into the working class, has big hopes of social and class mobility. He dreams of the kind of education and the kind of social and financial success from which those of his class are too often barred. But Jude's impoverished background is not so easily shaken.

An orphan raised by his aunt, Jude learns that his classical academic pursuits have all been for nothing: he's studied the wrong things. His head is stuffed with useless and probably incorrect information, and, what's worse for the scholars of Christminster, he has neither the resources nor the 'breeding' to become a scholar. He's, quite simply, not the right class and, all too often in Victorian England, the class in which you're born is the class in which you remain.

Love, Marriage, and Sex

Troubled relationships fill Hardy's novel. Jude and Arabella's disastrous marriage highlights an issue that Hardy himself frequently condemned: the Victorians' always judgmental and frequently cruel attitude toward sex.

Jude succumbs before marriage to Arabella's seductions and feels compelled, both by honor and by religious and social conviction, to marry her, tying himself eternally to a shallow woman whom he doesn't really love.

Conversely, the truly loving relationship between Sue and Jude is destroyed because it exists outside of marriage. The social condemnation and ostracism they incur ravage what might otherwise have been a very happy family. Sue, Jude, and their children are brutalized, and made hungry and homeless, through the scorn leveled against them.

Religious Hypocrisy

Religious hypocrisy is an important theme in the novel, in which men become priests simply because it is a comfortable career choice, not a vocation. There is a distinct absence of genuine religious feeling or experience in the novel; people use religion simply as a way to enforce society's rules and norms. Religion makes hypocrites of people because it forces them to despise and reject their natural urges (such as the desire for sex) and to violate natural morality: to leave partners who no longer suit them or make them miserable and to refrain from marrying unsuitable partners to establish paternity.

Religion is also a tool to subjugate women, who must get permission from husbands and fathers to do anything of consequence. For example, Sue points out that while a man gives himself freely in marriage, a woman is "given away" by a patriarchal figure, usually her father, to the husband who will become her keeper.

In Hardy's view religion is a crutch as well—to help the self-conscious creature that is a human being face the terrible existential angst (anxiety about existence) that is his or her fate. People comfort themselves with the idea of an afterlife, as when the organist plays the 73rd psalm at the children's funeral, and Sue hears, "Truly God is loving unto Israel." But where is God in their deaths? Without a belief in God, people must create their own reason to live, and if they are not able to come up with one, life becomes unbearable, as it did for Jude's mother and does for Jude's unearthly son, and eventually for Jude.

Related thematically are the words of the entire novel's epigraph: "The letter killeth." The sentence is a shortened version of St. Paul's words in the Book of Corinthians in the New Testament: "Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." In this quotation St. Paul is contrasting the "old covenant" of the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) with the "new covenant" created by the teachings of Jesus. However, Hardy means the letter of the law in religious matters may violate the tenets of Christianity if people do not interpret them with mercy and compassion. The words echo thematically throughout the novel as they apply to marriage and religion. In a wider context Hardy saw orthodox religion as a soul-killing philosophy, and the novel's characters reflect those who mercilessly follow the letter—inflicting heartlessness, cruelty, abuse—and those who do not.

Brutality of the Class System

The brutality of an impenetrable class system haunts Jude, who has the misfortune to be born into the working class. Despite being hard working, ambitious, and highly intelligent, he cannot escape from the restrictions of his class. He is doomed to remain basically in place, and the best he can do is become a craftsman in a skilled trade.

Jude cannot gain entry into the university because he has not had access to schools that teach Greek and Latin, and his efforts at self-study are not enough for him to catch up. Thus, he doesn't have enough knowledge to take an examination to qualify him for a scholarship. Neither does he have the money to pay—another route to a university education, and the one generally taken by the upper classes. Although Christminster was made for people like him—a genuine scholar with a thirst for knowledge, as Sue points out—Jude is doomed to remain outside its gates of learning and denied the opportunities to which learning can lead.

Gender Inequality

Gender inequality is an important theme in the novel, and Sue Bridehead represents, to an extent, the "new woman" who would prefer to remain independent. Given a choice Sue probably would not marry but feels constrained to do so. Sue has a trade as an ecclesiastical or church designer, and she has more than enough intelligence and talent to become a certified teacher, although she closes that opportunity by violating the rules of the teaching academy. Moreover, she rebels against her unjust punishment rather than meekly submitting to it, and as a result she is expelled. Readers may wonder whether male students would have similarly harsh restrictions and similarly harsh punishments for violating them.

Sue does not wish to get married because she understands the obligations of matrimony, the bondage of it, are worse for a woman than for a man. A wife is subject to her husband, and if he decides to treat her with physical or psychological cruelty, she has little recourse but to endure her pain. Sue resents the notion of women as property to be given and used in marriage. And she resents the accepted fact that women are reduced to using marriage as a way to ensure financial stability rather than choosing marriage freely to express their love and desire to live with a soulmate. Sue rebels against the hypocritical standards of society, which deem her immoral because she is not legally married to her children's father. Her failure to hide this information leads to tragedy that completely breaks Sue's spirit. As penance she surrenders to social norms, returning to her unlovable husband to atone for what she sees as the sin of having and then losing her children and living on her own terms.

References:

https://www.coursehero.com/lit/Jude-the-Obscure/themes/

https://study.com/academy/lesson/jude-the-obscure-by-thomas-hardy-summary-themes-characters.html

assignment 3

Lord Byron's Poems

Name: Emisha Ravani

paper: 103 Literature of The Romantics

Roll no: 07

Enrollment no : 4069206420210031

Email id: emisharavani3459@gmail.com

Batch : 2021-2023(M.A sem 1) 

Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Lord Byron's Poems

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) wrote a great deal of poetry before his early death, in his mid-thirties, while fighting in Greece. But what are Byron’s best poems? Here we’ve selected some of his best-known and best-loved poems, spanning narrative verse, love poetry, simple lyrics, and longer comic works.

1. Don Juan.

Despite the Spanish name of Byron’s hero (or antihero?), many readers and critics Anglicise the title of this, perhaps Byron’s most representative work and his greatest achievement, as ‘Don Joo-an’:

I want a hero: an uncommon want,

When every year and month sends forth a new one,

Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,

The age discovers he is not the true one;

Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,

I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan—

We all have seen him, in the pantomime,

Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.

A vast comic poem that is almost novelistic in its length and range, it follows the protagonist, a lothario, as he has affairs and adventures – Don Juan is partly a portrait of Byron himself (with his eventful private life), but is also a modern take on the figure who appears elsewhere in literature and culture, perhaps most famously in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Byron wrote of the poem in 1819, ‘it may be profligate – but is it not life, and is it not the thing? Could any man have written it – who has not lived in the world?’

2. ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’.

Byron once said that he awoke one morning to find himself famous, and it was the success of this long narrative poem which made his name:

Childe Harold was he hight:—but whence his name

And lineage long, it suits me not to say;

Suffice it, that perchance they were of fame,

And had been glorious in another day:

But one sad losel soils a name for aye,

However mighty in the olden time;

Nor all that heralds rake from coffined clay,

Nor florid prose, nor honeyed lines of rhyme,

Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime.

As with Don Juan, this poem has autobiographical elements: the protagonist is a young nobleman who, disillusioned with the world around him, takes off to exotic parts of the globe in search of adventure. This poem is the origin of the ‘Byronic hero’: a dashing, charming, attractive, and brooding protagonist who would become a staple of nineteenth-century poetry and fiction.

3. ‘When We Two Parted’.

How might two lovers part? In silence and tears, as this popular Byron poem has it. Possibly written about a real-life affair between the poet and Lady Frances Webster – who was also involved with the Duke of Wellington – this is a classic Romantic (and romantic) expression of parting as not-so-sweet sorrow:

When we two parted

In silence and tears,

Half broken-hearted

To sever for years,

Pale grew thy cheek and cold,

Colder thy kiss;

Truly that hour foretold

Sorrow to this …

‘When We Two Parted’ is a typical Romantic poem, reflecting the personal emotions and thoughts of the poet himself and focusing on his own feelings about the end of the affair. It’s a different kind of Romantic poet from Wordsworth frolicking among the daffodils, but it is characteristic of Byron’s themes and subject matter.

4. ‘She Walks in Beauty’.

Perhaps Byron’s best-loved and most widely anthologised lyric poem, ‘She Walks in Beauty’ is quoted in Dead Poets Society as an attempt to seduce a young woman, and it epitomises the Romantic poem idolising (and idealising) a woman’s beauty, as the first line makes clear:

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies …

‘So, we’ll go no more a-roving’.

Byron sent this poem to his friend Thomas Moore in a letter of 1817:

So, we’ll go no more a roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

And the moon be still as bright …

Byron prefaced the poem with a few words: ‘At present, I am on the invalid regimen myself. The Carnival – that is, the latter part of it, and sitting up late o’ nights – had knocked me up a little. But it is over – and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music… Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find “the sword wearing out the scabbard,” though I have but just turned the corner of twenty nine.’

Like ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, it is a poem about world-weariness and disillusionment: a quintessential theme of Byron’s poetry, and something which arguably sets him apart from much of the work of his contemporaries John Keats and Percy Shelley.

6. ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,

That host with their banners at sunset were seen:

Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,

That host on the morrow lay withered and strown …

This poem centres on the biblical story of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, who – we are told in the Second Book of Kings – tried to capture Jerusalem, but was destroyed by God’s Angel of Death, along with his Assyrian army.

In 1878, when the Australian cricket team toured England for the first time, Punch magazine published a poem mocking W. G. Grace and the English team when they were roundly defeated by the Australian side: ‘The Australians came down like a wolf on the fold, / The Marylebone cracks for a trifle were bowled; / Our Grace before dinner was very soon done, / And Grace after dinner did not get a run.’

7. ‘Darkness’.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day …

This poem was inspired by a curious incident: the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which drastically altered the weather conditions across the world and led to 1816 being branded ‘the Year without a Summer’. The same event also led to Byron’s trip to Lake Geneva and his ghost-story writing competition, which produced Mary Shelley’s masterpiece Frankenstein. For Byron, the extermination of the sun seemed like a dream, yet it was ‘no dream’ but a strange and almost sublimely terrifying reality.

8. ‘Beppo’.

’Tis known, at least it should be, that throughout

All countries of the Catholic persuasion,

Some weeks before Shrove Tuesday comes about,

The people take their fill of recreation,

And buy repentance, ere they grow devout,

However high their rank, or low their station,

With fiddling, feasting, dancing, drinking, masking,

And other things which may be had for asking …

This poem from 1817 was a sort of dry run for the more famous Don Juan: it uses the same Italian metre (ottava rima) and focuses on a man, Giuseppe (‘Beppo’), who has been lost at sea, taken captive and enslaved, and then freed by some pirates, and returns to reclaim his wife from the Cavalier Servente with whom she has become involved. Byron uses the poem to criticise the hypocrisy of English moral attitudes to adultery.

9. ‘The Isles of Greece’.

The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

Where grew the arts of war and peace,

Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!

Eternal summer gilds them yet,

But all, except their sun, is set …

Byron famously died of a fever in 1824, while fighting alongside the Greeks in their struggle for independence. This poem shows Byron’s love-affair with the country, and although it’s technically part of Don Juan, that poem is so long that it earns the right to be included here as a separate poem-within-a-poem. Harking back to Sappho from the island of Lesbos and the progenitor of all lyric poetry, Byron praises the land of ‘Samian wine’.

10. ‘Stanzas for Music’.

There be none of Beauty’s daughters

With a magic like thee;

And like music on the waters

Is thy sweet voice to me:

When, as if its sound were causing

The charmed ocean’s pausing,

The waves lie still and gleaming,

And the lull’d winds seem dreaming …

Another short lyric, as the title suggests, this poem is slight compared with others on this list, but it shows Byron’s talent for lyric verse and love poetry.

About Lord Byron

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) was one of the most famous English poets of second-generation Romanticism, and thanks to his colourful private life, he was certainly the most controversial. He attained considerable fame in 1812 while a young man in his twenties with his poem ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’: Byron famously commented that he ‘awoke one morning and found I was famous’.

He had been educated at Cambridge (where he is rumoured to have kept a pet bear in his college rooms, on the grounds that keeping pet dogs was banned), and after he graduated he travelled widely, wrote poems, and ramped up eye-watering amounts of debt, thanks to his extravagant lifestyle. He courted controversy through his various affairs, the breakup of his marriage, and rumours that he was involved with his own half-sister.

He fled to the Continent in 1816, and it was at Byron’s villa that the famous ghost-story competition took place which resulted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Byron could command vast sums of money for new instalments to his long comic picaresque narrative poem Don Juan (whose title character, a lothario and adventurer, is a thinly disguised version of Byron himself), and this helped him out of debt, but eventually his dissolute lifestyle caught up with him. Seeking to make up for a life of scandal and profligacy, Byron travelled to Greece to fight for Greek independence, but he contracted a fever and died, aged thirty-six, in 1824.

References:

https://interestingliterature.com/2018/06/10-of-the-best-lord-byron-poems-everyone-should-read/

assignment 2

Pamela;Or The Virtue Rewarded

Name: Emisha Ravani

paper: 102 Literature of The Neo classical Age 

Roll no: 07

Enrollment no : 4069206420210031

Email id: emisharavani3459@gmail.com

Batch : 2021-2023(M.A sem 1) 

Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Pamela by Samuel Richardson

A classic may be defined most simply as any work of art that has endured beyond the time of its production. If it is still in circulation after a few generations, then it is a classic. But this definition still leaves room for nuances; for one thing, there are different reasons why a work may endure.

Consider 18th-century Anglophone fictional prose narrative. One such narrative that is still widely read in the present is Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. Why is it widely read today? First, we might say it deals with still-relevant issues: it is a satire whose targets remain with us, from the superficialities of upper-class life to the arrogance of scientists to the base human desires that lead to war, poverty, and crime. But, as Ben Okri has recently angered many intelligent people by observing, subject matter and theme are probably the least important elements of literature. I think we still read Gulliver’s Travels because it is an elegantly-designed narrative; it is very funny in its caricatural metaphors for those social forms it attacks, as well as being just bawdy and scatological enough to make us all laugh with rueful recognition of our common creaturely life; it is a source of rich and unforgettable imagery; it is written in a clear, descriptive style that allows for deadpan comedy but also an undertone of angry sorrow. In short, we still read Swift’s book because it is fun to read. This is one kind of classic.

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded is another classic of 18th-century Anglophone prose narrative, but it is a different kind of classic: one we continue to read less for its intrinsic merit or interest than for its immense influence on later works. Pamela is an early realist novel told by the titular heroine in the first person as a series of letters to her parents, letters that come to be read as morally exemplary literature by the novel’s other characters. Pamela famously concerns a poor servant girl who is sexually menaced by the noble son of her dead mistress until he undergoes a reform of character that leads the pair to fall in love and marry.

Richardson’s 1740 novel was revolutionary for a number of reasons. Sociopolitically speaking, Pamela gives unprecedented voice to a woman of the lower class, insisting on her intelligence, rectitude, and all-around human worth. The novel boldly challenges both the unwarranted hauteur of the dissolute upper classes and the sexual privilege of the landowning or noble male, empowered by social custom to treat young women of the servant or working classes as erotic prey. Richardson, himself of the working class and religiously a Puritan, dramatizes his conviction that God is no respecter of persons and values only right action and virtuous behavior. The aesthetic consequences of this ideological revolt are significant: the realist novel as a literary form becomes in Richardson’s hands a conduit for the voices of the socially marginal or excluded, the most expansive and inclusive and progressive of literary forms. When critics today call for diversity, feminism, multiculturalism, etc., in literary curricula, they are following the path cleared by Richardson.

Despite the novel’s troubling (from a contemporary perspective) endorsement of marriage as a male-headed institution in which the wife must obey her master, Pamela might well be called an early feminist novel due to its sympathetic narrative of a poor young woman subject to sexual assault. The scene that is the heart of the novel occurs when Mr. B., Pamela’s master, begins tearing off her clothes to get at the portions of her letters and diaries that she conceals on her person. This scene is almost more shocking than the moment of attempted rape elsewhere in the novel, for when Mr. B. assaults Pamela’s body and her narrative at once, Richardson transforms rape from its archaic meaning as a property crime (the theft of a woman from her family) to a sin against a sacred individual. Because Pamela is not only her body or her social status but also her story and her language, Mr. B. trespasses in this moment against humanity as reasoning image of God. With this new understanding of women, sexual violence, and narrative, Richardson made a revolution, one still ongoing today. With Pamela more than any other work, the novel becomes the literary form corresponding to the modern individual, and the guarantor of that individual’s rights, even if said individual is just a poor girl.

(That these rights are ultimately property rights, guaranteed not only by narrative but by bourgeois virtue, is the underside of the seemingly upbeat transformation in political consciousness effected by Richardson’s novel, as critics such as Nancy Armstrong have explained at length; Pamela may therefore exemplify the complicity of individualism, feminism, and the novel with class domination, racism, and imperialism—too large a topic to discuss here, but too important to go completely unmentioned.)

By giving direct access to the feelings of a common person through epistolary form, Richardson opens up a new dimension in fictional narrative: the concern with human consciousness that will preoccupy the realist novel from Austen to James to Woolf to Bellow to today. As Margaret Anne Doody notes in her introduction to my Penguin Classics edition, Richardson begins the novelistic project that in many ways culminates in high modernism with stream of consciousness narration.

So this novel is an important one in literary history—far more important, in most ways, than Gulliver’s Travels, which was an honorable and brilliant entrant in several longstanding literary traditions (satire, travel narrative, utopia, romance) but not a world-shakingly original, genre-defining work. Swift’s book is a masterful narrative, but Richardson’s has a claim to being one of the first modern novels, a book that influenced the whole course of European literature, affecting everyone from Rousseau to Goethe.

On the other hand, Pamela is not very much fun to read. The narrative is shapeless, moving from intense and active scenes of confrontation or flight to plodding descriptions of minor matters with no sense of design for emotional effect. Richardson blundered into writing a novel; his initial goal was to write a set of model letters for young ladies. The novel is relentlessly didactic, instructing us over and over and over again about God’s Providence, the importance of virtue, and the necessity of social forms. The only well-developed characters are Pamela herself, Mr. B., his sister, and his grotesque servant Mrs Jewkes. The latter is perhaps the novel’s most vital character, a sharp-tongued and cynical woman who is possibly—we are never quite sure, because Pamela is not—a former procuress or bawd and who harbors homoerotic designs on the heroine. Alas, she repents too by the end: no one is spared the novel’s culminating reign of virtue. Most other characters blur together, insufficiently developed. Also, while I grasp the novelty of Richardson’s emphasis on emotion, the novel’s endless effusions, and the ocean of tears shed by every character in it, become tiresome.

In her introduction, Doody puts a positive face on all these flaws, praising the novel for its life-like impurities, excesses, and organic vagaries. I understand that assessment of Richardson’s achievement in a purely intellectual sense, but it does not lessen my extreme boredom with the novel qua novel—especially its lethal second half, a pageant of “virtue rewarded” wherein Mr. B. shows off Pamela to all his friends and demonstrates her many merits. Thankfully, Mr. B.’s sister shows up late in the second half to create some drama—poor Pamela has to jump out of a window to get away from her—but she ends up repentantly weeping too. No wonder I immediately thought of Swift on finishing Pamela: his bitterness is a needed corrective to Richardson’s sentimentality.

But more than making me wish for Swift, Pamela made me grateful for Jane Austen: she was the one who took Richardson’s materials and put them in order, discovering how to write a realistic novel of consciousness and common life in a more effective and economical way: she dispenses with the cumbersome and occasionally ludicrous epistolary apparatus (where does Pamela find the time and energy amid all these other events to write what is effectively a 500-page novel?) and instead conveys thought and emotion through a supple third-person narration marked by free indirect discourse. It is via Austen that we get from Richardson to Woolf, and through Austen that the realist novel becomes a form of art rather than a vehicle for didacticism.

Those less aesthetically reactionary than myself and Austen will no doubt see the transition from Richardson’s loose and baggy propagandistic monsters to the mute and well-wrought urns of modern fiction as a loss in cultural energy and complexity, a sacrifice of the radically social to aesthetic quietism; for Richardson was not only a proto-modernist explorer of the inner life, but, as Terry Eagleton discusses in his study of the writer, the popular ringleader of a coterie of devoted (largely female) readers, whose revisions and redactions he solicited and incorporated into his texts. A contemporary analogue to Richardson would be less a distinguished literary novelist like Philip Roth or Ian McEwan and more a master of a sentimental YA fan empire, such as John Green or Stephanie Meyer. Isn’t Twilight just Pamela with a dark Gothic glitter, the same old story of a girl from nowhere who tames the fierce and dangerous bad-boy aristocrat so as to be assimilated into the ruling elite?

For all that, any student of the novel’s history or of cultural history more broadly should read Pamela. A massive bestseller and cultural phenomenon in its own time, it is a book that helped to make our world and our literature, for better and for worse, and that is enough to make it a classic that cannot be ignored. 

Reference: 

https://johnpistelli.com/2015/01/04/samuel-richardson-pamela/

assignment 1

Character Sketch of Lady Macbeth

Name: Emisha Ravani

Paper: 101  Literature of The Elizabethan and Restoration Period

Roll no: 07

Enrollment no :4069206420210031

Email id: emisharavani3459@gmail.com

Batch : 2021-2023(M.A sem 1) 

Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji 

Character of Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frightening female characters. When we first see her, she is already plotting Duncan’s murder, and she is stronger, more ruthless, and more ambitious than her husband. She seems fully aware of this and knows that she will have to push Macbeth into committing murder. At one point, she wishes that she were not a woman so that she could do it herself.

This theme of the relationship between gender and power is key to Lady Macbeth’s character: her husband implies that she is a masculine soul inhabiting a female body, which seems to link masculinity to ambition and violence. Shakespeare, however, seems to use her, and the witches, to undercut Macbeth’s idea that “undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males” . These crafty women use female methods of achieving power—that is, manipulation—to further their supposedly male ambitions. Women, the play implies, can be as ambitious and cruel as men, yet social constraints deny them the means to pursue these ambitions on their own.

Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frightening female characters. When we first see her, she is already plotting Duncan’s murder, and she is stronger, more ruthless, and more ambitious than her husband. She seems fully aware of this and knows that she will have to push Macbeth into committing murder. At one point, she wishes that she were not a woman so that she could do it herself.

This theme of the relationship between gender and power is key to Lady Macbeth’s character: her husband implies that she is a masculine soul inhabiting a female body, which seems to link masculinity to ambition and violence. Shakespeare, however, seems to use her, and the witches, to undercut Macbeth’s idea that “undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males” . These crafty women use female methods of achieving power—that is, manipulation—to further their supposedly male ambitions. Women, the play implies, can be as ambitious and cruel as men, yet social constraints deny them the means to pursue these ambitions on their own.

Lady Macbeth manipulates her husband with remarkable effectiveness, overriding all his objections; when he hesitates to murder, she repeatedly questions his manhood until he feels that he must commit murder to prove himself. Lady Macbeth’s remarkable strength of will persists through the murder of the king—it is she who steadies her husband’s nerves immediately after the crime has been perpetrated.

Afterward, however, Lady Macbeth begins a slow slide into madness—just as ambition affects her more strongly than Macbeth before the crime, so does guilt plague her more strongly afterward. By the close of the play, she has been reduced to sleepwalking through the castle, desperately trying to wash away an invisible bloodstain. Once the sense of guilt comes home to roost, Lady Macbeth’s sensitivity becomes a weakness, and she is unable to cope. Significantly, she (apparently) kills herself, signalling her total inability to deal with the legacy of their crimes.

Lady Macbeth is possibly Shakespeare’s most famous and vivid female character. Everyone, whether they have read or seen the Macbeth play, has a view of her. She is generally depicted in the popular mind as the epitome of evil, and images of her appear over and over again in several cultures. She is usually portrayed in pictures as something like a Disney character, a cross between Cruella DeVille and the wicked stepmother in Snow White.

Although she has some of the most bloodthirsty lines in Shakespeare she is not quite Cruella De Ville or the wicked stepmother. The response she gets from the male characters suggests that she is a young, sexually attractive woman and, indeed, in her effort to influence Macbeth, she uses every method at her disposal, including the employment of her sexual charms.

She is usually depicted as a strong, tough woman and, in her drive to induce Macbeth to murder King Duncan, she appears to be that, but, having succeeded, it does not take long for her to crumble and break down, destroyed by guilt, and she ends up committing suicide.

Shakespeare does not have any evil characters. What he has are ordinary human beings, like you and me, placed in situations that challenge and test them. Some of them, like Iago in Othello, have personality defects, but that’s rare in Shakespeare and it’s not the case with Lady Mcbeth.

The challenges that Shakespeare presents his characters with generates different responses from different people. Lady Macbeth’s challenge is that she discovers that her husband has been tempted by an encounter with three witches to do something about their prediction that he will become king. She knows that the king would have to die for that to happen. When she gets a message that King Duncan plans to spend the night with them at Glamys Castle it seems to confirm the thought that they would have to kill him and that this was their once in a lifetime opportunity. That’s the situation into which she has been thrust.

She is as ambitious as Macbeth but she knows that for all his bravery in battle, all his soldierly and diplomatic qualities, he is basically much too soft –“too full of the milk of human kindness” – to take advantage of the opportunity. She makes up her mind to make him do it.

And she is right about his lack of resolve – they talk it over and he tells her that he just can’t do it. She goes into high gear and virtually holds his hand through it. One of her strongest qualities is persistence and she shows it here. Macbeth hesitates, equivocates and falters but she holds firm. She argues the case, she mocks him, bringing his manhood into question, she appeals to his sense of loyalty to her, she takes him to bed, and she finally prevails.

Macbeth kills Duncan in his sleep and from that moment their marriage begins to fall apart. They each fall into their own guilt-trip and hardly speak to each other. As king, Macbeth fears his political enemies and embarks on a reign of terror while Lady Macbeth stays in bed, unable to sleep, having nightmares when she does manage it. While walking and talking in her sleep she gives the game away about what they have done and sinks into a moral, physical and spiritual collapse. When Macbeth is on his last legs, with the rebels closing in, he gets the message that she’s dead. At that point, he says he doesn’t have time to think about it. “She should have died hereafter,” he says. Their partnership in this murderous enterprise has destroyed their marriage.

The promise of strength that we see in her at the beginning of the play is an illusion. What we are seeing is naked ambition and a willingness to act on it without having the resources to deal with the consequences. We see how guilt can eat up your soul and destroy you. We see how hollow ambition is, both in her journey and Macbeth’s.

Lady Macbeth is even more ambitious and ruthless than her husband. As soon as an opportunity to gain power presents itself, she has a plan in mind. She uses her influence to persuade Macbeth that they are taking the right course of action and even takes part in the crime herself.

For a while she is able to suppress her actions but eventually she becomes unable to deal with the guilt of what she has done. She becomes unable to sleep, and mentally unstable, eventually dying in tragic circumstances. 

Lady Macbeth is, perhaps, even more determined than her husband. She can only be Queen if he becomes King so when he hesitates she displays enough ambition for both of them. Once she has worked out a plan, nothing will turn her from that course until her ambition is fulfilled.Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be / What thou art promised; yet do I fear thy nature, / It is too full o'th milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great, / Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it. (Act 1 Scene 5)Lady Macbeth's determination to succeed is clear here. She is insistent that Macbeth will become King ('shalt be what thou art promised') However, she recognises that he is 'too full o'th milk of human kindness' and that this could stand in their way. It is interesting that she describes the necessary ruthless streak as an 'illness'. This suggests that even at this stage she knows what she is doing is wrong.

Cunning

To the outside world, Lady Macbeth seems like the ideal supportive wife but this is part of her ability to be deceptive. When Macbeth expresses doubts, she uses every trick she can think of to make sure he carries out their plan to murder Duncan. When he hesitates, she is there to urge Macbeth on.All our service, / In every point twice done and then done double, / Were poor and single business to contend / Against those honours deep and broad wherewith / Your majesty loads our house. (Act 1 Scene 6)Lady Macbeth welcomes Duncan to her home and flatters him so that he will not suspect a thing. She almost overdoes it when she exaggerates 'In every point twice done and then done double'. The word 'double' also links Lady Macbeth to the evil of the witches - they use the word repeatedly in one of their spells.

Conscience-stricken

Lady Macbeth seems to go from being someone with no conscience at all to someone who is overwhelmed by feelings of guilt. She cannot bear to think of what she has done and eventually dies alone and unmourned even by her husband.Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One, two. Why then 'tis time to do't. Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear? Who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? (Act 5 Scene 1)As the guilt-stricken Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, she remembers all the evil things she and her husband have done and tries to wash imaginary blood from her hands (Out, damned spot: out, I say!). In particular, she recalls the night of Duncan's murder and the part she played in persuading her husband to act. She is also aware that she will be going to hell for her sins. 

Reference: https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/macbeth/character/lady-macbeth/

https://nosweatshakespeare.com/characters/lady-macbeth/

Character Sketch of Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frightening female characters. When we first see her, she is already plotting Duncan’s murder, and she is stronger, more ruthless, and more ambitious than her husband. She seems fully aware of this and knows that she will have to push Macbeth into committing murder. At one point, she wishes that she were not a woman so that she could do it herself.

This theme of the relationship between gender and power is key to Lady Macbeth’s character: her husband implies that she is a masculine soul inhabiting a female body, which seems to link masculinity to ambition and violence. Shakespeare, however, seems to use her, and the witches, to undercut Macbeth’s idea that “undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males” (1.7.73–74). These crafty women use female methods of achieving power—that is, manipulation—to further their supposedly male ambitions. Women, the play implies, can be as ambitious and cruel as men, yet social constraints deny them the means to pursue these ambitions on their own.

Characters Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frightening female characters. When we first see her, she is already plotting Duncan’s murder, and she is stronger, more ruthless, and more ambitious than her husband. She seems fully aware of this and knows that she will have to push Macbeth into committing murder. At one point, she wishes that she were not a woman so that she could do it herself.

This theme of the relationship between gender and power is key to Lady Macbeth’s character: her husband implies that she is a masculine soul inhabiting a female body, which seems to link masculinity to ambition and violence. Shakespeare, however, seems to use her, and the witches, to undercut Macbeth’s idea that “undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males” . These crafty women use female methods of achieving power—that is, manipulation—to further their supposedly male ambitions. Women, the play implies, can be as ambitious and cruel as men, yet social constraints deny them the means to pursue these ambitions on their own.

Lady Macbeth manipulates her husband with remarkable effectiveness, overriding all his objections; when he hesitates to murder, she repeatedly questions his manhood until he feels that he must commit murder to prove himself. Lady Macbeth’s remarkable strength of will persists through the murder of the king—it is she who steadies her husband’s nerves immediately after the crime has been perpetrated.

Afterward, however, Lady Macbeth begins a slow slide into madness—just as ambition affects her more strongly than Macbeth before the crime, so does guilt plague her more strongly afterward. By the close of the play, she has been reduced to sleepwalking through the castle, desperately trying to wash away an invisible bloodstain. Once the sense of guilt comes home to roost, Lady Macbeth’s sensitivity becomes a weakness, and she is unable to cope. Significantly, she (apparently) kills herself, signalling her total inability to deal with the legacy of their crimes.

Lady Macbeth is possibly Shakespeare’s most famous and vivid female character. Everyone, whether they have read or seen the Macbeth play, has a view of her. She is generally depicted in the popular mind as the epitome of evil, and images of her appear over and over again in several cultures. She is usually portrayed in pictures as something like a Disney character, a cross between Cruella DeVille and the wicked stepmother in Snow White.

Although she has some of the most bloodthirsty lines in Shakespeare she is not quite Cruella De Ville or the wicked stepmother. The response she gets from the male characters suggests that she is a young, sexually attractive woman and, indeed, in her effort to influence Macbeth, she uses every method at her disposal, including the employment of her sexual charms.

She is usually depicted as a strong, tough woman and, in her drive to induce Macbeth to murder King Duncan, she appears to be that, but, having succeeded, it does not take long for her to crumble and break down, destroyed by guilt, and she ends up committing suicide.

Shakespeare does not have any evil characters. What he has are ordinary human beings, like you and me, placed in situations that challenge and test them. Some of them, like Iago in Othello, have personality defects, but that’s rare in Shakespeare and it’s not the case with Lady Mcbeth.

The challenges that Shakespeare presents his characters with generates different responses from different people. Lady Macbeth’s challenge is that she discovers that her husband has been tempted by an encounter with three witches to do something about their prediction that he will become king. She knows that the king would have to die for that to happen. When she gets a message that King Duncan plans to spend the night with them at Glamys Castle it seems to confirm the thought that they would have to kill him and that this was their once in a lifetime opportunity. That’s the situation into which she has been thrust.

She is as ambitious as Macbeth but she knows that for all his bravery in battle, all his soldierly and diplomatic qualities, he is basically much too soft –“too full of the milk of human kindness” – to take advantage of the opportunity. She makes up her mind to make him do it.

And she is right about his lack of resolve – they talk it over and he tells her that he just can’t do it. She goes into high gear and virtually holds his hand through it. One of her strongest qualities is persistence and she shows it here. Macbeth hesitates, equivocates and falters but she holds firm. She argues the case, she mocks him, bringing his manhood into question, she appeals to his sense of loyalty to her, she takes him to bed, and she finally prevails.

Macbeth kills Duncan in his sleep and from that moment their marriage begins to fall apart. They each fall into their own guilt-trip and hardly speak to each other. As king, Macbeth fears his political enemies and embarks on a reign of terror while Lady Macbeth stays in bed, unable to sleep, having nightmares when she does manage it. While walking and talking in her sleep she gives the game away about what they have done and sinks into a moral, physical and spiritual collapse. When Macbeth is on his last legs, with the rebels closing in, he gets the message that she’s dead. At that point, he says he doesn’t have time to think about it. “She should have died hereafter,” he says. Their partnership in this murderous enterprise has destroyed their marriage.

The promise of strength that we see in her at the beginning of the play is an illusion. What we are seeing is naked ambition and a willingness to act on it without having the resources to deal with the consequences. We see how guilt can eat up your soul and destroy you. We see how hollow ambition is, both in her journey and Macbeth’s.

Lady Macbeth is even more ambitious and ruthless than her husband. As soon as an opportunity to gain power presents itself, she has a plan in mind. She uses her influence to persuade Macbeth that they are taking the right course of action and even takes part in the crime herself.

For a while she is able to suppress her actions but eventually she becomes unable to deal with the guilt of what she has done. She becomes unable to sleep, and mentally unstable, eventually dying in tragic circumstances.

Lady Macbeth is, perhaps, even more determined than her husband. She can only be Queen if he becomes King so when he hesitates she displays enough ambition for both of them. Once she has worked out a plan, nothing will turn her from that course until her ambition is fulfilled.Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be / What thou art promised; yet do I fear thy nature, / It is too full o'th milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great, / Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it. (Act 1 Scene 5)Lady Macbeth's determination to succeed is clear here. She is insistent that Macbeth will become King ('shalt be what thou art promised') However, she recognises that he is 'too full o'th milk of human kindness' and that this could stand in their way. It is interesting that she describes the necessary ruthless streak as an 'illness'. This suggests that even at this stage she knows what she is doing is wrong.

Cunning

To the outside world, Lady Macbeth seems like the ideal supportive wife but this is part of her ability to be deceptive. When Macbeth expresses doubts, she uses every trick she can think of to make sure he carries out their plan to murder Duncan. When he hesitates, she is there to urge Macbeth on.All our service, / In every point twice done and then done double, / Were poor and single business to contend / Against those honours deep and broad wherewith / Your majesty loads our house. (Act 1 Scene 6)Lady Macbeth welcomes Duncan to her home and flatters him so that he will not suspect a thing. She almost overdoes it when she exaggerates 'In every point twice done and then done double'. The word 'double' also links Lady Macbeth to the evil of the witches - they use the word repeatedly in one of their spells.

Conscience-stricken

Lady Macbeth seems to go from being someone with no conscience at all to someone who is overwhelmed by feelings of guilt. She cannot bear to think of what she has done and eventually dies alone and unmourned even by her husband.Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One, two. Why then 'tis time to do't. Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear? Who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? (Act 5 Scene 1)As the guilt-stricken Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, she remembers all the evil things she and her husband have done and tries to wash imaginary blood from her hands (Out, damned spot: out, I say!). In particular, she recalls the night of Duncan's murder and the part she played in persuading her husband to act. She is also aware that she will be going to hell for her sins.

The Metaphysical Poetry

Hello, I am Emisha Ravani. Writing this blog for thinking activity for Metaphysical Poetry. 

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF METAPHYSICAL POETRY

• A group of poets emerged in the 16th century pioneered by John Donne

• Any tradition can not stay as it is so far. With passing of time it collapse. Ex. Film

• Metaphysical poetry is conscious attempt

• People crave for novelty

• They try to fetch image far from which never noticed

• ' અતિભોતિક પદ્ય' gujarati meaning of metaphysical

• Simply pray with your heart not need to be show off - Herbert

• Their poetry give the mental exercise to men. 

 A group of poet emerged in the second half of the 16th century whose poetry is identified as the metaphysical poetry. It was Dr. Samuel Johnson- A classicist of the age, who named poetry of John Donne and his school, As the metaphysical poetry. Johnson used these term while writting about the life of Abraham Cowley in his biographical work with the tittle"THE LIVES OF ENGLISH POETS" Dr. Johnson wanted to criticise the poetry of donne and his followers by using the term "metaphysical poetry". But with the passing of time the same term became the term of 'Appraisal' for their poetry. Dr. Johnson has passed on one remarkable comment stating that the poetry of metaphysical poets stood a trayal of "their finger but failed in trayal of the ears" Dr. Johnson wants to states that there is no music and rhythm in their poetry. 

                 Metaphysical poetry talks about deep things. It talks about soul, love, religion, reality etc. You can never be sure about what is coming your way while reading a metaphysical poem. There can be unusual philosophies and comparisons that will make you think and ponder.The most important characteristics of metaphysical poetry is “undissociated sensibility” (the combination of feeling and thoughts).

                   Even though it talks about serious stuff, it talks about it in a humorous way. The tone is sometimes light. It can be harsh sometimes too. The purpose is to present a new idea and make the reader think.

                    Another characteristic of such poetry is that it is unclear. Because it provides such complicated themes, the idea of metaphysical poems is somewhat not definite. It is different for every person. It depends on the perception and experiences of the reader. Every person will take something different out of the same poem based on their beliefs and understanding.

                 Metaphysical poetry is also short. It uses brief words and conveys a lot of ideas in just a small number of words. There are many maxims in this type of poetry too. John Donne introduced sayings into metaphysical poetry.

                  The unusual comparison of things in poetry is one of its unique and most interesting characteristics. All the metaphysicals have ability for unusual witty comparison , juxtaposition, and imagery. These unusual comparison are metaphysical conceits. As Donne in Twicknam Garden uses expression “spider love” that is contrary to the expectations of the readers. In the same poem, Donne also compares a lovers tears to wine of love that is unusual use of juxtaposition. Conceit compares very dissimilar things. For example bright smoke, calling lovers as two points of compass, taking soul as dew drop, etc.

                      The metaphysical poetry is brain-sprung, not heart-felt. It is intellectual and witty. According to Grierson, the two chief characteristics of metaphysical poetry are paradoxical ratiocination and passionate feelings. As Donne opens his poem “The indifferent” with a line with a paradoxical comment. “I can love both fair and brown”

Other unique feature of this poetry is Platonic Love. The word is taken after Plato. Platonic love is a non-romantic love. There is no lust or need of physical contact. It is spiritual love and is mostly for God.

                             Another feature of the metaphysical poetry is its fantastic lyrics style. As A. C. Word said: “The metaphysical style is a combination of two elements, the fantastic form and style, and the incongruous in matter manner”. The versification of the metaphysical poetry is also coarse and jerky like its diction. The main intention of the metaphysicals was to startle the readers. They deliberately avoided conventional poetic style to bring something new to the readers. Their style was not conventional and the versification contrast with much of the Elizabethan writers.It arouses some extreme level of thoughts and feelings in the readers by asking life-altering questions.

The  Metaphysical Poem: 'The Flea'

Original poem:

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,   

How little that which thou deniest me is;   

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;   

Thou know’st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,

    Yet this enjoys before it woo,

    And pampered swells with one blood made of two,

    And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,

Where we almost, nay more than married are.   

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;   

Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,   

And cloistered in these living walls of jet.

    Though use make you apt to kill me,

    Let not to that, self-murder added be,

    And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since

Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?   

Wherein could this flea guilty be,

Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?   

Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou   

Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;

    ’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:

    Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,

    Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

Explaination as a Metaphysical Poem:

The Flea (1633), written by John Donne is a short metaphysical poem that deals with the poet’s addressing his beloved about their sexual union with the help of the insect flea. It gives an insight into the sexual intimacy and challenges the contemporary Reformation where Donne seems to be playful with his explicit sexual imagery and language. Donne uses aspects of conceits , wits , unification of sensibility, puns and others as a metaphysical element in the poem.

The poem uses metaphysical conceits where the body of the flea is exaggerated and stretched to give a meaning out of it. When the flea bites his mistress and him then their blood is mingled inside the body of the flea. It is further stretched where the body of the flea is compared to the wedding chapels and their sexual consummation or marriage bed. Here, Donne is using a conceit to express the body of the flea as their sexual union where both the analogies contradicts to one another yet it is stretched to give a meaning out of it.

The poet uses his wits and intellect to justify and expound his arguments in the poem. He uses his wit by stating that his mistress should not kill the flea since they can be one and united in the body of the flea even if their parents disapprove of their relationship. He tells his mistress that they are safe within the body of the flea and killing the flea itself will add to her list of sins including the three sins which will come out of killing the flea. The three sins include the sin of killing the flea, the betrayal of their marriage as well dishonoring her chastity. Here, Donne uses his wit to justify his argument rhetorically and are calculated precisely to make his argument justifiable to his mistress.

The poem embodies the idea of unification of sensibility. It is when the poem has a balanced proportion of wit and emotions at the same time. The poem has the aspects of writer’s wit and the emotions. The emotions arises out of his love for his mistress and seduction whereas the wits arises out his arguments and justification to his mistress. The poem blends the equal proportion of wits and emotions and hence the unification of sensibility is deposited.

Lastly, the poem seems to address subtly the Christian references which would give an ironical overview for the Renaissance readers. It seems that Donne is aware of the contemporary Reformation status where discipline and chastity are being introduced in the society but he seems to input it in his writing yet is playful about it. He compares his sexual union as the “marriage temple” where the “temple” is the Church. Indeed, it is a Christian reference but he seems to address in an ironical way. It is a pun where he is showing to the readers about the importance of chastity and discipline in the poetic style but he is showing different aspects in his thematic style. He address that the idea of chastity that is embodied in the body of the flea where killing it would establish three sins. These three sins refer to the dishonor of the Holy Trinity itself. Donne is playful here and he is suggesting his beloved not to kill the flea since she would lose as much honor as the flea took away her blood.