"A Rose for Emily"

“The structure of the story is subtle and complex, and it is not easy to keep track of the time and chronology.”

1) Make a short chronological summary of the story.

The story told chronological

“A Rose for Emily” was written by William Faulkner and was published in 1930. It is the story of an eccentric woman, Emily Grierson and the story is told by an unnamed narrator who reviles the strange circumstances of Emily’s life and the horrible secret she hides.

The story begins with Emily’s father’s death. Everyone in the town feels sorry for Emily when her father dies. He left her with the house, but with no money. Emily also refuses to admit that he died for three whole days. People in the town thought that she had trouble letting go of her dad. Not too long after her father’s death, she starts to date a guy named Homer Barron. The people in the town do not really like the relationship between Emily and Homer and brings in Emily’s cousins to stop them.

One day Emily is seen buying some arsenic and the people in town thinks that Emily is going to kill herself. After this, Homer Barron is assumed to have returned north, since he is not heard from again. But soon after, Homer comes back and he is last seen entering Emily’s house.

The tax collecting people had a strange meet with Emily because of a really bad smell that came from her house. The stink got worse and people complained a lot about it. Emily is heard from less and less and hardly ever leaves her home. The next thing that happens is Emily’s funeral. Nobody has been at her house for ten years and Emily eventually dies in a bedroom that, old and grey. After Emily’s huge funeral, the people in the town breaks into Emily’s house and the room they know have been locked for forty years. Inside the room, they find the corpse of Homer Barron and next to him a shape of another person’s head and a long grey hair.

2) Why are some of the story elements repeated such as the smell and the question of Emily's taxes?

Some of the elements in the story are repeated such as the question of Emily’s taxes. This might be a symbol of death. Since there are a lot of deaths in the story, the question of Emily’s taxes is repeated. For instance when Emily’s father dies and also 30 years after when Homer Barron dies, the same question is repeated. The repeating of the smell in the story can be used to foreshadow Homer Barron’s fate.

3) Right from the start there is an atmosphere of mystery and unreality in the story. Find examples in the text that show how this is achieved. You may work together with a fellow student on this, but both have to post on their blogs, and hand in individual links to their blogs.

Right from the start there is an atmosphere of mystery and unreality and I think that’s partly because of the narrative point of view of the townspeople. Emily is also kept on a certain distance, which means that we do not exactly get to know her and that creates a very mysterious feeling. An example here, is for instance when the townspeople sprinkle lime around her house (to get rid of the horrible smell), and she just views them at a distance from her bedroom.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rose_for_Emily

http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=3217

http://www.enotes.com/rose-emily

http://www.shmoop.com/a-rose-for-emily/summary.html

http://www.shmoop.com/a-rose-for-emily/death-taxes-symbol.html

"The Girl with a Pearl Earring"

The girl with a pearl earring is written by Tracy Chevalier. The story is about 16 year old Griet who becomes a maid in the famous painter Johannes Vermeer’s house. My impression of the girl in the painting is that since her eyes are wide open and her mouth is half- smiling, she gives an impression of both innocence and seductiveness. She looks at the painter with a kind of sensuality and virtue. But I also got the impression that she is very nervous as she sits in front of the man she kind of love. In the house she is quickly going from a young and innocent life to an adult and grown up one. Her life gets so changed when she works in Vermeer’s house and she finds herself growing more and more apart from her family and closer and closer to Vermeer.

I really liked the book and I think it was both interesting and exciting. We get a close look into Griet’s life, the complicated family she works with and even the society of the small town.

The Young Victoria

Princess Victoria: Do you ever feel like a chess piece yourself? In a game being played against your will. Prince Albert: Do you? Princess Victoria: Constantly. I see them leaning in and moving me around the board. Prince Albert: The Duchess and Sir John? Princess Victoria: Not just them. Uncle Leopold. The king. I'm sure half the politicians are ready to seize hold of my skirts and drag me from square to square. Prince Albert: Then you had better master the rules of the game until you play it better than they can. Princess Victoria: You don't recommend I find a husband to play it for me? Prince Albert: I should find one to play it with you, not for you. This quote is from the film "The Young Victoria", which is a film based on a true story on the early life and reign of Queen Victoria and her marriage with Prince Albert. The film was directed by Jean-Marc Vallee and was published in 2009. The main character, Victoria is played by Victoria is only 18 when she becomes the Queen of Britain. But Victoria feels controlled by everyone around here, especially by her mother and Sir John Conroy (comptroller of the Duchess’s household) who controls her every move. The reason they control here this way is because they want to get Victoria to signing her power over to her mother (something they do not manage). But after she becomes the Queen she manages to get more independent and free. I think the quote here, represents that. When she is playing chess with Prince Albert she is asking him if he also feel controlled and forced by people around him. But he is than answering that she have to play the game better than they do. I think this movie was really good and interesting and I really liked it. The story is really a love story, focusing mostly on the love between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The love she felt for Albert were actually so strong that she wore black for the 40 years she was widow. Sources: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1948663,00.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Victoria http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0962736/

Humphry Davy and the Davy lamp

Humphry Davy was a british chemist and inventor. He started to experiment with lamps and soon he is a safety lamp with a wick and oil vessel burning originally a heavy vegetable oil, devised in 1815 by Sir Humphry Davy. It was created for use in coal mines, allowing deep seams to be mined despite the presence of methane and other flammablegases, called firedamp or minedamp. Davy had discovered that a flame enclosed inside a mesh of a certain fineness cannot ignite firedamp. The screen acts as a flame arrestor; air (and any firedamp present) can pass through the mesh freely enough to support combustion, but the holes are too fine to allow a flame to propagate through them and ignite any firedamp outside the mesh. The first trial of a Davy lamp with a wire sieve was at Hebburn Colliery on 9 January 1816.

Comparing The Painting "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth with the short story "The Story of an Hour"

In the picture we see a girl crawling trough the grass, trying to reach a house or a farm witha sort of handicap. This demonstrate hopelessness which I get the sense that Mrs Mallars in "The Story of an Hour" is having too. She wants to be free from her husband and if we compare Mrs. Mallard with the girl in the painting we can see that they both are kind of trapped. I also think the mood in the painting is quite similar to the mood in the short story but at the same time i don't think it fit that much. The girl in the painting has obvious some physical damages of some kind of sort, but the girl in the story feels trapped because she can't leave her husband.

So in many ways the painting and the story has some similarities, but not in everything.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingsway was born in 1898. He was an American journalist and author. He played a major role in defining twentieth-century American literature. Many of his works are classics in American literature and he even won the Publitzer price in 1953 and the Nobel Price in Literature in 1954.

His first novel was published in 1926 and was called "The Sun Also Rises". All together he has written seven novels, six short story collections and two non-fiction works.

Ernest Hemingway was married four times. He married his first wife, Hadley Richardson in 1921 and together they had a son called Jack. They were relatively poor but survived on the money Ernest made from his writing of short stories. But Ernest divorced Hadley in 1927 and married his second wife shortly after.

For his actions in World War I he also won the Italian Silver Medal for Valor and he also reported on the Spanish Civil War and World War II. During World War II he spent most of his time in Cuba and Key West where he patrolled the seas, searching for German submarines. It was during the second World War he met his last wife, Mary, which he married in 1946.

In the late 50's Ernest got really sick, and he got threated for high blood pressure and depression. He also suffered from his war injuries and there were also several signs which seemed to indicate suicidal tendencies.

Ernst Hemingway died in the summer of 1961 where he shot himself just as his father had done in 1928.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway

http://www.enotes.com/authors/ernest-hemingway

http://www.leninimports.com/ernest_hemingway.html