Critical essays on Frankenstein and Great Gatsby
great gatsby critical essay
Fitzgerald did not lack the talent it takes to get a similar unity of tone. There are plenty of pages, even in The Great Gatsby, so clearly keyed to the internal necessities, so "clean, and hard, and true," that there can be no question of his ability to write prose "of integrity." But at the point in history when the editors of the New Yorker were making epochal announcement that their magazine would not be written and edited for "the old lady from Dubuque," and every number of Mencken American Mercury was heaping slurs on the Middle West, Fitzgerald was writing for an audience which may have included the old lady herself and certainly took in her half-emancipated daughters.
great gatsby critical essays
For the issue of style is central in the structure of The Great Gatsby because it creates the voice of the "central moral consciousness." In other words, it is the principal means of characterizing Nick Carraway. Fitzgerald has been justly praised for the invention of the Carraway character. The strategy of telling the story through the awareness of a man who has his own independent life going on all the while --his job to do, his off-stage love affair to terminate, his private concerns at West Egg--greatly intensifies what Henry James would have called the "felt life" of the story.
critical essays of freud's work on women
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was the most influential of the clinical theorists. Although considered quite radical by many of his contemporaries, Freud's ideas met with increasing enthusiasm in both the psychological and medical communities and, then, in many fields of academic study. His ideas have had a tremendous impact not only on psychology and psychiatry, but also upon broader American and European culture. Few people in our society are not at least somewhat familiar with psychoanalytic theory and such basic Freudian ideas as unconscious motivation, the Oedipus complex, ego defenses, and the importance of early mother-child interactions.
critical essays on albert camus
Even the extensive L'Homme révolté is actually a group of related essays; it is not a systematic work. Albert Camus obviously has these things in mind when he insists that he is not a philosopher. By this he means that he does not proceed through induction to construct a rationally consistent picture of our universe. He can only proceed by analytical and deductive methods with what he feels are given realities of human experience; when the analysis has reached its terminus, there it remains; there is no possibility of merging the structure of the essay into a larger interpretive scheme. Albert Camus is an essayist and moral philosopher, and thus stands within a long tradition of French philosophers.
critical essays on anne bradstreet
On one hand, she fears she has become hopelessly hardened in sin, but, on the other, she sees salvation as giving up--as the capitulation and sacrifice of her individual being. Whereas Anne Bradstreet continued to struggle against her own impulses and inclinations, Emily Dickinson hon ors her feelings and does not permit her personal responses to be extinguished by external authority. That Dickinson was not simply being arbitrary in her resistance to conversion is evident in another letter she wrote to Abiah Root on January 31, 1846: "I am far from being thoughtless on the subject of religion. I continually hear Christ saying to me, Daughter give me thine heart"
critical essays on anne bradstreet
Urging their parishioners to scrutinize their lives for signs of salvation, for visible evidence of an invisible state of grace, Hooker and Shepard asserted that the prepared heart required constant testing, and therefore affliction and misfortune were to be welcomed as divine chastisement. Thomas Shepard explains the purpose of these moral trials in his journal: "if I had profited by former afflictions of this nature I should not have had the scourge." Because each setback or crisis was seen as a necessary correction demonstrating God's love, paradoxically suffering was a form of joy as Anne Bradstreet explains in her spiritual autobiography:
critical essays on Frankenstein
The most important revision made by Balderston to Webling's play concerns the third and last act. Act 2 of Webling's two versions concludes with the Creature's accidental drowning of Katrina. Act 3 then opens the following dawn in the Jura mountains, where the Creature has fled for seclusion. Balderston rewrites Webling's play so that Act 2 closes with the Creature's demand for a mate. Act 3 opens six months later in a hut in the Jura mountains on the day in which Frankenstein finally plans to bring the mate to life. Dr. Waldman arrives in time to persuade Frankenstein to abandon his operation and to destroy the being. When the Creature discovers the mutilated body of his mate, he kills Frankenstein by breaking his back.
essays on Frankenstein
While his demeanor has been elevated one notch above the dumb show Creatures of the 1820s, his attraction for Frankenstein's sister and fiancée mirrors the Beauty and the Beast episodes of the earlier dramatists. And contrasted with the Parliamentary rhetoric of Shelley's Creature, who reads Volney and Goethe and who cogitates on the implications of Milton Paradise Lost, the Creature of Webling and Balderston mumbles inchoate syllables, becomes excited by pondering the word kill, and prays to the sun. "Sun worship--fire worship," scoffs Frankenstein to Waldman in Balderston's version, "he is going through all the instinctive processes of primitive man-both in religion and behavior. Growing children do it too."
critical analysis of Frankenstein
By borrowing from the novel the demand and partial creation of a mate, Balderston introduces for the first time in any adaptation the theme of self-propagating evil. In terms of the doppelgänger, however, this conclusion has broader implications. For whereas Frankenstein is capable of engendering the male image in the Creature, he cannot project that of the female, the anima, the image that the Creature also lacks. Frankenstein's effort cannot succeed: in terms of Shelley, his failure embodies a renouncement of the Romantic quest; in terms of Balderston, only God can project both the male and the female image. The self can only engender the self in a parthenogenetic and even homoerotic form of creation.
critical essays on Frankenstein
In conclusion, the melodramas of Balderston and Webling culminate over 100 years of dramatizations of Frankenstein; after 1931 the influence of the first Universal film revitalized the myth and echoes through every sphere--dramatic, cinematic, and literary. Over seventy films and almost an equal number of dramatizations have been completed since 1931. 31 Furthermore, whereas before 1931 Frankenstein had only been translated into French, Italian, and German, since that date the novel has appeared in at least thirty-eight separate translations of nineteen languages--including Urdu and Sanskrit. Finally, whereas almost thirty editions of the novel were published between 1818 and 1931, after that date over twice as many appeared.