Huck Finn essays

Huck Finn essays Huckleberry Finn: The experiences of an endangered child Mark Twain created a character that expresses freedom within American society. Huckleberry Finn lives on the margins of society because he is the son of a town drunk. He sleeps where he pleases and eats where he pleases. No one requires him to attend school or church, bath or dress respectably. Years of having to fend for himself have invested Huck with solid common sense. Huckleberry Finns background is as important as his personality in this novel. He is only thirteen years old when he sets out on his own. He comes from the lowest levels of white society. His father was a drunk and he is often dirty and frequently homeless. Widow Douglass and Miss Watson reform him throughout the novel. The community failed to protect him from his father and he was denied schooling and religious training. He feels society and enters the natural world where he feels most at home. He and a friend, Tom Sawyer cross paths in the wilderness and decide to travel together. Both use a raft to escape the bondage of the land. Through Huck, Twain weighs the costs and benefits of living in society against those of living independently of society. Adult societies disapprove of Huck, but because he appears to be a likeable boy, the adults disapproval of Huck generally separates the readers from them and not from Huck himself. Throughout the novel, Huck becomes skeptical of the world around him and constantly looks to distance him from it. Since he is a child, Huck is always vulnerable; any adult he encounters has power over him. This allows Twain to compare Huck to Jim, who is a slave and also vulnerable to whites, even a poor white child such as Huck. Hucks childhood leads him to often distrust people. That same distrust and his experiences as he travels down the river force him to question the things he has been taught. Hucks sense of logic and fairn...

The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessings Feminist Novel

The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessings Feminist Novel Doris Lessings The Golden Notebook was published in 1962. Over the next several years,  feminism  again became a significant movement in the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of the world. The Golden Notebook was seen by many feminists of the 1960s as an influential work that revealed the experience of women in society. Notebooks of a Womans Life The Golden Notebook tells the story of Anna Wulf and her four notebooks of different colors that narrate aspects of her life. The notebook of the title is a fifth, gold-colored notebook in which Annas sanity is questioned as she weaves together the other four notebooks. Annas dreams and diary entries appear throughout the novel. Postmodern Structure The Golden Notebook has autobiographical layers: the character Anna reflects elements of author Doris Lessings own life, while Anna writes an autobiographical novel about her imagined Ella, who writes autobiographical stories. The structure of The Golden Notebook also intertwines the political conflicts and emotional conflicts in the characters lives. Feminism and feminist theory often rejected traditional form and structure in art and literature. The Feminist Art Movement considered rigid form to be a representation of patriarchal society, a male-dominated hierarchy. Feminism and postmodernism often overlap; both theoretical viewpoints can be seen in analysis of The Golden Notebook. A Consciousness-Raising Novel Feminists also responded to the consciousness-raising aspect of The Golden Notebook. Each of Annas four notebooks reflects a different area of her life, and her experiences lead to a larger statement about flawed society as a whole. The idea behind consciousness-raising is that the personal experiences of women should not be separated from the political movement of feminism. In fact, the personal experiences of women reflect the political state of society. Hearing Womens Voices The Golden Notebook was both groundbreaking and controversial. It dealt with womens sexuality and questioned assumptions about their relationships with men. Doris Lessing has often stated that the thoughts expressed in The Golden Notebook should not have come as a surprise to anyone. Women had obviously been saying these things, she said, but had anyone been listening? Is The Golden Notebook a Feminist Novel? Although The Golden Notebook is often hailed by feminists as an important consciousness-raising novel, Doris Lessing has notably downplayed a feminist interpretation of her work. While she may not have set out to write a political novel, her work does illustrate ideas that were relevant to the feminist movement, particularly in the sense that the personal is political. Several years after The Golden Notebook was published, Doris Lessing said that she was a feminist because women were second-class citizens. Her rejection of a feminist reading of The Golden Notebook is not the same as rejecting feminism. She also expressed surprise that while women had long been saying these things, it made all the difference in the world that someone wrote them down. The Golden Notebook was listed as one of the hundred best novels in English by Time magazine. Doris Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature.