Kate in the Elizabethan Era

At the end of Shakespeare’s play, was Kate really “tamed”? It might appear to the rest of the characters that she was tamed, but her speech at the end didn’t fool the audience. Kate is quite intelligent and full of passion, and I don’t think she was broken so easily. While those men betting on her obedience might agree Petruccio “hast tamed a cursed shrew”, she is choosing rather to put on a disguise. She cleverly disguises herself as an obedient wife as a way to ensure she can live in harmony with the dominant patriarchal society.
The views of society in the Elizabethan Era are expressed in “The Taming of the Shrew”. Women are meant to be obedient and are prized for their silence. They are meant to be submissive and used. They are treated much like animals—betted on and coerced to submission. There are many references in the play alluding to Kate being a cat or a falcon who’s being domesticated, in a sense, by Petruccio. Marriage is based on economics mostly as well as your social standing. This Patriarchal Society was dominated by men and women were given no freedom, justice, or even allowed to have any original thoughts, much less express them. They were molded by society and used for economic gain and bearing children.
Kate knows the expectations of a woman in her society, and she is initially conflicted with fitting in while retaining her intelligence. At the end of the play where she is giving her speech, we come to the conclusion that she has matured and found a way to both balance her place in a patriarchal society and her outspokenness and intelligence. While her speech is sickeningly subservient, the fact that she is even talking to a room full of men about her opinions is that side of Kate that will never be tamed. In the end, she finds it the best for everyone for her to disguise herself as an obedient wife. While she is not “tamed” per se, she has matured and has found a way that everyone wins.

Shakespeare's Stage

Act three, scene two does a great job at using language to get the reader to imagine what the characters looked like and how they acted during the wedding. The wedding isn’t actually staged in front of us, but rather it is described to the reader by someone who was at the wedding. Shakespeare also writes in clues to the reader earlier in the scene about the time of day it takes place, where it takes place, and how strangely Petruccio was dressed for the wedding.

The scene opens with clues about the time of day and which day it is. Baptista says, “Signoir Lucentio, this is the ‘pointed day/ That Katherine and Petruccio should be married…” (1-2). Petruccio, after he arrives says, “The morning wears. ‘Tis time we were at church” (112). From these clues worked into the dialogue, we get the day, the time of day, and the setting and purpose of the scene. The main conflict in the scene is the ridiculous manner in which Petruccio arrives to his own wedding. His clothing is described in lengthy detail by a servant who has arrived ahead of Petruccio and Grumio. This is a completely overwhelming description to Baptista and Tranio, but to the audience it is easy to find the comedy in his appearance even before he arrives. The audience is also able to guess at why he is dressed so absurdly. Tranio says, “’Tis some odd humor pricks him to this fashion…” (71). This gives a huge clue to the audience that Petruccio dressed like this on purpose, and we are able to infer that it is to embarrass and bewilder Katherine. Later in the scene, we don’t actually witness the wedding, but Shakespeare writes in a brilliantly humorous description of the unorthodox wedding. Gremio says, “This mad-brained bridegroom took him in such a cuff/ That down fell priest and book, and book and priest” (165-66). When we get a description of something funny from another person, it becomes funnier as we try to relive it in our imagination. This is why this secondary view of the wedding was so effective at capturing the humor and ridiculousness of the situation Petruccio is causing.

Eveline

Joyce’s short story, “Eveline”, depicts the classic story of a teenage girl determined to run away with her lover in order to escape her current oppressive life, although with a more realistic ending. She has met this wonderful man, Frank, who would be able to take her to places across the world that she longs to see. Her life at home is demanding and her father is overbearing; like most eldest daughters, she has taken on the duties and position of her mother after her mother died. Throughout the story, she is contemplating the meaning and worth of her life at home, and what it would be like if she left with Frank. As most young women with plans to escape would do, she argues back and forth with herself, trying to decide the best thing to do for her and her family whom she has an obligation to take care of. She experiences a sudden epiphany while she is reliving her mother’s death. “Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too…She has a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her” (40). Eveline’s epiphany is that she wants to be happy and escape with Frank, to start a new life and new adventure with someone she loves. Her epiphany, however, is not carried though as paralysis grips Eveline and stops her from carrying out her dream. She is overwhelmed with family ties, her promise to her mother to keep their home together, and her duty at home. She ends up doing what her mother did—something she firmly resolved she wasn’t going to do. Instead of escaping she clings to the familiar and the safe, destined to live her continuously repetitive life in Dublin safe in non-changing circumstances and mindless chores.

Gogol & Kafka

Kafka’s Metamorphosis reminds me a lot of The Nose by Gogol. Both of these stories are set in mundane settings and feature absurd events. Metamorphosis tells of a man who transforms into a giant insect one morning and The Nose features a high-ranking official who suddenly loses his nose and searches the city to find it. As absurd as both of them are, they are also each using their stories as a metaphor to comment on the absurdness, randomness, and uncertainty of the social capitalist world.

There are many things in Metamorphosis that suggest that Kafka’s novella is a metaphor for contemporary society. The first and most suggestive is the fact that the protagonist is transformed into a large insect and is viewed by everyone around him as vermin. This can translate to how the middle or lower working classes are seen by the higher classes and those of high station in the government as “vermin” or dirty. Also, Kafka uses the unfamiliar within the mundane and inverts the typical system of justice and right and wrong in order to portray the reality of the social order in society—randomness and absurdness often overcome justice and order. Kafka targets capitalist society and its alienation of low to middle class workers and shows through Gregor’s metamorphosis into an insect, and his eventual death, that the good don’t die young. It is important to pick details out from the story—such as Gregor’s desire to make it to work even once he has found out he’s an insect or his family’s reaction to him once he transformed—so that you can understand that while it is merely a story, there is a lot of meaning behind the actions of the characters and the metaphors carefully placed throughout the story.

Gogol’s story, The Nose has a lot conceptually in common with Metamorphosis. In Gogol’s story a very materialistic major loses his nose, which he later finds, reattaches, and continues on with his life as materialistic and womanizing as before. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Gregor, a slave to his social and economic class, is turned into a grotesque insect and later dies of the melancholy of alienation due to his appearance. Gogol’s story, much like Kafka’s, targets the Aristocratic class and the meddling government bureaucracy and conveys that randomness and absurdness will always have a place in the world, and that materialists stay materialists and justice is short lived and often non-existent. Both of these stories comment on the desensitization of those who are “formed” by contemporary society. This is seen through Gregor’s transformation into a vermin and Kovaliov’s embarrassment at the loss of his nose.

“...are there not absurd things everywhere?—and yet, when you think it over, there really is something in it. Despite what anyone may say, such things do happen—not often, but they do happen” (Gogol, The Nose).

The most thoroughly cited paragraph EVER

The German-Jewish-Czech Kafka was famed for his portrayals of alienation and faceless bureaucracy. All of Kafka’s works are marked by an impressively created sense of hopelessness and an absence of a more optimistic future. Nowhere is the individual able to escape the authoritarian and hierarchal structures of family and society. In The Metamorphosis, protagonist Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself turned into a vermin. He tries to convince himself to feel normal, but his incomprehensible condition as an insect proves otherwise. The Metamorphosis is an allegorical tale, which means that the events symbolize a more general human condition in modern society and depict the "profound danger to humanity of the demands of bourgeois acquisitive life”. The reification of human relationships in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century due to social and historical upheavals resulted in the general feeling of rootlessness and alienation among people. The fragmentation of society and life evoked a sense of inner anguish and anxiety. This culminated in the themes of loss, loneliness, and meaninglessness of life. Kafka belonged to this modern period of alienation and disorientation. His protagonists are, therefore, portrayed as estranged victims leading an Absurd life in a familiar yet a strange world. Applying the context of alienation to Kafka’s novella, we can view Gregor's transformation as an extended metaphor, carried from abstract concept to concrete reality: trapped in a meaningless job and isolated from the human beings around him, Gregor is thought of as an insect by himself and by others, so he becomes one. His vision of lonely individuals trapped in bureaucratic or legal labyrinths can be seen as a powerful metaphor for modern experience.

Poe's Short Stories

Edgar Allen Poe, the master of short stories, filled his stories with mystery, death, anger, murder, and perverseness. Three of his stories that all contain these characteristics are “The Black Cat”, “Tell Tale Heart”, and “The Cast of Amontillado”. All three of these short stories share characteristics with each other that exemplify common themes that Poe writes about.
At the beginning of many of his stories, especially in “The Black Cat” and “Tell Tale Heart”, Poe includes a sort of disclosure from the narrator declaring or explaining something. In “The Black Cat” and “Tell Tale Heart”, there is an explanation of why the narrator isn’t crazy for what he eventually goes on to say he did. In “The Cask of Amontillado”, the narrator makes a similar disclosure but this time explaining why he was murdering Fortunado in the first place. These explanations at the beginning of these stories are really interesting because they are walking the reader through these very logical, lucid points and you begin the story thinking the narrator is quite rational and clear headed. As you read the story and are a witness to the perverse crimes that the narrator commits, you question his sanity and you are conflicted with whether he is crazy or in fact as rational as he says he is. This is a very clever way of confusing the reader and giving the narrator some extra depth. In “The Cask of Amontillado” the narrator explains to the reader why he wants revenge on Fortunado and vaguely tells us that there were some injuries done unto him by Fortunado, and later insult on top of that. At the end of the story, however, when you realize that the narrator, Montresor, murders this man because of some injuries committed against him, you question whether he is sane or not.
Another theme that appears in all three of these stories is the perverseness of man. This theme is shown through the narrator’s actions in each of the stories and questions the reader whether this perverseness could be found in them, in all men. This “heart of darkness” or “perverseness” is found in “Tell Tale Heart” when the narrator kills the old man simply because his “evil eye” is bothering him. It’s also found in “The Black Cat” when the narrator cuts out the cat’s eye because he thought the cat had ignored him and then goes on to later kill his wife with an axe and buries her behind a wall of bricks. “Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man” (Poe, Black Cat). Poe suggests that this impulse to commit perverse acts is found in all men and it is only a matter of time before it is acted upon. This spirit of perverseness is also found in “The Cask of Amontillado” when the narrator, just like the one in “The Black Cat” murders his victim based only on a minor dispute and disposes of the body behind a brick wall.
Seeing that Poe was an alcoholic himself, it is no surprise that alcohol is found to affect many of the narrators in his stories. In “The Black Cat”, alcohol is what the narrator claims to have led him to cut the cat’s eye out and he used alcohol to drown his guilt of the occurrence. In “The Cask of Amontillado”, wine and alcohol is what eventually leads to Fortunato’s death. I feel that with Poe, he incorporates a lot of his ideas, thoughts, and problems into his stories and maybe even uses his stories to vicariously commit crimes or do things that he wouldn’t be able to do in reality.

"Daddy" in a Cheeseburger!

In her poem “Daddy”, Silvia Plath uses vivid imagery and metaphors to express her relationship with the men in her life. Using Nazi and Jew imagery as a metaphor, she is able to communicate to her readers the trauma of the oppression of her father and husband. She takes images of concentration camps, prisons, stomping feet, and swastikas and associates them with her father and husband while she compares herself to the Jews, the victim. “You do not do, you do not do any more, black shoe in which I have lived like a foot for thirty years, poor and white, barely daring to breathe or Achoo” (1-5). The many Nazi images that she uses, accompanied by a lot of symbolism incorporated into those metaphors build emotion and sympathy for the reader. The symbolism is important in expressing her ideas because certain symbols she uses are widely recognized and have attached emotions and relations. Using such extreme symbols and images is what allows her to express how traumatic her experience was.


Revised
In her poem “Daddy”, Silvia Plath applies vivid imagery and metaphors to express her relationship with the men in her life—her father and husband. Using Nazi and Jew imagery and symbolism as a metaphor, she is able to communicate to her readers the trauma of the oppression forced upon her by her father and husband. She builds emotion and tension between images of concentration camps, prisons, stomping feet, and swastikas and associates them with her opressive father and husband while she compares herself to the Jews, the tortured victim. “You do not do, you do not do/ Any more, black shoe/ In which I have lived like a foot for thirty years, poor and white,/ Barely daring to breathe or Achoo” (1-5). The many Nazi images that she uses, accompanied by a lot of symbolism incorporated into those metaphors build emotion and sympathy for the reader. The symbolism is important in expressing her ideas because certain symbols she uses are widely recognized and have attached emotions and relations. “Not God but a swastika/ So black no sky could squeak through./ Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you” (46-50). These symbols and imagery such as the Swastika, the idea of the Fascist, a black boot, and the color black are symbols that have a universal and cultural understanding and emotions attached to them. Through the utilization of these symbols and imagery she can transfer her emotions to her writing, and then to her reader. Using such extreme symbols and images are what allow her to fully express how traumatic her life with her father and husband was.

A problem with my first paragraph was that I didn't use enough examples and explanation of those examples to argue the point of the paragraph. Also, I argued in more of a general sense, rather than on close reading. In the revised paragraph, I added more quotes and explanation of those quotes and I tried to delve deaper into how the symbolism effects the close reading and emotion of the poem. I think that the revisions helped to build the argument more, but I felt that I wasn't able to incorporate enough close reading into the broader argument.