Mrs. Ramsay characterization

Mrs. Ramsay is characterized as a beautiful and charismatic woman who is widely admired as well admiring of others. At face value, her marriage to Mr. Ramsay seems idealistic however, when it is scrutinized in other characters' thoughts, flaws begin to appear. Lily, a young intellectual, is in awe of Mrs. Ramsay's perfectly  traditional lifestyle, a path Lily herself has made a conscientious decision to avoid. While Lily is impressed by Mrs. Ramsay's accomplishments, she can't help but also question the possibility of unfulfillment that may accompany Mrs. Ramsay's lifestyle. This thought is addressed later on by Mrs. Ramsay when she thinks, "...he will never be so happy again, but stopped herself, remembering how it angered her husband that she should say that. Still, it was true" (62). On the opposite end of the spectrum, Mr. Ramsay is fully aware of the compromises Mrs. Ramsay makes despite her undeniable strengths. Mr. Ramsay's thoughts confirm what Lily speculates. He realizes that while it is his role of the marriage to be the intelligent, accomplished half, he realizes that his success would be nonexistent had it not been for the charisma of his wife.

Research Paper Outline

(the info sheet said to share outline on a google doc but just in case, I'm posting it here too.)

Life and Work of Dorothy Parker

    Dorothy Parker was an American writer with a sharp tongue and biting wit who lived through one of the most vibrant times in American History. Despite her satirical style, Parker’s life was filled with misfortune and struggle that is reflected in her work. Even though history remembers her as a humor writer, her work extends to social criticism, civil rights activism, war reporting and brutally honest life reflections.

s1) Dorothy Parker, born August 22 1893 New Jersey. Died June 7th, 1967.

Journalist, writer, and poet, civil rights activist.

- Wrote for the The New Yorker Magazine, Vogue, Vanity Fair,

- Formed a group called the Algonquin Round Table with writer Robert Benchley and playwright Robert Sherwood

- After Hollywood, still a well-regarded writer and poet, wrote a play entitled Ladies of the Corridor in 1953

Early Life

Despite her legacy as a humorist, Dorothy Parker was born into a tragedy riddled family. Her life filled with sudden catastrophe inspired her signature telephone greeting, “What fresh Hell is this?”.

- Born August 22 1893 New Jersey. 3 much older siblings .

- Parents Jacob Henry Rothschild & Annie Eliza (Maston) Rothschild

-Mother dies 1897,father married Eleanor Frances Lewis 1899

- Never close with stepmother, dies 1903

- Attended Blessed Sacrament Academy because of Stepmother even though she was Jewish

-At age fourteen, Dorothy dropped out of school never receiving a High School diploma although she was an avid reader.

-An uncle was killed on the Titanic

-Father died 1913, broke after a decline in business as a garment manufacturer, Dorothy was 20, began playing piano and taught at a ballet school.

-Within a year she broke into the magazine business by selling her poem “Any Porch” to Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair. He later helped her get a job writing captions for Vogue in 1914.

-1917 she married Edwin Parker, a stock broker. Married for ten years until Parker returned from WWI an alcohol and morphine addiction. Kept the last name ‘Parker’.

Career

-At Vanity Fair she became New York's only female drama critic at the time

-Critic job led to her invitation and the creation of the Algonquin Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel

-The Algonquin Round Table was a group of famed New York writers who gathered at the Algonquin Hotel to meet and discuss events for over a decade. Notable members included: Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross,Robert Benchley; columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Heywood Broun, and Broun’s wife Ruth Hale; critic Alexander Woollcott; comedian Harpo Marx; and playwrights George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, and Robert Sherwood

-ART came to define American humor of the era.

-Throughout the 1920s, her life took on the surface glamour of the Jazz Age

-Despite her surface success, Parker had a troubled personal life, unsuccessful love affairs, suicide attempts . (This parallels the characteristics of Jazz Age).

-The most intense of these, with writer Charles MacArthur, ended in pregnancy, abortion, and a suicide attempt

-Married Alan Campbell, a writer and former actor who shared her Jewish-Gentile heritage, he was also speculated to be bisexual. Moved to Hollywood and wrote or contributed to scripts for thirty-nine films. (2)

-Poem Unfortunate Coincidence reflects on Parker’s failed relationships.

-As the popularity in sound motion pictured increased, so did the demand hollywood script writers. Many members of the Algonquin migrated west. Parker followed reluctantly because of her, “deep distrust of any place outside the borough of Manhattan.”

--1930s and 1940s, spent time in Hollywood, California writing screenplays with her second husband Alan Campbell, including the 1937 adaptation of A Star Is Born (Academy Award Nomination)  and the 1942 Alfred Hitchcock film Saboteur. In 1937, Campbell and Parker had a combined salary of $5,000 a week, unheard of during the Great Depression.

Later Years: (Source 3)

A political activist, Parker supported the Actor's Equity Strike in 1919, criticized pretentious and hypocritical men who hid behind leftist politics and art in several of her poems, and was arrested for protesting the Sacco and Vanzetti executions in 1927. (2)

-She traveled to Spain during its civil war and returned to write two of her war stories, "Soldier's of the Republic" and "Who Might Be Interested".

-She was involved with the Communist Party in the 1930s, led to her being blacklisted in Hollywood.

-"The Lovely Leave" and "Song of a Shirt, 1941," examine war from a domestic point of view

-Her pro-communist sympathies were noted by the F.B.I.; the agency kept a nine hundred page file on her.

-She and Campbell divorced in 1947, and remarried in 1950. Separated 1952-1961. Campbell dies of a sleeping pill overdose in 1963

-Moved back to New York in 1964

-Died of a heart attack in 1967 at age 73. She left her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. foundation.

Writing Style

Dorothy Parker wrote from experience and often followed themes of female life including love, men, their unreliability, social standards and of course death. Death in Parker’s work is most often characterized as untimely or prospective. One of her most well known pieces describes various methods of killing oneself, several she had tested personally.

Resume Analysis

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

- A her matter-of-fact view of life and death

-Ambiguity in title. Without accents, it means to carry on despite obstacles, a message evident in the poem. With the meaning of a sort of summary, it is a statement of her experience towards the struggles in her personal life including four suicide attempts. (1)

-When "Resume" was published, some people admired the way she had transformed a near-fatal experience into dark humor.

Humor: “Humor to me, Heaven help me, takes in many things. There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind. There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it. There must be some lagniappe in the fact that the humorist has read something written before 1918.” Dorothy Parker, The Most of S. J. Perelman, by S. J. Perelman (1).

- Parker’s poems function as a vehicle for social criticism

-Her wit was her weapon, used to tell truths close to her experience

-Satirized stereotypical female characters, more bitterly than playfully.There were limited occupations available to American women during the Twenties and Thirties, decades when the predominant image of the American woman was the sexually free, even promiscuous, flapper. (1)

-Her humor is explores the bittersweet, serio-comic, a depiction of the sexual double standard and uneasy relations between men and women.

-An example of work that follows the style of the time is 1927’s “Arranged in Black and White.”

- “Big Blonde” is one of Parker’s most celebrated pieces. It won the O. Henry Prize in 1929 for best short story. The story reflects much of Parker’s personal life including tumultuous relationships, career struggles and a suicide attempt by the main character similar to her own. (2)

Works Cited

Source 1)

"Dorothy Parker Biography." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television, n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2014. <http://www.biography.com/people/dorothy-parker-9433450>

Source 2)

Parker, Dorothy. The portable Dorothy Parker. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Print.

Source 3)

Pettit, Rhonda . "Bio-Critical Summary and Selected Bibliography: Dorothy Parker." Bio-Critical Summary and Selected Bibliography. Modern American Poetry, n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2014. <http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets

To The Lighthouse Narration

    One of the most stand out characteristics of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse is the unique way in which it is narrated. The story follows the thoughts of several characters through a variation of stream of conscience, none of which is in first person. By giving each character similar means of expression, the characters' thoughts and personalities are an opportunity for the reader to form opinions or interpret morality. With a lack of omniscient narrator, the thoughts of the characters are presented without further explanation. By observing different themes and events through multiple perspectives, the ideas presented are thoroughly explored through the different demographics of the characters. While the multiple insights broadens the experience for the reader, it could also cause confusion based on the uniform means of narration.  
(apparently I pressed save instead of publish yesterday.)

Picture of Dorian Gray Essay Outline

   Lord Henry Wotton is a self indulgent character who, with his eloquence and status, creates a deceiving image of sophistication.  Henry's role in the story is the most detrimental to Dorian's fate because he is the first to introduce Dorian to the hedonistic lifestyle and later unwilling to help him recover his righteousness.  
   Henry is the first character to cause Dorian to be concerned for the mortality of his beauty, "When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you" (164).
  Henry, on several occasions, completely alters Dorian's opinion using adages that don't seem to have little validity. Dorian is initially very enthusiastic at the notion of marrying Sybil Vane, but one conversation with Henry seems to convince him otherwise. "Never marry at all Dorian. Men marry because they are bored; women because they are curious: both are disappointed" (191).
    When Henry returns later in the story as an older man, he has lost much of the finesse that made him notable. His lack of investment and understanding in what he has done to Dorian emphasize the degree to which his advice should not be taken.
  Basil introduces Dorian to his vanity and is the artist who painted the portrait, but his guilt is redeemed when he acts as a conscience for Dorian even though he refuses. This is evident in the scenes in which Basil learns of Sybil's suicide and when he is reunited with the painting in its grotesque form. "Dorian, this is horrible! Something has changed you completely" (261).

Alan Campbell

    In chapter 14, the character, Alan Campbell, makes a brief appearance to unwillingly assist Dorian in the disposal of Basil's body. In order to gain Alan's help, Dorian threatens him with blackmail about information that is never revealed: "I have written the letter already...If you don't help me, I will send it. You know what the result will be" (332).  Even though the secret is unexplained, given the time period and "intimacy" of the relationship, it can be inferred that Alan is gay. In Victorian England, homosexuality was a crime punishable by imprisonment, Wilde himself was found guilty in 1895. While it isn't a huge threat by today's standards, revealing Alan equivocates Dorian's crime of murder. The ruthlessness of Dorian's threats are further evidence of how he has devolved from a decent person over the years by being willing to destroy the lives of close friends. Alan Campbell is not only a plot device used to benefit the story, but also a social political statement of the time.

The Flea and The Apparition

   The poem, "The Apparition" serves as a sequel to the poem, "The Flea," with the speaker of the first poem seeking revenge against his lover as a ghost. The betrayal and resentment between the speaker and hos lover is highlighted by the use contrasting situations such as are feeling sympathy for traditionally unsympathetic characters and wavering approval of traditional beliefs.
   The main subjects of the poems are a ghost and a flea, things that are typically considered evil or invasive are both described as having innocence: "The blood of innocence" and "threatenings rest still innocent". To distance the woman further, the speaker describes her as "cruel" and "wretched". By giving otherwise unsympathetic, the speaker is antagonizing his love and making her seem more vindictive than the flea or the ghost.
   The female lover in both poems is unable to please the speaker sexually even though she displays opposing behavior in the separate occasions. In "The Flea", the speaker is frustrated by his love's refusal to sleep with him, "Thou knowest that this cannot be said a sin, nor shame nor loss of maiden head". However in "The Apparition" the woman is still shunned when she herself is rejected sexually: "Think thou call's for more...thou should shouldst painfully repent". In an era when women were held to a virtuous standard, the -- emphasizes the hostility the speaker feels towards his love from how she has betrayed him.

Sonnets

    Both poems, "On the Sonnet" and "Sonnet" explore the purpose and characteristics of sonnets although one does so in a critical manner while the the other takes a more instructional approach. Keats' poem criticizes the sonnet as being too constrictive,"If by dull rhymes our English must be chained." He encourages poets to explore their own abilities and resist the conformity of traditional poetic structure.
     The second poem by Billy Collins presents sonnets  with historical context in a very scientific manner almost as a formula for others to follow, "All we need is fourteen lines...insist Iambic bongos must be played." Both poems explore the qualities of sonnets,Keats' poem is opinionated while Collins' is informational.

still crazy after all these years

    At the reunion of Basil and Dorian, Basil makes it very clear that he disapproves of Dorian ways stating his name,"implicated in the most terrible confession I'd ever read."  Basil's description of Dorian's sins is noticeably vague, giving few clues as to what exactly Dorian has been doing. This ambiguity allows the readers to both imagine the worst possible outcome the way Basil does and gives leeway for a timeless reaction. While social taboos vary throughout the times, Dorian's misconduct stays relevant in the minds of the readers. If the audience and characters are uncertain of Dorian's past sins, they have little perception of his future actions especially Basil's spontaneous murder. In the time that has lapsed between chapters, Dorian has undoubtedly been reinvented as the villain of the story.