Victorian author Essay Example for Free

Victorian author Essay Victorian authors and painters give a good representation of what life must have been like for the people of that period. John Ritchie’s painting, â€Å"A Summer’s Day in Hyde Park†, for instance shows that, while people in the Victorian era might have been overly-dressed, they certainly were not without their fair share of amusement. In the bottom, right hand corner of the painting, a gentleman can be seen rowing a lady (perhaps his wife) and a young girl (perhaps his daughter), home in a boat. The entire family has come to the beach for an outing a site less often seen in modern days, where families (and especially elderly relatives) tend to be a bit sedentary. Meanwhile, in the background of the picture, A gentleman can be seen riding by in a carriage, tipping his hat to his neighbors as he passes. The writing of Victorian authors suggests that the fact that a man own’s a carriage means he has some wealth. In William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, for instance, Becky Sharp comments that the â€Å"acquirement of that dignified deportment and carriage† is â€Å"requisite for every young lady of fashion. † (Thackaray, 2005, p. 1) In the left hand corner of the painting, an officer in a red coat can be seen resting wearily on the bench next to a lady who seems to be paying no attention to him at all. The lady next to her may be giving the officer some attention, but it is impossible to tell, because her face has no detail. It is merely a blotch of paint. Still, because her head is tilted upward, it seems reasonable to believe she might be speaking to the officer. Indeed, if there is any truth to how Victorian authors portray the importance of soldiers to young women, then the viewer can be fairly certain that she is attending to the officer. For in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, officers are some of the most ardent admirers of the main characters, Miss Sharp and Miss Amelia. Although there is much merriment depicted in Ritchie’s painting, there is something disturbing about the way he treats the subject of children. Many of them are in the painting, but only one seems to be looked after. Her grandparents, rather than her parents seem to be doing the watching. The reason for this can be seen in Victorian author Charlotte Bronte’s writing, which suggests that children in the Victorian era were sometimes looked upon as inferior to adults. In Jane Eyre, Bronte describes a situation in which Jane’s Aunt says to her the following: Jane, I dont like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner. Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent. (Bronte, 2005, p. 1) It is no wonder, then, that Ritchie’s adults pay such little attention to their children. In conclusion, Victorian painters and authors show that the Victorian era was one of leisure for wealthy adults, but not, perhaps, the most nurturing environment for children. Works Cited Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 2005. Classic Reader. 19 July 2007. http://www. classicreader. com/read. php/bookid. 31/sec. 1/ Thackaray, William. Vanity Fair. 2005. Classic Reader. 19 July 2007. http://www. classicreader. com/read. php/bookid. 91/sec. 2/kw. acquirement+of+that+dignified/

Alcohol and Alcoholism Essay -- Drinking Binge Alcoholic Effects Essay

Alcohol and Alcoholism Alcohol is a drug, but unlike the other drugs, marijuana, cocaine, heroine, and probably all the others for some reason this is socially accepted and is legal. Alcohol is bad for you and does have long term affects associated with it. Such as the long addiction to it, effects on the body, and the social interaction effects. Alcohol, and alcoholism is common in America, but drinking is more common around kids. Social drinking a term kids and drinkers have come accustom to, social drinking is defined by one standard drink per hour, and no more than 3 per day, but some people just socialize around people that drink as heavily as they do and confuse that for social drinking. Addiction to alcohol can be acquired easily if not careful, binge drinking and family history are all keys in the identification of addiction. Family history could be linked to alcoholism by finding out if your family had problems in the past with alcohol, and it is determined by studies that genes have effects on alcohol. Alcohol is a drug, but legal unlike the other drugs on the street, in my opinion drugs are all harmful to the body, and can have serious problems to you in the long run. Alcohol can effect the body in multiple ways. The tranquilizing effects of being drunk, acts like a stimulate, but is a depressant, and causes the brain to lower self control, and impairs vision, other senses and effects bodily coordination. This tranquilizing e... Alcohol and Alcoholism Essay -- Drinking Binge Alcoholic Effects Essay Alcohol and Alcoholism Alcohol is a drug, but unlike the other drugs, marijuana, cocaine, heroine, and probably all the others for some reason this is socially accepted and is legal. Alcohol is bad for you and does have long term affects associated with it. Such as the long addiction to it, effects on the body, and the social interaction effects. Alcohol, and alcoholism is common in America, but drinking is more common around kids. Social drinking a term kids and drinkers have come accustom to, social drinking is defined by one standard drink per hour, and no more than 3 per day, but some people just socialize around people that drink as heavily as they do and confuse that for social drinking. Addiction to alcohol can be acquired easily if not careful, binge drinking and family history are all keys in the identification of addiction. Family history could be linked to alcoholism by finding out if your family had problems in the past with alcohol, and it is determined by studies that genes have effects on alcohol. Alcohol is a drug, but legal unlike the other drugs on the street, in my opinion drugs are all harmful to the body, and can have serious problems to you in the long run. Alcohol can effect the body in multiple ways. The tranquilizing effects of being drunk, acts like a stimulate, but is a depressant, and causes the brain to lower self control, and impairs vision, other senses and effects bodily coordination. This tranquilizing e...

Jay Gatsby And Halvard Solness As Victims Of Their Own Dreams Essay

Do both Halvard Solness in Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, and Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, destroy themselves in pursuit of their dreams? Clearly, they do, and while their dreams are quite different, they pursue them to ultimately tragic ends. Solness and Gatsby are alike in this critical way. Both Solness and Gatsby are men of considerable material success. Gatsby occupies a mansion in West Egg, New York, a magnificent copy of a French hotel de ville (Great Gatsby 5), from which he pursues a career as a Tremalchio (Great Gatsby 113), opening his house weekly for ostentatious parties open to anyone caring to wander in. (Great Gatsby 39-56). Solness is the master builder, a man at the peak of his powers, able to lord himself over others, although trying frantically to hold on to his position. (Beyer. 171; Master Builder 272 (â€Å"New. Not the sort of old-fashioned rubbish I generally build. †) But Solness has acquired that position by destroying almost everything else that has been of any value, in essence, by killing any dreams he had. Because of his desire to become a master builder, he has lost his wife’s children, her capacity through raising children to â€Å"build† them into fine people, his willingness to build churches, and his faith. (Beyer, 171-74, Clurman 174-75) By his actions, he has reduced his wife to â€Å"a tomb. † (Clurman 175) Even as master home builder he feels that what he is doing is hollow and pointless. â€Å"Building homes for human beings–is not worth a brass farthing, Hilde. † (Master Builder 342) Into his life comes Hilda Wangel, whom he had met and inspired ten years earlier when she was merely a child. She calls him to retrieve the dreams that he then held. She challenges him to overcome his guilt over the many things that he has done by which he has made himself into a financial success but a remarkably small, cramped, and limited person, and in a physical way to overcome his fear of heights. In the end, at her urging, he tries to break free from his confined life. He climbs to the top of the tower on a new house he has had built, trying to master his dread of heights in an effort to repeat the wreathing ceremony which was where he first met Hilda ten years early, at the construction of the last church he ever built. (Beyer 171-74). Solness has lived much of his life tormented by what he did to gain his first major project. He wanted a fire to occur at the home his wife had inherited from her parents, an ugly, barn-like structure, so that he could build in the land. The fire came, but afterwards his wife grew sick, and her fever spread to her infant twins, killing them. (Master Builder 313 (â€Å"the fire was the making of me as a builder. † ) 314, 319-21) Wracked by guilt, he now feels old, on the edge of losing his powers, and he is haunted by what he has done and by what he has failed to do. Possessed of a sickly and fragile conscience, he regrets the limited nature of his life. (Clurman 171-72; Bentley 31) Solness is afraid of youth. Though arguably at the peak of his powers, he fears that younger people, such as his subordinate Ragnar will overtake him. ( Clurman 174) In accepting Hilde’s challenge, Solness tries to break out of the pettiness in which he has lived and to return to something that he had idealized in his youth. (Bentley 30) To do this, he challenges his own fear of heights, insisting on climbing to the top of the new house he has just finished, to drape a wreath over the highest spire. (Forester 10) He overcomes his fears, and atop the house, he appears momentarily to be arguing with someone else who is there. (Master Builder 354 (â€Å"He is disputing with someone. †)) This is apparently his attempt to come to some final reconciliation with God, whom he had renounced ten years earlier in his climbing of the last church he built. (Master Builder 349) In climbing the tower to try to put the wreath over the uppermost spire, Solness is undertakes the great risk that he will be overcome by his dizziness and fear of heights. Nevertheless, he feels that he must do this, futile as it might be, to revive the dreams that he once had. (Gilman 110-111) While his wife and friends tremble at his recklessness, Hilde sees it as the fulfillment of his destiny. (Master Builder 353-54) When he plunges head-first into a quarry, smashing in his skull, she claims him, â€Å"My . . . my master builder. † (Master Builder 354) This is not wild cruelty. When she saw him ten years earlier, placing the wreath on the church spire, he inspired her. She has lived on that inspiration, and wants him to return to that glorious moment when he so moved her, rather than living with the defeats he has borne. (Beyer 175-76) Unlike Solness, Jay Gatsby is not called back to a dream in order to pursue a youthful woman. Nor did he destroy his dream in order to achieve his fabulous wealth. Rather, his dream of obtaining the woman he adores has driven him to obtain wealth as a necessary means to pursuing the woman. Gatsby believed that as a young lieutenant stationed at a camp outside Louisville, he had found his ultimate prize in the person of Daisy Fay, the socialite who was seeing several young officers each day. (Great Gatsby 148-50) He believed he lost her because of the army, the war, and the lack of the resources with which to compete with the likes of Tom Buchanan. Now, just a few years later, free from the Army and free from poverty, he wants to retake his one great and compelling dream. Gatsby is chasing Daisy as the ultimate symbol of success, and while it is a philistine success (Fussell 34), he yearns for it with his whole being. Part of what Gatsby seeks is a wistful longing for a dream that may never have been real. (Stern 105; Great Gatsby 182) There is a naive idealism in Gatsby, the â€Å"heightened sensitivity to the promises of life† (Great Gatsby 2; Gross & Gross 164) that Gatsby inspired in the narrator Nick Carroway. At the same time, while Carroway tells Gatsby, â€Å"You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together† (Great Gatsby 154), he carefully points out that this is the only compliment he ever paid to the man, whom he still disliked profoundly. (Great Gatsby 154, 2 (â€Å"Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. †)). Gatsby stands as a marvel of contradictions. On the one hand, he pursues Daisy with the faith of the true believer. He values and revalues things through her eyes, bestowing on her a romantic’s adoration of an ideal that is not quite real, and indeed, as it becomes real, it loses its significance. (Great Gatsby 92, 94) At the same time, he is willing to use whatever means are necessary to gain the means with which to court Daisy, dealing with Meyer Wolfshiem, the man who fixed the World Series (Great Gatsby 69-74, 114, 134) bootlegging (Great Gatsby 109, 134) and trading in illicit bonds. (Great Gatsby 95, 167) From the outset, Gatsby’s dream is doomed because he fails to realize that in the end, Daisy Buchanan will be so fundamentally careless. As the narrator says, â€Å"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. † (Great Gatsby 180-81) Gatsby accurately sums her up: â€Å"‘Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly. //That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money — that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. . . . high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl. . . † (Great Gatsby 120) But Gatsby fails to realize that money, and critically the comprehensive security that it represents are essentially all that drive Daisy. While she will gladly come over to spend her afternoons with Gatsby (Great Gatsby 114), and while she will curse Tom Buchanan for the thoughtless trysts he has with any convenient hotel chambermaid (Great Gatsby 78), in the end, she will cling to him rather than risk going away with Gatsby. Eventually, she drives Gatsby’s great yellow car into Myrtle Wilson, races away into the night (Great Gatsby 144-45), and then assumes a stony silence when Gatsby is condemned for the murder. When George Wilson, wild with rage and grief, comes to her house, she allows her husband to point him to Gatsby’s house (Great Gatsby 180), where Wilson kills first Gatsby and then himself, completing the holocaust. (Great Gatsby 162-63) Gatsby believes, with an unalterable faith, that by showing Daisy the towering wealth he has accumulated, if by questionable and never quite clarified means (Fitzgerald’s letter to Maxwell Perkins), he can take her back to the world as it was when they first met. He has a hard time grasping such basic matters as that Daisy has had a child by Tom (Great Gatsby p. 117), and cannot understand that in the end, she will stay with this incredibly wealthy if insensitive brute, because of the stability he offers. In the end, the great tragedy of Jay Gatsby is that he believed so fervently that if he could establish himself with the wealth that he had lacked when he first met Daisy as a young army lieutenant, his passion for her would be enough to pry her away from anyone who lacked the passion and purity of purpose that he drove him on. Daisy never put the value on this purity of purpose that Gatsby had. Thus, both of these men are destroyed by their dreams. Yet dreaming is a great human capacity, and it seems that as long as there are people, they will dream, and in dreaming, risk their destruction. SOURCES USED: Bentley, Eric. â€Å"Ibsen: Pro and Con. † Theatre Arts. 34:39-43 (July 1950), reprinted in Henrik Ibsen. Harold Bloom, ed. (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999). Beyer, Edvard. Ibsen: The Man and His Work. (New York, New York: Taplinger Publishing Co. 1978) Clurman, Harold. Ibsen (New York, New York: MacMillan Publishing Co. , 1977). Fitzgerald, F. Scott, Letter to Maxwell Perkins (Dec. 20, 1924) The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. (New York, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), pp. 172-73, ), reprinted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Harold Bloom, ed. (Broomail, Pennsylvania: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996). Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. (New York, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925). Forester, E. M. â€Å"Ibsen the Romantic. † reprinted in Henrik Ibsen. Harold Bloom, ed. (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999). Fussell, Edwin S. â€Å"Fitzgerald’s Brave New World. † ELH. 19:296-97 (Dec. 1952), reprinted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Harold Bloom, ed. (Broomail, Pennsylvania: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996). Gilman, Richard. â€Å"Ibsen and the Making of Modern Drama. † The Making of Modern Drama. reprinted in Henrik Ibsen. Harold Bloom, ed. (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999).

The Mosque Essay - 525 Words

The Mosque The mosque is an Islamic holy place; in Arabic it is called a Masjid. It simply means the ‘place of prostration’ because frankly speaking you can make a mosque any where in the world as long as a Muslim kneels to prostrate. To recognize there are many unique features which you can tell it is a Masjid. There are two things that differentiate as to whether it is a Masjid or not. They are the a Dome and a Minaret. The Dome is a vital part of the Masjid as it allows the air to travel and make the Masjid Prayer Hall cooler. It is built on top of the Prayer Hall as it amplifies the human voice. The Minaret is a large building on the†¦show more content†¦The Mihrab is a niche set in the wall facing Makkah. They are beautifully decorated will tiles also text from the Qur’an. This is sometimes called the ‘niche of lights’ and represents the presences of Allah (The Arabic word for God) in the heart of believer’s. During prayers, the leader is able to use the prayer mat in the Mihrab itself. The leader is the Islamic leader called the imam, he is who leads preaches, he leads ceremony, leads the Namaz (prayer), he teaches the Qur’an to children, he teaches the Qur’an teaching on how to live according to the Qur’an. The Prayer Hall is the most essential part of the Masjid. It is used for praying performing the Namaz (prayer) it all so used for funerals and other ceremonies. It’s a large space of area where all the men gather and pray. It is also a command from Allah that every Muslim to pray five time a day. The Decoration most of the Masjid is beautifully decorated with beautiful Islamic patterns and text’s from The Qur’an. In any Masjid they will not be any statues, pictures as it is strictly forbidden in Islam. Islam teaches that Allah is too grand for the human to even attempt to draw; hence it is prohibited to do that. The Minbar is like a pulpit from which the imam or Islamic leader (the Imam) speaks it is basically 3 steps of stairs to raise the person whom is giving a speech orShow MoreRelatedMain Features of A Mosque1552 Words   |  7 PagesAi) Describe the main features of a mosque A mosque is mainly used as a place of worship for Muslims to pray to Allah. Not all mosques are the same, they vary from place to place. Some mosques are big and expensive whilst some other mosques are small and cheap. All mosques are different but are yet similar in some ways for example; all mosques are a place of worship. Some mosque have a tall minaret in which the Muezzin uses it to call the Adthaan, informing nearby Muslims that the time of prayerRead MoreThe Great Mosque Of Cordoba1541 Words   |  7 Pages The Great Mosque of Cordoba Can the Great Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba be used for two religions, and How the design effects these religions? 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