These 'girls' are openly and immediately obvious as famous successful women from various times of human history and places through the past 1200 years. In their interactions with the characters of the present, women such as Pope Joan and Lady Nijo teach the contemporary family featured in the play about the various implications their lives hold for contemporary women. The education is not covert as in "Arcadia," but overtly didactic and feminist in nature.
Although it moves as two rather than one linear narratives, however, Stoppard's tale of past and present parallels still has a narrative force. One of the most interesting ways in which Stoppard deploys time in his play to move the narrative forward, is when, for example, the academic Bernard advances the theory that Lord Byron was a murderer. The viewer first realizes this is unlikely by observing the past, and later the present day academic Hannah Jarvis realizes that this is not the case by discovering evidence in the house after Bernard has left to give his erroneous lecture. And even while Stoppard's past and present only interact in a tangential fashion, certain emotional as well as plot parallels occur as well -- Septimus flatters his employer, even though he gave a bad review to Mr. Chater's first poem, and Hannah's book on the Romantic lady Caroline Lamb was panned by Bernard, even though he flirts with her. Also, the mathematical queries provoked by Thomasina further destabilize the viewer's intellectual certainty of what is past and present.
The reason that Churchill uses more conventional narrative techniques than Stoppard may be that her play is more openly ideological than "Arcadia" -- she wishes to make her message clear that women have always striven to enjoy political and social dominance, but have had to make tremendous sacrifices to do so. Stoppard's play is academic and speculative, much like his characters, in its agenda. His play speaks to the abstract uncertainties humans have about nature of memory and time, rather than strives to advance a particular ideology. However, by gently suggesting the futility of knowing time and human history only through literary words alone or science and math alone, as do both sets of his characters in their various historical ways, the playwright less stridently suggests the need to understand both realms of human experience in the 'time' of words and the time of physics, to be truly a completely educated and feeling person.
Salem Witch Trials -- Theories and Causes In the year 1692, a tragedy occurred that is remembered to be one of the most immense disasters of American History. In a small region of Salem village, which is now the now Danvers, MA area, in the home of the provincial minister Samuel Parris, a little girl started acting in s strange predicament. It would not be long before this behavior would be
Greek Temple Architecture From Its Inception Through the Hellenistic Period Present day Greece still retains the Greek temples, shrines and sanctuaries of the pre-Hellenic period. The modern world of architecture and historians regards these temples very highly because of their unique and simple designs and also because of their apparent beauty and technical excellence. These temples have a profound history behind them because they stand testament to perhaps one of the
Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, in the Deep South-East of the United States in 1925. Her adolescence was marked by the death of her father, from whom she later inherited the disease, deadly enemy with whom she fought, without surrender, for a lifetime. (Ann, pp74-78) However, her childhood was marked by more or less serene moments; she was taken to be, at the age of 6 years, a minor
Italian-Americans -- 1930s The American experience for Italian immigrants (with particular emphasis on the 1930s) is the salient topic for this paper. The materials presented from scholarly sources in this paper show the positive and negative impacts experienced by Italian-American immigrants; those sources will also be critiqued and analyzed in the context of the experiences, including impacts such as discrimination that Italian-Americans went through during the 1930s. Italians Arrive in the United
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