Capturing Cruelty in the Opening Scene of John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men
The English author and historian Edward Gibbon once wrote that, "The works of man are impotent to the assaults of nature." Nowhere is this philosophical perspective better captured than in the John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. The novel tells the story of two migrant agricultural workers, George Milton and Lennie Small, during the Great Depression in 1930's California. A central theme in the novel is man's cruelty to one another and how it drives them to hurt other human beings as in the case of Curley's viscous attack on the mentally-handicapped Lennie. In the opening scene of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, the author establishes a contrast between innocence and cruelty through the use of expansive descriptions of nature, symbolism and characterization. This opening dichotomy is vital to an understanding of the theme of cruelty and the larger structure of the novel in light of its violent and disturbing end.
In the beginning passages of the novel, the reader encounters dramatic idyllic imagery of a riverbed in rural California. The scene is described as a winding tree-lined creek at the foot of "golden foothill slopes" where, "The Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool." The author continues to detail the physical beauty of the area but begins to describe nature as if it were an active agent, "The evening of a hot day started the little wind to move among the leaves," and "The shade climbed up the hills toward the top." Through descriptions such as these a picture of untrammeled innocent nature...
Magdalene Sisters Peter Mullan's 2002 movie The Magdalene Sisters depicts the dark side of Irish culture, church, and history. From the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, the Sisters of Mercy in Ireland ran profitable asylums for women. The laundry businesses allowed the convents to earn money while keeping socially scorned women behind bars. Yet far from being a place of spiritual refuge, the Magdalene laundries often became torture houses
Yet, I suggest that while Anne Clifford succeeded in life -- she was at last able to join the fellowship at Penshurst and through long life and tenacity to reclaim her lands -- Aemilia Lanyer succeeds in an imaginative vision: out of marginality, out 'of absence, darkness..., things which are not,' indeed out of weakness, Lanyer creates in Salve Deus a remarkable community of strength, present more powerfully and
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In the Nineteenth Century, Mahmud II and Abdulmecid promulgated reforms that gave to millet the sense it has always had to Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Western scholars, diplomats, and politicians. The millet system furnished, degree of religious, cultural, and ethnic continuity within these communities, while on the other it permitted their incorporation into the Ottoman administrative, economic and political system. An ethnic-religious group preserved its culture and religion while being subject
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