One of the primary functions of ghosts in James' and Wharton's short stories is as human conscience: to bring the unconscious into conscious awareness and to evoke guilt, shame, or fear. For the governess in "The Turn of the Screw," the ghosts symbolize sexual awakening and social deviance. From the time she arrives at Bly, the governess learns of Miles' misbehavior at school, mischievous behavior that Mrs. Grose attributes to normal adolescence. However, the narrator views the ghosts with increasing suspicion, believing them to herald the social and sexual corruption of Miles' youth. Similarly, Miss Jessel is depicted as having been promiscuous and the governess views her apparition partly as a symbol of unconscious sexual desires. Spencer Brydon's ghost serves a more direct psychological purpose in James' "The Jolly Corner," as the protagonist's own conscience symbolizing the life he never lived and the choices he never took. In both cases, the ghosts bring to light unconscious desires.
In Wharton's "The Lady Maid's Bell," Emma Saxon's ghost serves a similar function as the ghosts in "The Turn of the Screw." Saxon, like Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, signals sexual corruption. In "The Lady Maid's Bell," Saxon's ghost seems to be aware of Mrs. Brympton's relationship with Mr. Ranford. Moreover, the narrator suspects that Saxon was among one of Mr. Brympton's sexual prey. The ghost of Robert Elwell in "Afterward" delivers not a sexual message but a moral one. However, Elwell's ghost does bring to light that which had remained secret and hidden just as Saxon's ghost did in "The Lady...
He uses ample slang and simple sentence construction that is nevertheless sophisticated enough to warrant attention by publishers that aim to reach a broad audience. Readers of Ghost Rider could be motorcycle enthusiasts, Rush fans, or travelogue lovers and "The Loneliest Road in America" would satisfy all three groups of readers. His descriptions are not overloaded by flowery language. Nevertheless, they are vivid and active: "I had almost reached
It is after all a ghost story, so one may assume, just based on the conventions of the genre, that the two apparitions in the story are indeed evil. Supposing the reader takes the narrator at her word, there is evidence to support that the red-headed lecher, Peter Quint, and his infamously beautiful paramour, Miss Jessel, are the hell raisers the Governess makes them out to be. The Governess describes
For example, "Out on the lake, for example, calling and voices are heard within the mist almost detached from Gray and Gisele. The mist dissolves all boundaries between themselves and the point of landing, creating a space which seems infinite but in which one is contained. As viewers, we, too, become contained within this space and share the characters' experience of blocked vision and of doubled and repeated echoes"
"Why I live at the P.O." is told in the first person, so its point-of-view is far more unreliable in character than "A Worn Path." The story makes use of a single character's limited point-of-view to derive humor from family conflicts and the narrator's jealousy of Stella-Rondo. Sister's tone is what makes her story unintentionally funny for the reader. The story's irony is derived from her melodramatic view of her
This sentence, although it talks about bowels, is really describing the mother's love of the baby. This story is written like a detective story. It is very difficult to determine which woman is telling the truth and to determine if King Solomon is actually a bad person or a good person. It does not give the names of the women. They are simple referred to as one woman and the
Winter Dreams" the tension between democratic and aristocratic values in America "Winter Dreams" depicts the struggles of a middle-class character who is attempting to prove himself 'worthy' of a woman of American, blue-blooded aristocracy. At the beginning of the story, the hero Dexter is acting as a caddy at a golf course where most of the patrons are of a far higher social class than the caddies. Dexter, a member
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