¶ … religious themes of the three works mentioned, those being Les Miserables, Notes on Nursing and the Calling of Katie Makanya, are all fairly easy to see. A major fact about Les Miserables is that Jean Valjean spends a lot of time in jail for doing something relatively minor, stealing food to feed a starving family, and then this gets compounded three to four times over when Valjean tries to escape. In all, Valjean is in prison for nineteen years before being released. He is then treated like a leper by innkeepers because of his convict past. As the story progresses, there are some obvious themes relating to the law, the enforcement thereof and grace. There is a common theme from Valjean needing to be forgiven and allowed to gain redemption despite the past at hand but there is a common theme of people not doing that in the book. Javert's assertion that criminals never change and that breaking the law should be met with zero tolerance. Despite Valjean trying to escape his past, many in that era and that book hold that it is not that easy. The obvious point, or at least one of them, from Les Miserables is that Valjean was not treated fairly and even his original sin did not warrant the behavior and jailing he received even if what he did was technically against the law. The zero tolerance nature of his punishment was over the top. Notes on Nursing speaks about religion in a way that bucks the trend of how nurses were perceived at the time and how they should do their job. Nightingale made references at differnet points about doing one's job even when the maddening din of events around a nurse demand or require otherwise and how doing's on job with Christian love should always win out. Lastly, Maknya said something similar of a black woman being resolute and committed to doing the Godly...
Katie even accepted the ideals of marriage, Christianity and so forth of the dominating European culture.
Because of its strong ethical overtones and themes, Victor Hugo naturally gravitates towards imagery of light and darkness in Les Miserables. Light and darkness symbolize their respective moral poles, the binaries of good and evil, beneficence and maleficence, right and wrong. Drawing attention to ethical polarities helps the reader to better understand and appreciate moral ambiguity. The protagonist Jean Valjean epitomizes moral ambiguity, as the reader follows his journey from
Costumes in Les Miserables (1998) Directed by Bille August 1998's Les Miserables' costumes were designed by Academy Award-winning costume designer Gabriella Pescucci. Pescucci had previously won for The Age of Innocence and been nominated for The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1993). While her work for Billie August's Les Mis would go unnominated for any major awards, the costumes are nonetheless on par with her previous work and reflect the authentic style
They are sympathetic to Walker because of their fondness for Sarah, a young Black washerwoman who is Coalhouse's lover. The iconic WASP family is called only by their family identities, because unlike Walker and the Jewish Tateh, they do not need to make a name for themselves -- their place in the world is secure. But even with the help of a prominent family, no one will take a
Through this experience, I realized that these characters could help other to understand themselves and to resolve the internal conflicts that drive young males in their actions. As I began to study the characters in the novel more closely, I began to realize that Valjean and Javert were not the only characters that represented Jungian archetypes. It became apparent that gaining a better understanding of the characters and the
Victor Hugo Romantic Writings of Victor Hugo The romantic period was partly in reaction to the impact that the industrial revolution had on the psyches of artists of all stripes. The move toward an industrial culture had moved many people from the pastoral scenes of the country into the grungy hearts of the cities. Many of the people worked in the factories six days a week for many hours a day, or
The theater of the 1930s often saw strategies that wanted to expose the tragedy of American life at the time, but did not want to keep the audience in a state of depression, because after all, that was their everyday experience. As such, many theater productions began implementing multi-faceted strategies which included the combination of several genres in order to provide a flexibility that would both sadden and humor.
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