¶ … Sister Carrie" by Theodore Dreiser, and "My Antonia" by Willa Cather. Specifically, it will determine what each character's value system is by asking what things are most important to her and what things or values she spends most of the time seeking. Each of these characters has strong and determined values that guide them through their lives. These values are at the core of their being, and help the characters become real and compelling in the readers' mind. One character's values bring her contentment, while the other's do not, and this is the key difference between these two women and their values. One has values to be applauded, while the other has values that leave her wanting. Antonia in "My Antonia" is a child of the land. She values life in the country and family, and these values stick with her throughout her life. She notes, "I'm a country girl...and I doubt if I'll be able to manage so well for him in a city. I was counting on keeping chickens, and maybe a cow" (Cather 309). This love of the land keeps her strong and healthy during the novel, but this core value also anchors her best friend Jim to his home and the land. He writes on a visit home, "She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions" (Cather 353). Antonia's values also represent the core values of family...
It is clear author Cather admires Antonia and her values, for she creates the narration around her, and makes her the central character in the novel, even though she really appears infrequently. Just as her values are core American values, she is the core of the novel.
Dreiser's "Second Choice" jolts Shirley out of her "lower-middle-class complacency by Arthur, a dashing, romantic newcomer who woos, wins, and leaves her. Love, Shirley suddenly finds, is excitement, defined by Arthur as freedom, movement, exploration," and a different way of being in the world (Harris 73). When Arthur leaves her, instead of using this reinvigorated sense of purpose to change her own life, her inability to win Arthur causes
Gender as Performance Theodore Dreiser's 1900 novel Sister Carrie is in style and tone in many ways radically different from Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, published just five years later. And yet there is in both works a similar core, what might be called a parallel moral, for both novels explore the ways in which gender is performative in the two societies that we learn about within the world of
Sister Carrie and a Modern Instance and discusses the characters geographic attempts to escape their problems. The writer compares and contrasts the stories and argues that social norms continue to follow the characters wherever they go. There were two sources used to complete this paper. Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and William Dean Howells' A Modern Instance are classic examples of the way people try and change their personalities and their
characters in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. The writer of this paper provides an insight to the things leading to the eventual outcome of Carrie and Hurstwood. The writer uses examples from the book to underscore the paths each life takes and explain why they each end up the way they do. There was one source used to complete this paper. Many times fiction imitates real life with a hint of
Real America? Interestingly enough, one of the themes in the post-modernism period of American history has been the reexamination of the "real America," particularly the moral, ethical and sexual changes that have evolved since the turn of the century. This has not been a new theme, nor has it been relegated to non-fiction. At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists were expanding the role fiction took by examining
Narrator In many ways, the literary movements and philosophies of determinism and individualism are opposites of one another. Determinism is one of the facets of Naturalism, and is based on the idea that things happen due to causes and effects largely out of the control of people and that choice is ultimately an illusion. Individualism, however, is widely based on the idea of free will and the fact that people can
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