This suggests that it is an intellectual understanding of her friend's beatings and not a true emotional empathy that she is after. Though the scene is most definitely tragic, if it is approached with the same intellectual curiosity that the two adolescents bring to it can only be seen as an episode of horribly dark humor. The fact that Wendla can be so foolish as to desire an intellectual understanding of child abuse shows her complete lack of a true appreciation for the situation, and is thus a comic -- not necessarily humorous, but comical nonetheless -- situation. The end of a play is also one way to determine if a particular work is a comedy or a tragedy. The fact that Moritz and Wendla are both unnecessarily dead at the end of the play at first seems to suggest a tragedy, as does Melchior's expulsion. When the characters end up worse than they were at the start of the action, it usually indicates a tragedy. But this is not actually where Spring Awakening leaves off. Instead, Melchior returns to his village -- or at least its graveyard -- and encounters Moritz and the masked Man. This scene is not only highly intellectual,...
Melchior has grown and become better for the incidents in the play, and this outcome suggest a more typical comedy than a tragedy.
Awakening, which might have been more aptly titled, The Sexual Awakening shocked the delicate and rigid sensibilities of Kate Chopin's contemporaries of 1899, although many of those contemporaries were slowly experiencing awakenings of their own. In telling the story of a married woman who begins to realize that she is an individual human being, rather than a nonentity made up of female roles assigned by a male-dominated society, Chopin immediately
Awakenings - Dr. Oliver Sack Film Based on a true story about Dr. Oliver Sack's work in the 1960s, Penny Marshall's film Awakenings elucidates the challenges of clinical experimental psychology. Dr. Sack's fictionalized character, Dr. Malcolm Sayer had worked as a laboratory researcher until he was forced to accept a new position treating catatonic patients at a Bronx mental institution. His relative inexperience in a clinical setting could be partly to
It is Edna who achieves both the awakening of the title, the awareness of how the social traditions imposed on her are stifling her and preventing her from expressing herself as she would wish, and also fails in that she cannot overcome these traditions and so chooses suicide rather than continue under such a repressive system. Chopin implies that there is a danger in awakening, in understanding the nature of
The figures that, during the novel, have the greatest role in shaping Edna Pontellier's character, and therefore the figures from whom she must escape, are her husband and children. It is her role as wife and mother that is supposed to define her, as it did for much of recorded history. Women were thought to have very little value outside of the home, especially in the higher classes (when it
Awakening mother-women ( Adele Ratignolle) mother-Women ( Edna Back to Sleep: Edna's Fate Kate Chopin's The Awakening functions as a turn of the century tragedy regarding the domesticated lot of women in American society. Its protagonist, Edna Pontellier, is forced to forsake all of the wonder, delight, and sensations of life -- those that are intrinsically hers, anyway -- for an unyielding society in which her only virtue is that of
Awakening ONE (a): The Awakening speaks to the fact that women were breaking away from the dependence they had on men (and the power men had over women as a cultural tradition). When Edna learns to swim, for example, she is extremely happy that she has control over something that propels her; Chopin uses Edna's emerging independence (and Edna's repulsion for the "…vague, tangled, chaotic…exceedingly disturbing" truth about her own
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