...“Trying to be perfect in a world that is so imperfect” seems so cliché for the majority of today’s society. For a handful of people that feel they can be perfect, this can have a bigger impact on life then intended. In Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls, Lia, an eighteen year old girl is suffering from Anorexia Nervosa, while being haunted by her dead best friend’s soul. She is trying to recover, but is unable to cope with the taunting she gets from her ‘friend’. In Crystal Renn’s Hungry: A Young Model’s Story of Appetite, Ambition and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves, Crystal has all the looks to be a super star run way model, but there is one catch, she must lose weight. Soon enough Crystal just like Lia is consumed by an eating disorder and through food and exercise; she too is able to demonstrate how easy it is to be lured into an addiction. It is through the self determination and the influence of others, when they realize that they do not have to succumb the ideal image to have self worth and acceptance. Follow Lia Overbrook, and Crystal Renn, who both are convinced they have what it takes to have the ‘perfect’ physical appearance and be beautiful. It is when people want something bad enough; they develop a sense of will power and determination to reach their goals. In Anderson’s Wintergirls, Lia shows how food and bones are signs of will power, success and control. As a result of her parents’ divorce, Lia feels the only way she is able to grasp a sense of control is...
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...timeline of music created by the Beatle. Their songs during the early parts of their career were solely about pleasure, speaking about the beauty of women and love, and while some songs from the latter part of their career still used words of joy, the undertone and theme of the sounds were depressing and hopeless...
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...particular conception of beauty, Disney encourages women to submit to the painful and confining beauty ideal to permit the continuation of male empowerment. To begin the slipper’s inherent beauty stems from its conceptual design with its elegant arch, delicate heel as well as the material used to create it, clear glass befitting a rare, crystal vase. Moreover, its clearness permits Cinderella to expose her similarly delicate and dainty foot, a quality long associated with beauty especially in Oriental cultures. Created out of glass, the slipper stands as a signifier for the ambivalent notion of beauty proposed by a masculinist culture - epitomized by the phallic towers of the castle - at the heart of the tale, a culture that permits the Prince to select his bride based solely on beauty. Therefore, more specifically, the slipper, in a sense, represents the pain associated with beauty. Encased in the fragile glass and perched upon a thin spiked heel, Cinderella’s foot suffers pain. Moreover, should this fragile glass crack, the splinters would sever her tender flesh exposed for all its beauty by the transparent glass. So ultimately, the slipper symbolizes the harmful side of beauty, a contention further alluded to in the fiction by the cause of the step-sisters great dislike for and mistreatment of Cinderella: jealousy of her luminescent beauty. Thus, over and over the fiction affirms the dangers and pain of beauty, a notion reinforced...
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...Enlightenment leads one to question his or her decision making—emphasizing decisions based in reason—the Enlightenment also leads one to question the motive behind those choices. Is it human nature to act in one’s own self-interest or, rather, on a moral sense? Connected to these questions on motive are the Enlightenment concepts of beauty, or “that quality…by which [it causes] love, or some passion similar to it,” and the sublime: “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger.” Beauty and sublime hold immense influence over the human conscience and that is evident far beyond the Enlightenment period. People then and now often choose...
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...career, “Ode to a Nightingale” has long been regarded as one of the most refined works of his poetry. Previous criticism has comprehensively explored its themes of nature, beauty and mortality, as well as its demonstration of Keats’s notion of Negative Capability. But based on my research, few critical reviews have touched upon the point which I find clearly suggest itself in this poem: that the poet’s experience here depicted is not merely an escape into the realm of ideal beauty, but also an intoxication with the Romantic sublime. Between the sublime and his anticipated death, Keats builds an analogical connection from which he gains insights into both. Hence it is my endeavour in this paper to illustrate that in “Ode to a Nightingale”, Keats describes the entire process of his journey into and back from the sublime, after which he has to face again the transience of the sublime and the mortality of human life. Traditionally, most critics agree on the poem’s theme being the conflict between reality and the Romantic ideal of uniting with nature, among many other contrasts that are present throughout the poem. The most representative interpretation comes from Richard Fogle, who defines the principal stress of the poem as a struggle between ideal and actual, containing more particular antitheses of pleasure and pain, of imagination and reason, of permanence and change, of nature and man (32). However, the majority fails to detect the innate relevance between that ideal to the sublime...
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...Hang’s description of the Russian landscape is often devoid of color, which symbolizes the emptiness and mechanical state of her life as an exported worker. During this time of her life she has ceased to fight and resigned herself to her empty, lonely life of work. The weather in the USSR is oppressive. A “net of grey clouds” (37) hangs over the Kiev sky. This “net” illustrates that Hang is trapped in this life and this grey, hopeless world. The trees are leafless and barren silhouetted against this sky, reflecting Hang’s bleak outlook on life. Colorless white snow is also repeatedly described while Hang is in Russia. Although she appreciates its beauty, she describes the flakes as piercing, and their beauty causes her pain. Her sadness makes...
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...beautiful qualities, as symbolized by the nightingale, and the pain of leaving it, as symbolized by death. I choose the first three stanzas because its draw my attention to keep on reading this poem. The first stanza shows us that the poet feels two different feelings which is pain as we can see in the first line “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains”. He also feels joy and happy in his line “But being too happy in thine happiness”. The poet heard and enjoyed bird’s singing a song. The bird represents art, while the poet describes to us that the bird like a Greek word nymph make us think that the bird represents and symbolizes nature. Let’s move on to the second stanza, the poet mentioned about wine in his line “O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been, Cool’d a long age in the deep delved earth”. He wishes he had a whole “beaker full” of wine so that he could get drunk and lose consciousness. He also wishes to disappear into another world that can make him happy than the real one. That happier world is represented by the nightingale. In the stanza three, the bird’s world is different and contrasted to all the pain such as getting old, disease and despair that every single human will experience it. The poet wants to be in the nightingale’s world that are happy. He continues explain why the world of the human is such a bad place. Both of a beauty and a lover can survive in human world for a long time. A beauty loses her glowing and younger face as she’s aging. A new love...
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...Yvette Nyodog Ms. Reinhart AP Literature Rape of the Lock Literary Analysis 11 March 2015 Commodities have been a part of human culture from the start of the first civilizations. They can be crudely constructed or richly made works of art; they are still objects, however some people treasure their possessions more than anything in the world. These objects can become the driving force behind a person's life and desires. When someone's prized possession is stolen, it may seem as though a disaster has taken place. In The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope is commenting on the triviality of a lost possession. Pope blurs the line between people's personalities and their possessions. He creates a world in which people are their commodities and important ideals in society are also transformed into concrete objects that could be stolen from society. Pope opens the poem by invoking a muse, but rather than invoking one of the mythic Greek muses, he leaves the muse anonymous. In the first verse paragraph of Canto I, he introduces his epic subject matters: a war arising from “amorous causes” (1) and “mighty contests rise from trivial things” (2). In lines 11-12 Pope juxtaposes grand emotions with unheroic character-types, specifically “little men” and women: “In tasks so bold can little men engage, / And in soft bosoms dwells such mighty rage.” The irony of pairing epic characteristics with lowly human characters contributes to Pope’s mock-heroic style. Pope uses the mock-heroic genre to...
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...History of makeup Have you ever wondered beauty can be a pain? We often say beauty is pain, but people in ancient times actually believed it. The first use of makeup was found in ancient Egypt around 400 BC. Later, the ancient Greeks and Romans started using makeup but were unaware use of life threatening chemical properties such as uses of mercury and white lead. The ancient Egyptians had a wide amount of makeup utensils. They mainly used kohl to outline the eyes. Kohl was made up of lead, copper, burned almonds, soot and other ingredients. The ancient Egyptians believed that eye makeup could ward off evil spirits and improve better eye sight. Over the centuries, women used burnt matches to darken their eyes, berries to stain lips. They used a young boy’s urine to remove freckles and they also swallowed ox blood to improve their complexions. Women used homemade cosmetics usually to improve their beauty. They put their beauty and health at risk by using and experimenting with the dangerous chemicals such as arsenic, lead, mercury and even leeches to give themselves a pale appearance deemed beautiful in the old day. The uses of makeup were different all around the world. They used make up and other beauty products for different purposes. Middle East (Persia): Persian women used henna to stain their hair and faces with the belief that these dyes enabled them to summon the majesty of the earth. Europe: According to Church leaders beliefs during middle ages the wearing...
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...Omeros: The River of Ancestry and the Importance of Identity What defines a location, a place in space? Is it those who are there or those who have been there? Is it the life this position exudes or the life that is being suppressed? How does one define what is in front of them? How does one differentiate between the history of a place, the lives – the feelings, everyday happenings of the people – and the History of the place, that is to say the history that is imposed on the people? This is a problem when discussing places that have been colonized. The history of the people is assumed to be the History – the histories of the colonizers. The lives of the colonizers are projected onto the colonized – their religion, their rites, their businesses. The actual lives of the people are forgotten . The lives of the ingenious people are forgotten. And in places where slavery and indentured servitude was a practice, the original and true histories of those people are forgotten. This is a phenomenon that West Indian author and poet Derek Walcott addresses in his insightful and touched the Nobel Prize Lecture delivered after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. He begins his lecture describing a performance that takes place on the island of Trinidad, every year by the East Indian population of the town Felicity. The performance is a dramatization of the Hindu epic Ramayana, a major representation of their original history and presentation of their identities....
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...this pursue greater sales volumes. Due its superior quality, Dove used real people instead of models to place emphasis on the product’s attributes that would portray honesty and enhance consumers. Dove’s mission was to engage people in cleansing activities. It would help people wash away the pain with a smooth bar of soap. It was associated with the military since its chemical research came from this source, and it was used to heal wounds. This gave it a greater national sentiment, which helped the brand expand throughout the United States. It quickly became a success, and the brand was well-acknowledged. Currently, Dove is the world’s leading “cleansing” brand in over 80 countries. They launched a campaign that would once again try to reach down to the consumer’s internal needs. When it was launched it tried to suppress the war’s pains, and now it tried to tackle female insecurity in a world obsessed with beauty. 2. Problem statement Dove transitioned from a functionality marketing perspective to creating a social debate with their “Campaign for Real Beauty”. The brand director, Silvia Lagnado, must evaluate if this approach coerces the aspirational element that Dove, as a beauty product, should entail. 3. Facts/factors that are relevant to the decision. In the 1980’s Dove was always backed up by physicians and dermatologists as a product that will add value to your skin. However, its claim had to change in 2000 since it was forced to lend its name to other Unilever...
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...and truthfulness the mirror. The mirror has no magic power in it, but simply portrays the reality to those who use it. “It swallows” the true image just the way it is without any prejudice, unlike the humans that see things distorted through the lenses of their inner bias. We can observe an interesting usage of the figures of speech in the poem. The mirror is not only a symbol, but it is also a personification, because the mirror tells us the story from its standpoint. Therefore, the symbol of the truth tells us a story of the unbiased reality it has to portray to those who seek answers in it. Sylvia Plath was a representative of a confessional poetry genre. She herself was that woman looking in the mirror. That mirror exposed her to much pain through its honesty. She is scared of that true image of herself getting older as the days go by That is why she turns to lake, but the lake does not want to lie to her either. Even that she detests her own reflection, she still becomes dependent on the truth the lake gives her. Therefore, closer to the end of the poem you can see that kind of relationship were it says "I am important to her. She comes and goes." Metaphorically Plath calls the moon and the candles liars, because they do not give the precise truth like the mirror. They just distract the woman and do not let her find herself. Those liars show to her a deceptive image by hiding wrinkles, and other companions of the aging process. We might assume that the woman comes every now...
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...love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred ” (Shelley 139). Frankenstein’s monster recognizes the insurmountable hatred towards him, and decides to take revenge through murder to attain justice. The monster's desire for love fueled his revenge, and if he was originally as heartless and unaffectionate as he is perceived, his actions would have been a lot less extreme; he wouldn't have felt the loss of never experiencing love and thus never the desire to act out his revenge. Murder and revenge are the only things that the monster feels he can control, as he hardly had anything else left to lose, but everything to take away from others; to make them experience the same pain of loss that he was...
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...Nila Tavangarian Women Studies 30 January 30th, 2017 WS Midterm Exam Winter 2017 Part 1: Brief Essays – the Beauty Myth 1) In Wolf’s “Chapter 6: Hunger” in the Beauty Myth she argues that anorexia and bulimia is taking over women in the West. She claims that, “Women must claim anorexia as political damage done to us by a social order that considers our destruction insignificant because of what we are-less,” (Wolf, 208). I agree with the feminist perspective in “Hunger” that women are affected by pop culture and media to starve themselves until the point where they are unstable. Unfortunately, many women in the US are influenced to look like women in pop culture, however this has caused millions of suicides and health issues that...
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...Edmund Spenser uses some dutch words in his poem, like strand (now: beach). Here we have somebody who writes the name of the person he loves on the beach, because he wants the world to know he's in love. It's not clever because when the tide comes, the waves will wash it away. In poetry they use metaphor. An example : “you are like a red rose”, a red rose is a metaphor for beauty. Line 1-2: ‘’One day I wrote her name upon the strand, but came the waves and washed it away.’’ The speaker and his love are at the beach (strand) and the speaker is in a romantic mood, because he writes her name in the sand. The waves wash the name away. Line 3: “Again I wrote it with a second hand,” The speaker writes the name again. Second hand is the same as again. The line needs to be complete and he had already used “again”. Line 4 : “But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.” Tides: the periodic variation in the surface level of oceans. The tides are a metaphor for life and death, often used by poets, because it´s one of the cententies of life. The tide is presented as a predator. His pains (efforts) are the prey of the waves. Death is also a predator, the tides are life and death. Line 5-6: ‘’Vain man, said she, that doest in vain assay, a mortel thing so to immortalize.’’ Vain has two meanings here, Vain (man) = you think too highly of yourself. Vain (assay) = useless (try). It´s useless to try and make her live forever, to make her immortal, she’s telling...
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