Collegamenti Oliver Twist e Rosso Malpelo

       

 ROSSO MALPELO 1881                                                                               OLIVER TWIST 1837

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SIMILARITIES

orphans

poor

hard-working in bad conditions

suffer abuse

a deep loneliness

the adults are far away and indifferent

relations based on bullying and extreme poverty

selfishness and ignorance as consequences of poverty 

their destiny is written in their names

DIFFERENCES

A resigned child                                                                                 a strong-willed rebel

He dies at the end                                                                            He's adopted at the end

Through the story of Rosso Malpelo, Verga expresses all his pessimism, his hopeless conception of life. Malpelo does not rebel against the injustices he suffers because they seem inevitable to him: if he dreams of rebelling, he immediately returns to what is real and unchangeable from his point of view. The pessimism expressed by Verga in Rosso Malpelo is absolute, it knows no way out, it leads him to think that never having been born would have been better.

Instead, Oliver lives happily with Mr. Brownlow as his adopted son. Dickens is optimistic. In the midst of corruption and degradation, the essentially passive Oliver remains pure-hearted; he steers away from evil when those around him give in to it, and like in a fairy-tale , he eventually receives his reward – leaving for a peaceful life in the country, surrounded by kind friends. On the way to this happy ending, Dickens explores the kind of life an outcast, orphan boy could expect to lead in 1830s London.

Dickens criticizes the system of workhouses and he denounces the situation and the living conditions in those horrible places.He thought that all the injustices and the violence suffered by the poor occured in the city and that are the effect of it.So he idealized the countryside, because in his opinion it was free from poverty and ugliness.

Verga talks about the living conditions in the countryside, especially in very small towns or villages. He doesn't openly criticize the system, but he describes it as it is with detachment and the total impersonality of the narrator. In contrast to Verga, Dickens criticizes the system by exaggerating some aspects of the descriptions and by attacking single people, more than the entire system.

IRONY

In both texts it stimulates critical reflection on the reader's part through a series of more or less evident contrasts. Its aim is to make the reader aware of the distortions, injustices and contradictions to be found in the reality that is being described.

NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE

Verga speaks in the third person, but it's clear that he does not share the community's point of view.We can find a kind of anonymous narrator, but he does not subscribe its point of view. This technique reflects the one of estrangement.

Dickens uses a third-person narrator who is omniscient, but he assumes the points of view of various characters- In the extract Oliver wants some more he adopts Oliver's point of view

CONTRASTS in OLIVER TWIST

the boys' world and the adults' world

the poor and the rich

thinness(hunger) and  fatness

submission(fear) and power

THE USE OF PARATAXIS

Rosso Malpelo- a marked use of parataxis

Oliver wants some more- the syntax is discontinuous and broken, acquiring a kind of paratactical form

The purpose is to create an atmoshere of suspense or give the narrative a tone that is firm, rigorous, absolute. It doesn't admit any exception.

Aunt Jennifer's tigers questions

 ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ is a 1951 poem by the American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-

2012), published in her first poetry collection, A Change of World, which was

published while the precocious Rich was still in her early twenties.

The speaker describes her aunt’s embroidery featuring tigers who prance proudly and

unafraid, in contrast to the aunt’s own meek, oppressive life and marriage.

Adrienne Rich 

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,

Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.

They do not fear the men beneath the tree;

They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool

Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.

The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band

Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie

Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.

The tigers in the panel that she made

Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Answer the questions

1.Describe the tigers created by Aunt Jennifer.

2.Why did Aunt Jennifer choose to embroider tigers on the panel?

3.What will happen to Aunt Jennifer’s tigers when she is dead?

4.How has Aunt Jennifer created her tigers? What traits of tigers do they reveal?

5.Why are Aunt Jennifer’s hands fluttering through her wool?

6.Describe the contrast between Aunt Jennifer ‘ and her creation, the tigers.

7.Why do you think Aunt Jennifer created animals that are so different from her own

character?

8.What do the symbols, ‘tigers’, ‘fingers’ and ‘ring’ stand for in the poem, ‘Aunt Jennifer’s

Tigers’?

9.Why did Aunt Jennifer choose to embroider tigers on the panel?

10.What kind of married life did Aunt Jennifer lead?

11. What will happen to Aunt Jennifer’s tigers when she

Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ is a 1951 poem by the American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), published in her first poetry collection, A Change of World, which was published while the precocious Rich was still in her early twenties.

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Rich was known for her feminist writings as well as her poetry, and this fact is relevant for an analysis of ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’, in which the speaker describes her aunt’s embroidery featuring tigers who prance proudly and unafraid, in contrast to the aunt’s own meek, oppressive life and marriage.

‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’: summary

The poem comprises three stanzas. In the first stanza, the speaker describes the tigers her aunt has created in an embroidery. On the screen of fabric, the tigers appear to ‘prance’ or move in a lively manner against the backdrop, which is green. They are without fear.

The embroidery also contains some men under a tree, but the tigers are apparently unafraid of the men. They walk about the scene, glossy and smooth and sure of themselves; they are majestic, like knights from the medieval days of chivalry.

In the second stanza, the speaker describes the movement of her aunt’s finger as she works on the woollen embroidery with an ivory needle. On the aunt’s finger is her wedding ring, denoting her marriage to the speaker’s uncle. This wedding ring is described as sitting heavily on the aunt’s hand, implying the oppressive weight of marriage as a patriarchal system (of which more below).

The speaker concludes the poem by thinking about the future. When her aunt dies, her hands will lie in her grave and even in death they will bear the mark of all of the suffering and hardship she endured when she was alive. However, the tigers she has created in the embroidered panel will continue to prance proudly forever, unafraid of anything.

‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’: analysis

If we wished to summarise the meaning of Adrienne Rich’s poem in one sentence, we could do worse than offer: ‘“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” is about a woman using art to triumph over the oppression of patriarchy, which rules her life but cannot rule the art she creates.’ The tigers Aunt Jennifer embroiders represent the kind of creature she wishes she could be: proud and unafraid of the men in her life.

In an early collection of her essays, Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979), Adrienne Rich observed that throughout history, ‘women’s struggle for self-determination’ had been ‘muffled in silence’.

The reference to history is apposite, because ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ may put us in mind of all of those examples from nineteenth-century women’s fiction in which female characters wove or painted their stories or desires because they felt unable to speak them out loud. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s ground-breaking study of this, The Madwoman in the Attic, contains many such examples, and came out in the same year as Rich’s essay collection.

Aunt Jennifer, then, weaves or embroiders an image of woman – symbolically rendered into tigers in her artwork – which does not exist, but which is devoutly to be wished. The tigers are proud, confident, and unafraid: unlike Aunt Jennifer herself, and many other women, they do not go in fear of the men, beneath the tree or elsewhere.

The tigers are a symbol of power but also that ‘self-determination’ Rich identified as women’s struggle throughout the ages. Their ‘topaz’ colours (some varieties of the mineral topaz are indeed orange-brown, with some black) contrast sharply with the green backdrop of the embroidery Aunt Jennifer is working on.

We do not know the age of the poem’s speaker – the niece (if we assume she is female) of ‘Aunt Jennifer’. But there is something simple about the rhyming couplets of the poem, with these couplets themselves being arranged into pairs to form quatrains, and the (largely iambic) pentameter metre of the poem.

The poem’s rhythms might even put us in mind of children’s nursery rhymes – ‘Humpty Dumpty’, perhaps – and this adds an extra angle to the poem’s depiction of female subjugation.

How innocent is the speaker of Rich’s poem? How old, or how young? The key to the poem’s success as a feminist poem, perhaps, lies in the way Rich’s speaker seems innocent of the import of the things she is revealing to us: for example, the link between those men in the first stanza of the poem and the wedding band weighing down Aunt Jennifer’s finger in the second.

The ivory in Aunt Jennifer’s needle, meanwhile, is another reminder of the violent and predatory nature of men, who will hunt and slaughter elephants for their ivory tusks.

We are left, then, to piece together these disparate details and form a picture of, on the one hand, the quiet, meek, and put-upon Aunt Jennifer, and the proud, fearless, and masterly bravura of the tigers she creates through her art.

There are only subtle hints given about those ‘ordeals’ she suffered, ordeals her hands became ‘ringed’ by: both defined and restricted by, in other words. A key word in that final stanza is ‘mastered’, summoning the masculine dominance over Aunt Jennifer’s life.

In the last analysis, then, ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ is a poem which celebrates women’s ability to create art out of their oppression, but the nature of Aunt Jennifer’s art is at the same time a reminder that she could not speak out or forge a different path for herself: the (silent) world of those tigers on their green screen, and the (safely feminine) practice of needlework was the only outlet for her quiet defiance against marriage and other patriarchal norms.

 

Essay-Women's condition nowadays with reference to A room of one's own by Virginia Woolf

 

For all these centuries women have played the role of mirrors, endowed with the magical and delicious property of reflecting the figure of the man double-sized of the natural

 

These were the words written by Virginia Woolf in A room of one’s own  and these are still the words that echo in the mind of those who observe rationally the society in which we are.

After years of struggle, women have partly managed to emancipate ourselves, but the path is still long because we must eradicate those habits and traditions based on a patriarchal conception of society. For centuries women have been forced to be mothers, wives, educators, without ever having had the chance to build upthemselves and without ever having had the chance to rise as they wanted.

The woman has always been presented from the male point of view, starting from the thirteenth century with Dante Alighieri up to quote more modern authors such as James Joyce and his Eveline.

But why did that happen? Why did no woman ever find the courage to describe the world from her point of view before Charlotte Brönte or Jane Austen? Why so few women writers in the history of literature in the various countries of the world?

The answers to these questions are many, but Virginia Woolf was the one who gave a brilliant explanation to all these questions in an extraordinary work A Room of one’s own, which had a great impact on the feminist movement of the 60s and 70s of the 19th century.

 

Nowadays women have the opportunity to study, the opportunity to vote, to work where they want and above all they are independent, but did women have the same opportunities as men in the past centuries? Obviously the answer is no, they didn’t. In most societies women and men have always faced different expectations about how they should behave or work. Women have been expected to play specific roles- the wife, the mother, the daughter, the housewife; they have not been considered to be fit to do jobs generally associated with men, or even to start a career in politics, to do scientific research or do the same sports as men.

During the Victorian Age, for example, in England, the ideal Victorian woman was the “angel in the house”; her place was in the home, she was the pious, respectable and busy wife, mother and daughter. Victorian women didn’t have the same rights as men: they could not vote or hold political office, they had limited education and limited employment opportunities.

Men could divorce their wives for adultery, but wives could do so only if adultery was combined cruelty, bigamy or incest.

General attitudes to sex were a crucial aspect of respectability, with an intense concern of female chastity, and single women with a child were marginalized as “fallen women”.

Fortunately, the condition of the woman has changed over time.

Over the years, indeed, there have been many women who have fought for their emancipation; we can remember, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s mother, who is considered one of the forerunners of the feminist movement. She campaigned for a more active role for women in society.  In her opinion, if women were treated as subordinate beings and they often accepted this state of oppression, it was because they didn't have the tools to avenge their fundamental rights. In particular, she saw education as the key for promoting better living and social conditions for women.

In the late 19th century women struggled hard to improve their condition, but the early 20th century was an era of emancipation.

Emmeline Pankhurst is the icon of the feminist movement of the 20th century, she was a British activist and politician who led The Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United Kingdom, helping women gain the right to vote: the suffragettes broke windows, cut telephone wires, even went to prison. In 1918 they gained the vote for women over 30, but only in 1928 the age limitation became 21, the same as that for men.

 

Virginia Woolf, A room of one’s own. 

In 1929, Virginia Woolf published A Room’s Of One’s Own, which is a brilliant feminist essay, where the modern novelist explored the material and psychological conditions and historical constraints encountered by women writers. In this essay, Woolf advanced the thesis that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”, in other words, she says that women must be independent.

Here, the room is associated with economic independence, not just a space in which to write. Women must own enough money, if they want to completely devote themselves to write books.

To make people understand the importance of women's independence, Woolf creates Judith Shakespeare, the imaginary sister of the great dramatist William Shakespeare, she’s the example of the tragic fate a highly intelligent woman would have met.

This is the way she figures out her possible story in one section of the essay.

Judith was beaten by her father, she hated the idea of marriage and one night she decided to run away to pursue her dream: She wanted to enter the world of art and literature, because she possessed fantasy and was good with the musicality of words.

She was not accepted into theatres, no one taught her to act, she could not eat in taverns and she could not wander the streets of London at midnight alone. The men abused her, became pregnant and eventually decided to commit suicide. She was abandoned by everyone and no one would ever remember her.

“She lives in you and in me,” said Woolf, talking about Judith “and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.”

Moreover, according to Virginia Woolf, women had to revolutionize the world of literature, they had to create a new narrative genre in which they could express reality through their eyes with an innovative language, as Jane Austen did with the novel, this is because women have always seen the world from a different perspective and need a new literary tradition.

Woolf closes the essay with an exhortation to her audience of women to take up the tradition that has been so hardly bequeathed to them, and to increase the endowment for their own daughters.

 

Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. Sustainable development goal 5 is related to the importance of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. There has been progress over the last decades: more girls are going to school, fewer girls are forced into early marriage, more women are serving in parliament and positions of leadership, and laws are being reformed to advance gender equality.

 

In many countries in the world, gender equality has been achieved and today there are many women writers such as JK Rowling or Isabel Allende, or  in addition to the world of literature, women have also been welcomed in politics or in some other fields. In Italy, for example, the Prime Minister is currently a woman Giorgia Meloni.

However, despite these gains, many challenges remain: discriminatory laws and social norms remain pervasive, women continue to be underrepresented at all levels of political leadership, and women and girls all over the world report experiencing physical or sexual violence.

 

There are also countries where women are still exploited, beaten and killed, where between sixty and eighty percent of marriages are forced and violence, especially sexual violence, is the order of the day and lots of women cannot read or write.

The coronavirus outbreak has increased existing inequalities for women and girls across every sphere – from health and the economy, to security and social protection. 

 In conclusion, I think that women must fight every day as opportunities and expectations are still different for women and violence against them has even intensified. That is made clear if we consider all the movements and organizations  helping and supporting women in all parts of the world, such as the Me Too or NonUnaDiMeno movement.

We are a long way from real equality.

Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good government. -Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the UN.

 

Different ways to say me too

 Me too= 

So do I, Likewise,Ditto,Same here

NESWSPEAK (1984 by Orwell) and today's Internet abbreviations-examples

 

NESWSPEAK and today's Internet abbreviations

SUP=What's up

BF=Boyfriend 

GF=Girlfriend

BTW=By the way

THNX= Thanks 

TGIF= Thank God it's Friday

LMK=Let me know

NGL=Not gonna lie

ISTG=I swear to God

GTG=Got to go