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The Time Machine has two main threads. The first is the
adventure tale of the Eloi and Morlocks in the year 802,701
AD. The second is the science fiction of the time machine.
The adventure story includes many archetypal elements.
The Time Traveller's journey to the underworld, his fear
of the great forest, and his relationship to Weena, mirror
imagery prevalent in earlier literature, imagery strongly
associated with the inner workings of the human psyche.
The tale of 802,701 is political commentary of late
Victorian England. It is a dystopia, a vision of a troubled
future. It recommends that current society change its
ways lest it end up like the Eloi, terrified of an
underground race of Morlocks. In the Eloi, Wells satirizes
Victorian decadence. In the Morlocks, Wells provides a
potentially Marxist critique of capitalism.
The rest of the novella deals with the science fiction of
time travel. Before Wells, other people had written
fantasies of time travel, but Wells was the first to bring a
strong dose of scientific speculation to the genre. Wells
has his Time Traveller speak at length on the fourth
dimension and on the strange astronomy and evolutionary
trends he observes as he travels through time. Much of
this was inspired by ideas of entropy and decay
promulgated by Wells's teacher, Thomas Henry Huxley.
order to stay still, now "rebuff[s] the big wind" with its
forward propulsion. At the same moment, the poet feels his
own heart stir, or lurch forward out of "hiding," as it
were--moved by "the achieve of, the mastery of" the bird's
performance.
The opening of the sestet serves as both a further
elaboration on the bird's movement and an injunction to the
poet's own heart. The "beauty," "valour," and "act" (like
"air," "pride," and "plume") "here buckle." "Buckle" is the
verb here; it denotes either a fastening (like the buckling
of a belt), a coming together of these different parts of a
creature's being, or an acquiescent collapse (like the
"buckling" of the knees), in which all parts subordinate
themselves into some larger purpose or cause. In either
case, unification takes place. At the moment of this
integration, a glorious fire issues forth, of the same order
as the glory of Christ's life and crucifixion, though not as
grand.
Form
The confusing grammatical structures and sentence order
in this sonnet contribute to its difficulty, but they also
represent a masterful use of language. Hopkins blends and
confuses adjectives, verbs, and subjects in order to echo
his theme of smooth merging: the bird's perfect immersion
in the air, and the fact that his self and his action are
inseparable. Note, too, how important the "-ing" ending is
to the poem's rhyme scheme; it occurs in verbs, adjectives,
and nouns, linking the different parts of the sentences
together in an intense unity. A great number of verbs are
packed into a short space of lines, as Hopkins tries to nail
down with as much descriptive precision as possible the
exact character of the bird's motion.
"The Windhover" is written in "sprung rhythm," a meter in
which the number of accents in a line are counted but the
number of syllables does not matter. This technique allows
Hopkins to vary the speed of his lines so as to capture the
bird's pausing and racing. Listen to the hovering rhythm of
"the rolling level underneath him steady air," and the
arched brightness of "and striding high there." The poem
slows abruptly at the end, pausing in awe to reflect on
Christ.
Commentary
This poem follows the pattern of so many of Hopkins's
sonnets, in that a sensuous experience or description leads
to a set of moral reflections. Part of the beauty of the
poem lies in the way Hopkins integrates his masterful
description of a bird's physical feat with an account of his
own heart's response at the end of the first stanza.
However, the sestet has puzzled many readers because it
seems to diverge so widely from the material introduced in
the octave. At line nine, the poem shifts into the present
tense, away from the recollection of the bird. The horseand-rider metaphor with which Hopkins depicted the
windhover's motion now give way to the phrase "my
suffers for crimes that are not her own and lives a life
more degraded than she deserves.
Alec dUrberville An insouciant twenty-four-year-old man,
heir to a fortune, and bearer of a name that his father
purchased, Alec is the nemesis and downfall of Tesss life.
His first name, Alexander, suggests the conqueroras in
Alexander the Greatwho seizes what he wants regardless
of moral propriety. Yet he is more slippery than a grand
conqueror. His full last name, Stoke-dUrberville,
symbolizes the split character of his family, whose origins
are simpler than their pretensions to grandeur. After all,
Stokes is a blunt and inelegant name. Indeed, the divided
and duplicitous character of Alec is evident to the very end
of the novel, when he quickly abandons his newfound
Christian faith upon remeeting Tess. It is hard to believe
Alec holds his religion, or anything else, sincerely. His
supposed conversion may only be a new role he is playing.
This duplicity of character is so intense in Alec, and its
consequences for Tess so severe, that he becomes
diabolical. The first part of his surname conjures
associations with fiery energies, as in the stoking of a
furnace or the flames of hell. His devilish associations are
evident when he wields a pitchfork while addressing Tess
early in the novel, and when he seduces her as the serpent
in Genesis seduced Eve. Additionally, like the famous
depiction of Satan in Miltons Paradise Lost, Alec does not
try to hide his bad qualities. In fact, like Satan, he revels
in them. In Chapter XII, he bluntly tells Tess, I suppose I
am a bad fellowa damn bad fellow. I was born bad, and I
have lived bad, and I shall die bad, in all probability. There
is frank acceptance in this admission and no shame. Some
readers feel Alec is too wicked to be believable, but, like
Tess herself, he represents a larger moral principle rather
than a real individual man. Like Satan, Alec symbolizes the
base forces of life that drive a person away from moral
perfection and greatness. Angel Clare A freethinking son
born into the family of a provincial parson and determined
to set himself up as a farmer instead of going to Cambridge
like his conformist brothers, Angel represents a rebellious
striving toward a personal vision of goodness. He is a
secularist who yearns to work for the honor and glory of
man, as he tells his father in Chapter XVIII, rather than
for the honor and glory of God in a more distant world. A
typical young nineteenth-century progressive, Angel sees
human society as a thing to be remolded and improved, and
he fervently believes in the nobility of man. He rejects the
values handed to him, and sets off in search of his own. His
love for Tess, a mere milkmaid and his social inferior, is one
expression of his disdain for tradition. This independent
spirit contributes to his aura of charisma and general
attractiveness that makes him the love object of all the
milkmaids with whom he works at Talbothays.
TESS-Men Dominating Women
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Pip As a Bildungsroman (obrazovni roman), Great
Expectations presents the growth and development of a
single character, Philip Pirrip, better known to himself and
to the world as Pip. As the focus of the bildungsroman, Pip
is by far the most important character in Great
Expectations: he is both the protagonist, whose actions
make up the main plot of the novel, and the narrator, whose
thoughts and attitudes shape the readers perception of
the story. As a result, developing an understanding of Pips
character is perhaps the most important step in
understanding Great Expectations.
Because Pip is narrating his story many years after the
events of the novel take place, there are really two Pips in
Great Expectations: Pip the narrator and Pip the character
the voice telling the story and the person acting it out.
Dickens takes great care to distinguish the two Pips,
imbuing the voice of Pip the narrator with perspective and
maturity while also imparting how Pip the character feels
about what is happening to him as it actually happens. This
skillfully executed distinction is perhaps best observed
early in the book, when Pip the character is a child; here,
Pip the narrator gently pokes fun at his younger self, but
also enables us to see and feel the story through his eyes.
As a character, Pips two most important traits are his
immature, romantic idealism and his innately good
conscience. On the one hand, Pip has a deep desire to
improve himself and attain any possible advancement,
whether educational, moral, or social. His longing to marry
Estella and join the upper classes stems from the same
idealistic desire as his longing to learn to read and his fear
of being punished for bad behavior: once he understands
ideas like poverty, ignorance, and immorality, Pip does not
want to be poor, ignorant, or immoral. Pip the narrator
judges his own past actions extremely harshly, rarely giving
himself credit for good deeds but angrily castigating
himself for bad ones. As a character, however, Pips
idealism often leads him to perceive the world rather
narrowly, and his tendency to oversimplify situations based
on superficial values leads him to behave badly toward the
people who care about him. When Pip becomes a gentleman,
for example, he immediately begins to act as he thinks a
gentleman is supposed to act, which leads him to treat Joe
and Biddy snobbishly and coldly.On the other hand, Pip is at
heart a very generous and sympathetic young man, a fact
that can be witnessed in his numerous acts of kindness
throughout the book (helping Magwitch, secretly buying
Herberts way into business, etc.) and his essential love for
all those who love him. Pips main line of development in the
novel may be seen as the process of learning to place his
innate sense of kindness and conscience above his immature
idealism.
Not long after meeting Miss Havisham and Estella, Pips
desire for advancement largely overshadows his basic
goodness. After receiving his mysterious fortune, his
idealistic wishes seem to have been justified, and he gives
himself over to a gentlemanly life of idleness. But the
discovery that the wretched Magwitch, not the wealthy
Miss Havisham, is his secret benefactor shatters Pips
oversimplified sense of his worlds hierarchy. The fact that
he comes to admire Magwitch while losing Estella to the
brutish nobleman Drummle ultimately forces him to realize
that ones social position is not the most important quality
one possesses, and that his behavior as a gentleman has
caused him to hurt the people who care about him most.
Once he has learned these lessons, Pip matures into the
man who narrates the novel, completing the bildungsroman.
Estella Often cited as Dickenss first convincing female
character, Estella is a supremely ironic creation, one who
darkly undermines the notion of romantic love and serves
as a bitter criticism against the class system in which she
is mired. Raised from the age of three by Miss Havisham to
torment men and break their hearts, Estella wins Pips
deepest love by practicing deliberate cruelty. Unlike the
warm, winsome, kind heroine of a traditional love story,
Estella is cold, cynical, and manipulative. Though she