Analyzing The Theme Of Nature In Literary Devices English Literature Essay

Analyzing The Theme Of Nature In Literary Devices English Literature EssayThe theme of nature is really important to each of the texts to be discussed in this essay The red-hot Black Womans Poems by Grace Nichols Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller and enormous sargassum Sea by Jean Rhys. In a sense, the fact that each work is created at heart a different literary genre to some issue dictates the essential differences amongst them. However, this essay sets out to examine how, in addition to comparing literary devices, nature is used as a different imperative in each of the selected texts.Throughout the play, Willy escapes back into his memories and it is deeply significant, at that placefore, that the bucolicside is allied to this I was driving along, you understand? And I was fine. I was even observing the scenery. You can imagine, me looking at scenery, on the road every week of my life. But its so beautiful up there, Linda, the trees are so thick, and the sun is warm3Loma n both belongs in the country and out of it because he has simply used it, as he has used both things and people, to get ahead. The fact that he has been unsuccessful is indeed a lese majesty of his own and a generic dream that is never fulfilled nor justified, just as the story he begins to tell Linda, his wife, ends not in reverie on the idyllic, as it started, but on loss of control all of a sudden Im going off the road4Miller uses nature, therefore, as an emblem of Willys slip Many of Willys activities can be seen as highly symbolic. He plants seeds just as he plants false hopes both will die and never arise to fruition, largely because the ingleside has become too hemmed in by the city.5In addition, a further lost dream of Willys has been connected with nature, that of his brother, Bens, offer to join him and start his fortune beyond the suburban life Willy has lived William, when I walked into the jungle, I was seventeen. When I walked out I was twenty-one. And, by God, I was rich6For Willy, therefore, nature has become a place of lost hope where the grass dont grow anymore7 it does not belong and nor does he A victim of both a heartless capitalist society and his own misguided dreams, Willys eventual suicide is set uped with tragic dimensions. His beliefs may be misguided, but he stays true to them to the end. Although he has neither affable nor intellectual stature, Willy has dignity, and he strives to maintain this as his life falls apart around him.8Displacement is also a major feature of Jean Rhyss novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. First published in 1966, it is a prequel to Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre, first published in 1847. The novel uses nature as a means of pay backing the narration of Rochesters first wife, Bertha Mason, here known as Antoinette Cosway, a young woman who feels herself displaced following the freeing of the slaves who had worked on her familys plantation. The very word place occurs many measure in the novel9and Antoinet te seeks solace in what she sees as an Eden garden, her former home, from which she is cast out A very important early set rear is Antoinettes description of the garden at Coulibri, where she was a child, a garden which was probably based on Rhyss memories of her mothers family estate at Geneva. It marks childhood as fetching place in a damaged Eden.10The description of the garden is thus very important to an understanding of Antoinette and of the way Rhys uses her nexus with nature to aid her geek and thematic developmentOur garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched. One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted r oot. Twice a year the octopus orchid flowered then not an inch of tentacle showed. It was a bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, howling(prenominal) to see. The scent was very sweet and strong. I never went near it.11The possessive pronoun with which this paragraph opens immediately establishes the dichotomy of Antoinettes situation. This is her home, it should feel like hers but it does not. The beauty she infers has a duplicitous lushness because it has gone wild, emblematic of a land which has lost control, albeit for a positive reason. The living and the dead mix and encroach upon one another, and there is a serpent in the garden in the snaky orchids. Moreover, the twisted root implies a distortion of what was meant to be, metaphorically echoing Antoinettes displacement. In addition, this is not the completely example of places appearing resonant of disposition and/or situation Places are extremely alive in this novel the menacing, lush garden at Coulibri, the opa que bathing pool at Coulibri, sunset by the huts of the plantation workers, the road from the village of Massacre up to Granbois, the sea and sky at sunset from the ajoupa or thatched shelter at Granbois, the bathing pools at Granbois (the champagne pool and the nutmeg pool) the forest where Antoinettes husband wanders until he is lost, the road to Christophines home, the trees and bamboos around the house at Granbois.12Here, Antoinette appears at the same time intoxicated and repelled by the sweet and strong of the garden, which perhaps says something about her similarly ambivalent attitude towards those around her and they to her The picture we now have of Rhys and her heroines is that of a passive, impotent, self-victimized schizoid who, comfortable with failure, wields her helplessness like a weapon all as instinctive as being distaff.13The presentation of nature at the honeymoon house is similarly difficult to place, seeming to be one thing but actually being another, but h er former home is a sacred infinite where Antoinette hugs to herself the secret hidden in Coulibri.14It is, indeed, these secrets in isolation, echoed in the descriptions of Antoinettes homeland that make the representation of nature in Wide Sargasso Sea so clearly an imperative of the textAs long as Antoinette can remember and order the events of her memories into a temporal role or causal sequence, create even an colour of sequence and maintain a measured sense of space and time, then she can hold her life and self together. Her act of narration becomes an act of assertion and cohesion, a nod to the world and its conventions, an attempt to prevent herself from dissolving. When, in Part Three, Antoinette lies encaged in Thornfield Halls dark, cold attic, the threads that hold her to the reality that the world perceives as saneness finally break. These threads are the elements of conventional narrative linear chronology, sequence, narratorial lucidity, distance. She herself adm its at this point that time has no meaning sequence disintegrates into a confusion of present and past and crowning(prenominal)ly into a dream which narrates her future.15This has been quoted at length because it addresses many of the literary devices that the novelist, as opposed to the playwright or poet, can use to develop a theme. With regard to nature, it is used by Rhys, as suggested above, to create a temporal space for Antoinette that is emblematic of the identity she has lost. The wildness which is encroaching upon the Eden of the garden, afterwards to be completely destroyed, is an example of the way in which the novelist can use one strong image to lead into another, both being resonant of the past. Indeed, once more as stated above, the act of telling the tale creates the reference point in the mind of the reader and the locations in which she is placed are connected to that, as is the temporal dislocation which memory produces and which is often, as with Antoinette, indicative of her state of mind. The evocation of nature as a turbulent and emotive presence adds to this, with the sea as the ultimate semiotic of challenge, chaos and dislocation.Grace Nichols second collection of verse, The Fat Black Womans Poems, published in 1984, also uses nature to evoke a particular image. However, as this is poetry, the linguistic and literary devices used are very different from either those of the playwright and/or novelist. Nichols grew up in Guyana16but has made her life and go in England, she has lived and worked in Britain since 197717, and this cross-cultural imperative is very much evident in her work her poems frequently acknowledge the alien climate, geography, and culture of Englands cities18Within The Fat Black Womans Poems, Nichols seeks to evoke a different perception of beauty from that which is shown in white Western culture Nichols also deploys the fat black woman as a powerful challenge to the tyranny of Western notions of female beauty19 and thus engender a new heroine, a woman who revises the aesthetic of female beauty.20One of the techniques Nichols employs to do this is combining nature with an aspect of the physical self, as here in Thoughts drifting through the fat black womans head time having a full bubble bathSteatopygous skySteatopygous seaSteatopygous wavesSteatopygous me21The unfamiliar word, steatopygous (meaning having fully rounded buttocks) is repeated for emphasis and juxtaposed with images of nature so as to produce an emblem of the black woman as close to nature, her body shaped like the sky, waves and sea. Nichols is empowering black women in image by doing this as she does by giving the black woman her own unique voice In making the fat black woman the speaking subject of many of these poems, Nichols signals her refusal to use up the subject(ed) position designated for the black woman by history and to insist on more complex subjectivities.22Nichols is also concerned that the voice should seem naturalistic and therefore the natural images perform yet another function Like many Afro-Caribbean writers, Nichols infuses her poetry with the spiritual energy of the tradition of women before her, a tradition that has lower-ranking written record.23In another poem from the collection, cup of tea, this reproduction of a different image of physical appeal can also be seen to be connected with natureBeautyis a fat black womanwalking the fieldspressing a breezedhibiscusto her cheekwhile the sun lights up her feetBeautyis a fat black womanriding the wavesdrifting in happy oblivionwhile the sea turns backto hug her shape24Again, the woman is juxtaposed with nature, providing a unity between the persona and her surroundings which is both literal and metaphorical. Repetition is used once more by the poet to emphasise the connection between the theme of the collection and beauty in abstract. Indeed, the word Beauty, the only capitalised word in the poem, is set alone on a line, as is hi biscus, as if to stress its importance as an emblem or iconic of what Nichols says is an imperative i.e. that this is what beauty unequivocally is. There is a mutual embrace between the woman and nature, she pressing the hibiscus/to her cheek and the sea turning back/to hug her shape. It is as if Nichols is suggesting that the fat black woman who is riding the waves/drifting in happy oblivion is in unison with nature and recognised by it as being so. All of nature, indeed, like the sun that lights up her feet is glorifying her and she it. There is no punctuation in the verses, emphasising the smooth, natural flow of the descriptions and the way in which they are intended to imply all that is inherently natural. As Nichols writes in The Assertion, This is my birthright25and thus the investigation of beauty within the poems becomes a socio-political imperative, too.In conclusion, all three texts Millers Death of a Salesman, Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea and Nichols The Fat Black Womans Poe ms all use nature as a way of enlarging upon and more effectively demonstrating their central concerns. An important element of this is the way in which pathetic fallacy is used by the authors, i.e. nature reflecting and/or suggesting a mood or theme. As the three texts discussed here are from different genres, they of course use nature in different ways, employing different literary devices, as has been shown. However, for each of the authors nature is singularly important and enriches the individual texts immeasurably. In the final analysis, therefore, it might be suggested, indeed, that nature itself becomes almost a communicative character within each of the very different works discussed within this essay, as its importance to the creation and communication of each cannot be overestimated.