Monday, October 24, 2011

The Custom of the Country - Edith Wharton

Our heroine emerges in the form of a bratty young woman whose seemingly only virtue is her beauty, with which she schemes and finagles 4 marriages with men, each one richer and more esteemed then the last. As she seeks her next financial victim she leaves a trail of heartache and death in her wake as her husbands each fall prey to her beauty and then helplessly watch as she throws them over for the next...
super sad...I kept waiting for the heroine to get some sort of divine retribution. I even found myself whispering under my breath "please Edith Wharton....just make a huge rock fall out of the sky and land on her...not killing her but leaving her horribly maimed and crippled and yet alive enough to live out her endless years in the anguish of being truly hideous...but nope. She got everything she wanted. Meanwhile husband #2 shot himself, husband #3 was forced to sell family heirlooms that had been in his family since the crusaders and her 9 year old son was left hopelessly alone while his mother ran off to try on new dresses and throw elaborate dinner parties...

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Henry V - William Shakespeare

In this essay, I will examine the rhetorical and dramatic effectiveness of King Henry’s speech to the Governor of Harfluer in Act 3 Scene 4 ...