Essays on Society

Ethics is what defines a person’s character. How a person should behave in the society. But how do we justify our acts as ethical? An idea suggests that an act is ethical if it is benefiting the greatest number of people. While doing this, one...

In Harriet Jacobs’ historically renowned narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the story of Linda Brent’s struggles as a slave woman help to shed light on the unrealistic standards placed on women during the nineteenth century. As defined by Barbara Welter, the...

As a society we are less likely to change when given a mirror image of ourselves in a text. In A Single Man directed by Tom Ford, 1960s society provides a modern audience with events and people that are not in the contemporary world, but...

Many people who commit acts of terror fundamentally consider themselves to be altruists, believing that the acts of violence they carry out are truly for the greater good. This distorted view of blind ‘selfless devotion’ stems from many factors; therefore, raising the question, how are...

Archetypes are an important foundation for building literary work. As “reoccurring patterns, images, or descriptive details” (Crisp 2), they not only define the identity of an author’s characters, but the course of the plot, the journeys and the tragedies. Archetypes are utilized as a useful...

Societal dictum and etiquette are fluid concepts, changing and differing dependent largely on location, culture, time period, and other factors. With reference to carting a carriage of Peaches through rural Japan in the middle of a cold winter night, the narrator of Abe Akira’s Peaches...

Title: The Believer and MacIntyre’s Emotivist Culture Author: Katherine Perry Date Written: Feb. 22, 2006 Words: 2,085 In his book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre asserts that members of contemporary society live in a world devoid of definitively objective moral foundation, a world he calls an...

Historically, Greek tragedies have been used as a means to convey particular political and ethical testimonials about society, usually in order to convey certain morals or to ensure order. In such chronicles, a protagonist grapples with a particular conflict or sets of conflicts, usually pertaining...

While “Cabaret” relies on the cabaret setting as a narrative force of the film, it is also based in the history surrounding cabaret performances in Berlin. Both in the film and in real life, the cabaret served as a place of degenerate art and political...

In Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, the blank white space occupies more area than all of the black text and pictures combined. As a relatively short American Lyric, one must assume that this half of the book – the parts where nothing is said – has great...

In the play, Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman employs symbolism through the characters and their actions to reflect aspects of the corrupt Chilean society that Dorfman himself lived through. Act II, scene i illustrates the symbols quite well, with the troubled, unjust Paulina, the...

The world is witnessing terrorist activity happening all over the world today. Because they are loyal to some political ideology or to certain religious beliefs, many organizations have chosen the path of violence and terror to achieve their ends. This vested circle does not have...

Marketing has been described by many businessmen and experts as the backbone of any business activity or idea. There is no any single company in the world which has thrived to its pinnacle performance levels without a comprehensive and strategic marketing plan. It is also...

In Victor Pelevin’s novel, The Yellow Arrow, there is an evident string of symbols and metaphors which represent the harsh conditions of the Russian people during the early 1990’s. One of the literally largest symbols in the novel was the train itself: The Yellow Arrow,...

The period referred to as the Golden Age of English Drama was a revolutionary period when it came to the portrayal of human thought and behavior in society. Some would even argue that this period in Renaissance England was a major influence in the development...

Roughly halfway through Euripides’ The Bacchae, a messenger describes to Thebes’ bewildered king his encounter with the women who have left the city to practice their religious rites in the forest. His account cogently presents the basic opposition between nature and civilization that is inherent...

In the novel Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev explores the inevitability of man’s integration into society by implementing effectiv structural devices. The parallel trips of the central characters highlight their emotional and intellectual paths and culminate in their seemingly inevitable fusion with society. Similarly, Turgenev’s...

Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies is a book of philosophical and logical refutations and arguments. It is a direct response to several writings in which the male authors make claims against women’s purity. These books, according to de Pizan, slander...

When most people think of addiction, they think of potheads and alcoholics. Although those are the most common types of addiction, there are also more bizarre things like sex addicts and gambling. In a sense, every person has a form of addiction. Weather to caffeine,...

Weight lose in society has created an obsession for many people. In this essay I will show how society is ultimately to blame for this process of obsession and how it has created exercise mania that leaves some people desperate to create the “perfect” body....

King Solomon’s Mines, in its first pages, poses the question, “What is a gentleman?” (10). Men and masculinity are at the novel’s core. It is both for and about men, and consciously so: Haggard assures his readers that there is not a woman in the...

In the film Lantana, Ray Lawrence builds both internal and external conflict between characters using various film techniques; in turn, such conflict acts as a catalyst for many characters in reaching a turning point for change. Major conflict is caused between the relationships (Leon and...

Joe Christmas is a walking contradiction in the Southern society in which he resides. Throughout Light in August, central character Joe Christmas experiences many factors that contribute to his inability to form substantial relationships with other characters. Joe’s childhood in the orphanage and living with...

The 1868 novel Little Women is not only a heartwarming and heartbreaking story set in the midst of the Civil War, but also a series of veiled narratives of the life of the author, Louisa May Alcott. The story coincides with many of the economic...

Wake up, have a cup of coffee, and put on some makeup before walking out the door for the first time in twelve hours. The day ends with a phone call from a loved one as the makeup comes off and the sweatpants go on...

The seventy-year-old Moll Flanders who narrates her own life story considers herself a reformed criminal. But to what degree should her perceived transgressions cause her to actually be understood as such? After all, Defoe’s novel makes it clear that a number of different factors ultimately...

Postcolonial literature both reveals and challenges the ideals of a dominant culture in their attempt to marginalise and control a minor group. No Sugar is a play set in a period of Australian history known as Protectionism, in which Indigenous Australians were marginalised as primitive...

In The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, by Bertolt Brecht, a violent gang gains power through the vegetable trade, attaining near dictatorial status in a chillingly short amount of time. One thing leads to another in a rapid sequence of events that ultimately results in...

Although the characters’ distinctive individual stories are told in Act I of Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls, the overall effect is a cumulative chorus of women’s issues. The dinner scene in Act I establishes thematic foundations upon which numerous women’s issues can be raised. Despite...