The Icon Speaks For Itself

[masterofmidgets]

I JUST TURNED IN MY PAPER, GO ME.

It's a little under length, and totally lacking in direct quotations, but I think not utter rubbish - I had a fairly solid thesis and I backed it up more or less. Not my best work, but considering that for one of my classes winter quarter last year I completely lost it and didn't even turn in my final paper - eh, I'm doing okay. Wish I had started earlier, but I never do. Now I'm just going to do a quick thing for my writing class - just a short story analysis, hopefully won't take more than an hour, and then it is SWEET MERCIFUL SLEEP.


Also, have the intro to my essay. Because while the rest of it is distinctly meh, I'm kind of proud of this, especially considering I'd already been awake like 20 hours when I wrote it.

In both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the authors create characters who act as doppelgangers for their protagonists. In Frankenstein, the monster is a perverse inversion of his creator; he exposes Victor’s dark side, attacks the things he loves, and drags him down into destruction. In Atwood’s novel, Offred in effect has two doubles, each showing a different path she could have taken: on the one side is the Commander’s wife Serena Joy, respected, powerful, but barren and miserable, and on the other is Moira, who enjoys a measure of freedom only because she has sold herself into prostitution. These are very different approaches to the concept of the doppelganger, but in each novel they share a common purpose. For both Shelley and Atwood, the doppelganger serves as a tool to address the theme of women’s role in a sexist society. That they are presented in such dramatically different forms is indicative of the changing societies that produced them. Shelley, writing in the 19^th Century, uses the doppelganger in her story to declare the eminent importance of women as mothers and nurturers of life by showing how life created free of a mother is monstrous. Atwood, writing in the 1980s, writes to a society where women enjoy a far greater agency, and rather than embracing the power of motherhood Offred’s story is an argument for the power of women to choose – to be mothers or not be mothers, but in either case to act of their own will and not by coercion and law. 

Let it be noted that the more sleep-deprived I am, the more...stentorial my writing gets. According to , by 9.00 am I'm practically declaiming.

Comments

[estarial.livejournal.com]

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuude, Zephra, that is like the smartest thing I have ever read.

[masterofmidgets.livejournal.com]

I think it's one of my better intros - some of my SLE papers in retrospect make me cringe, not even counting the one I almost accidentally turned in that said Virgirl was banging Dante in the Inferno.

But the rest of the paper totally goes downhill from there D: Oh well, at least I turned something in!

PS: Are you still alive? And getting to sleep at some point in the near future?