Culture Clashes in Daisy Miller Essay Example for Free

Culture Clashes in Daisy Miller Essay Throughout the world people have differing ideas on what is good and bad based on whatever culture one visits one is sure to find major differences. In the period that this story takes place the US is trying to find its own identity and establish their own traditions. In the Europeans perspectives the Americans were deviant people because their culture was out of the norm. Winterbourne is stunned and intrigued immediately once he meets Daisy. He growing up with a more European lifestyle finds Daisy’s flirtatious and outgoing attitude very abnormal yet refreshing. Many of the older women in society, especially his mother, find her to be cheap and very unlady like due to her lack of classy behavior compared their idea of a proper high society woman should behave like. The book Daisy Miller, illustrates the American lifestyle, compared to the proper etiquette of European social standards. The novel Daisy Miller is the story of a girl who is on vacation with her mother and little brother. Along the way she meets Winterbourne and whom he immediately notices that she is different than other girls he has met in the past. She gives off an aura of wanting to become independent and a free spirit. Which all of the other women look down upon because they find it very trashy and very improper, especially for someone of such a high status also. Daisy’s family is of high society and normally girls like Daisy are quiet and respectful, never is it heard of to approach a man to which she is not acquainted with. Therefore, the idea that Daisy is flirtatious and so headstrong and direct with Winterbourne is just shocking to everyone who hears of her. She makes a great impact on those around her and unfortunately most do not like her because she is different and American. Henry James was born in New York on April 15, 1843 and died February 28, 1916 of edema following a series of strokes in London( â€Å"Henry James† par 1). He was the son of Henry, a minister, and Mary (â€Å"Henry James† par 1). He immigrated to England in 1910 and was naturalized in 1915(â€Å"Henry James† par 1). Since he was born in the US he had a similar outlook on perhaps what he wrote about. He moved to London for the latter part of his life, which caused him to see the extreme difference in the European perspective. This is what the novel Daisy Miller is all about. The differences and the controversy that occurs when two different cultures clash together. James had a very successful career that always involved writing. He was a well-known literary critic and novelist. He was a writer for Nation and art critic for The Atlantic in 1866-1869(â€Å" Henry James par 2). He was a writer for the New York Tribune while living in Paris for a year. Surprisingly though he was also a volunteer among the displaced and wounded during World War I (â€Å" Henry James par 2). He received many prestigious awards throughout his life including the Order of Merit in 1915 and he was commemorated with the James memorial stone (â€Å" Henry James par 4). Henry James lived from 1843 to 1916, which is around the same time that he set the period in the novel Daisy Miller. James lived the majority of his life in the US and was raised with the American culture. For the latter years of his life he moved to London were most people were still living in an old-fashioned setting as opposed to Americans who were exploring and expanding from the European way. James having experienced life in both areas causes him to not give quite a clear suggestion on which culture he prefers, â€Å" In late Victorian eyes, Daisy was likely to be either wholly innocent or guilty; James, either all for her or against her†( Ohmann par 1). Due to this the reader is never told which culture James ends up supporting, â€Å" James began writing with one attitude towards his heroine and concluded with a second and different attitude toward her(Ohmann par 1). In the novel Daisy is often regarded as an outsider or an unwelcome intruder in society. Her outgoing and free spirit causes people, specifically Europeans, to look down on her because her behavior does not conform with the norms of that particular society. She stands out but at the same time she does not really care that people are talking about her and looking down on her with distaste. She puts it in the back of her mind and just tells her self that she will do whatever she wants and she will not let anybody tell her that she is not able to. She does not let the fact that she is a woman restrain her from achieving what she wants. Yet at the same time she maintains her dignity and pride while still acting like a woman to a certain extent. She balances the fine line through the book of the quiet proper woman and the wild American. She maintains the free spirit of an American girl, but traditionally she is still a woman who has escorts and fine extravagant dinner parties for young high society people. She revolutionizes the idea that it would be alright to loosen up on occasion, â€Å" her conduct is without blemish, according to the rural American standard, and she knows no other†(Howells par 2). However in the perspective of other people they regard her as a nuisance and someone who is a threat to society because she could soil and corrupt the minds of their young daughters: â€Å" Daisy exemplifies those young girls who have fine social gifts to be sure but whose cleverness is too much for them and if allowed any influence their folly runs away with them, like horses with the bits between their teeth†(Montiero par 4). She stands out and people around her do not appreciate her trying to be different because they do not want to accept change or different cultures. They are all used to the regular routine and tradition that the generations before them have set up and carried out for hundreds of years before them. They expected to continue with tradition for hundreds until they saw things were changing and were scared to approach it so they tried to shut it out. The novel Daisy Miller represents a major problem that is still controversial to this day. Still in the world cultures clash and people are sometimes offended at others. However no one can be blamed because its all about the society’s norms and values. Every society is different and what may be important not one may not necessarily be as important to some one else. Many cultures differ but fortunately they find a common ground to agree upon on the basic rules of society. They may not agree completely but they are willing to acknowledge that its true. Works cited Deakin, Motley F. â€Å"Daisy Miller, Tradition, and the European Heroine. † Comparative Literature Studies. 6. 1(Mar. 1969): 45-59 Rpt. in Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale. Farragut High School. 26 oct. 2009 http://go. galegroup. com â€Å"Henry James. † Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Farragut High. 22 Oct. 2009 http://go. galegroup. com Howells, William Dean. â€Å" Defense of Daisy Miller. † Discovery of a Genius: William Dean Howells and Henry James. Ed. Albert Mordell Twayne Publishers, 1961. 88-91. Rpt in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas Votteler. Vol. 8. Detroit: gale Research, 1991. 88-91. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Farragut High School. 26 Oct. 2009 James, Henry. Daisy Miller. New York: Penguin Books,1995. Monteiro, George. â€Å"What’s in a Name? James’ Daisy Miller. † American Literary Realism. 39. 3 (Spring 2007): p. 252. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Farragut High School. 25 Oct. 2009 http:// go. galegroup. com Ohmann, Carol. â€Å" Daisy Miller: A study of Changing Intentions. † American Literature. 36. 1 (Mar. 1964):1-11 Rpt in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Anna J. Sheets. Vol. 32. Detroit: gale Group, 1999. 1-11. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Farragut High School. 22 Oct. 2009 http://go. galegroup. com Wardley,Lynn. â€Å"Reassembling Daisy Miller. † American Literary History. 3. 2(Summer 1991):232-254. Rpt in Short Story Criticism. Ed Anna J. Sheets. Vol. 32. Detroit: Gale Group,1999. 232-254. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Farragut High School. 23 Oct. 2009

Sex & Violence in the Media Essay -- Essays Papers

Sex & Violence in the Media On February 1, 2004, millions of Americans sat down around their television sets with their family and friends to watch the biggest sports event of the year: Super Bowl XXXVIII. Inside the Reliant Stadium of Houston, Texas, the New England Patriots beat the Carolina Panthers 32-29 in one of the closest games in recent history; but this year it wasn’t the football game or even the commercials that had people talking. It was an incident that occurred during the halftime show that involved pop singers Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake that ended in millions of Americans having the privilege to see the left breast of Janet Jackson for a few moments. This single issue may not have been a huge ordeal in itself, but it brought to surface some very pertinent questions about how far was too far in the media, what the government should do to control it, and what effects sex and violence in the media were having on American culture. The events that took place during the halftime show of the Super Bowl may have shocked and angered many parents for exposing such sexual behavior and nudity to their children, but there were also a great number of people who questioned why people were so upset over a few seconds of screen time that Janet Jackson’s left breast received. After all, it was simply part of the female anatomy. Many people argued that it wasn’t just nudity, that it was â€Å"softcore† pornography because of the sexual conduct that was behind the performance. It is understandable that Jackson and Timberlake’s routine was full of sexual innuendo, but the majority of young children usually don’t pick up on such behavior and thus a simple â€Å"wardrobe malfunction.† Whether the performance during the halftime ... ...ildren, teenagers, and adults in many different ways. While some people were outraged by the Super Bowl incident and others believed it was merely an accident that could have been prevented, the event put to the test some fundamental questions concerning how much power the media should have. Because the FCC is on a rampage right now trying to put an end to these problems, many networks are implementing new features such as the ten second delay, and others are trying to promote the use of V-chips (prevent children from viewing objectionable material) and reminding Americans of the rating system that is on the television. But the fact is, television is free to the public, and the public is watching. As sex and violence increasingly fill our television sets, our minds become more adjusted to such behaviors and we forget to grasp reality and focus on the important things.

Dick Hebdige’s work Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Dick Hebdige’s work Subculture: The Meaning of Style has had a great impact within the area of cultural studies as it manages to take the preceding theories of subculture one step further, and to pinpoint the differences between culture and subculture as well as to decipher the â€Å"the hidden messages inscribed on the glossy surfaces of style† (Hebdige, 18). Hebdige follows on the tracks of semiology as theorized before him by Saussure and Roland Barthes and tries to read and interpret the signs and the language of the subcultures that emerged in Great Britain after World War II, such as the punks, the mods or the skinheads.Also, he is inspired to a great extent by Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology. What is really significant about Hebdige’s works though is that he applies the purely theoretical frame that had been constructed by the preceding authors directly to the different styles which appeared as forms of subculture. Thus, he tries to interp ret the outer signs which were displayed by each of the groups, from the punks to the skinheads, and reveal their social and cultural meaning.He uses clothing and hair styles, types of music or dancing and so on, as part of the language of the subcultures, in which the actual social meanings are inscribed. Thus, according to Hebdige although the social classes were said to have disappeared after the Second World War, they were actually simply transformed into ideological divisions from the mainstream. The classes thus formed were subcultures, that is, ‘marginal discourses’ which opposed the general tendency of the anonymous culture existing at that point in time:â€Å"It has become something of a clichà © to talk of the period after the Second World War as one of enormous upheaval in which the traditional patterns of life in Britain were swept aside to be replaced by a new, and superficially less class-ridden system [†¦] Nonetheless [†¦]class refused to disa ppear. The ways in which class was lived, however – the forms in which the experience of class found expression in culture did change dramatically.The advent of the mass media, changes in the constitution of the family, in the organization of school and work, shifts in the relative status of work and leisure, all served to fragment and polarize the working-class community, producing a series of marginal discourses within the broad confines of class experience. †(Hebdige, 54) As Hebdige emphasizes, the subcultural styles formed their own rhetoric by means of a certain way of living and of an ostentatious appearance, as a response to the particular cultural, social, political circumstances of the time.In brief, it can be said that these subcultural styles were a form of protest to the anonymous culture. Although sometimes their rhetoric, as in the case of the punks, was intentionally baffling and consciously aiming at meaninglessness, to the point that it seemed to  "work against the reader and to resist any authoritative interpretation,†(Hebdige, 89) it formed nevertheless a coherent symbolic order in itself.The subcultural groups represent, in Hebdige’s view, responses to the â€Å"contrary mythology of class†, that is, to the way in which class was alternatively proclaimed as gone and then reaffirmed by the media: â€Å"Rather the different styles and the ideologies which structure and determine them represent negotiated responses to a contradictory mythology of class. In this mythology, ‘the withering away of class' is paradoxically countered by an undiluted ‘classfulness', a romantic conception of the traditional whole way of (working-class) life revived twice weekly on television programs like Coronation Street.The mods and skinheads, then, in their different ways, were ‘handling' this mythology as much as the exigencies of their material condition. They were learning to live within or without that a morphous body of images and typifications made available in the mass media in which class is alternately overlooked and overstated, denied and reduced to caricature. †(Hebdige, 55) Thus, Hebdige sees subcultures as homogeneous and coherent forms of rhetoric, which go beyond the merely desire to shock the public opinion.In fact, as he theorizes, all the parts of the systems of symbols that make up a particular style are homologous, and they can be said to be as coherent as a’ whole way of life’: â€Å"In Profane Culture, Willis shows how, contrary to the popular myth which presents subcultures as lawless forms, the internal structure of any particular subculture is characterized by an extreme orderliness: each part is organically related to other parts and it is through the fit between them that the subcultural member makes sense of the world.For instance, it was the homology between an alternative value system (‘Tune in, turn on, drop out’), halluci nogenic drugs and acid rock which made the hippy culture cohere as a ‘whole way of life’ for individual hippies. †(Hebdige, 123) As Hebdige remarks the subcultures were actually strong constructs, which were usually meant as a response to a crisis situation, as is the case of the punks at the end of the 1970’s, whose rhetoric mimicked the chaos of the English social and economical life.The violent and obscene style was in fact a language in itself, in perfect accordance with the way in which swore or spoke: â€Å"There was a homological relation between the trashy cut-up clothes and spiky hair, the pogo and amphetamines, the spitting, the vomiting, the format of the fanzines, the insurrectionary poses and the â€Å"soulless,† frantically driven music. The punks wore clothes which were the sartorial equivalent of swear words, and they swore as they dressed — with calculated effect, lacing obscenities into record notes and publicity releases, i nterviews and love songs.Clothed in chaos, they produced Noise in the calmly orchestrated Crisis of everyday life in the late 1970 s[†¦]†(Hebdige, 125) Hebdige thus highlights the identity of language and style within the subcultural rhetoric. The punks for instance functioned as a current in which the meanings were not even fixed as such, although the general meaning behind the style was that ‘the forbidden is permitted’, as Hebdige comments: â€Å"If we were to write an epitaph for the punk subculture, we could do no better than repeat Poly Styrene's famous dictum: ‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’ or somewhat more concisely: the forbidden is permitted, but by the same token, nothing, not even these forbidden signifiers (bondage, safety pins, chains, hair-dye, etc. ) is sacred and fixed. †(Hebdige, 125)The subcultures were thus a way of subverting the anonymous, mainstream currents trough a form of stylistic rhetoric. The main discontents with the contemporary world were thus displayed by means of dress or discordant music for example, aiming at a deconstruction of traditional concepts or cultural facts.The subcultural styles didn’t target necessarily the values of a certain society, as it is usually believed, but rather those notions and cultural patterns that they found as incoherent and contradictory. They were actually an abstract embodiment of the outside chaos, and not a chaotic response to order, or a protest against order. Also, the subcultural streams aimed at emphasizing otherness and difference and their adherents were intentionally posing as aliens to society and wearing masks so as to avoid any categorization or prescribed identity:â€Å"They [the punks] played up their Otherness, ‘happening’ on the world as aliens, inscrutables. Though punk rituals, accents and objects were deliberately used to signify working-classness, the exact origins of individual punks were disguised or symbolically d isfigured by the make-up, masks and aliases which seem to have been used, like Breton's art, as ploys ‘to escape the principle of identity. ’ †(Hebdige,126) Another very important characteristic of the subcultural movements is, as Hebdige notes, the fact that they strived to confuse the usual divisions of race, gender and chronology by combining them in their style.The boundaries between the white and black cultures are progressively erased through the borrowings that the white cultures made from the black ones in their style: â€Å"[†¦] it is on the plane of aesthetics: in dress, dance, music; in the whole rhetoric of style, that we find the dialogue between black and white most subtly and comprehensively recorded [†¦]†(Hebdige, 96) The subcultures proceeded to mix up the separate elements of the mainstream culture, attacking thus the idea of identity and opening the way to difference and otherness:â€Å"Behind punk's favored ‘cut ups†™ lay hints of disorder, of breakdown and category confusion: a desire not only to erode racial and gender boundaries but also to confuse chronological sequence by mixing up details from different periods. †(Hebdige, 128) The important thing to note therefore is that in Hebdige’s theory the subcultures were deviations from the anonymous culture, aiming at decentralizing some of the most rooted concepts and ideas of society, and at establishing a new different order outside the stereotypes of society. All this was done through style, ranging from music to dressing and all the other means of expression.Style works therefore as a system of signs, as a text that must be read to grasp the meaning behind it. Obviously, Hebdige’s work deals with the subcultures in the modern epoch, after the Second World War. Therefore, there have been attempts to take his study further, so as it may capture the way in which subculture is manifested in postmodernism. Although the main subcultures that Hebdige discusses- the punks, the teddy boys, the mods, the skinheads, the Rasta men and so on, lost their force or even disappeared, some subcultural groups still exist today, although their structure seems to be different from that of the modern subcultures.The styles in the contemporary world are, to a great extent, the products of postmodernism and therefore imitate its main tenants, its fragmentation and hybridization. There are no longer entirely compact, coherent or well delimited subcultures like those identified by Hebdige, therefore the concepts he proposed remain mostly valid for the historical period he analyzed in his work. His approach is very enlightening for any cultural studies inquiry but it should be modified or continued so as to comprise the contemporary phenomena.

Essay on the Concept of Power - 1154 Words

Nertile Latifi and Brikena Sela Julie Kolgjini Writing Seminar 0502-227 October 07, 2008 What is power, and how does it present itself in our lives? We know for certain that it proves as the one thing that either keeps people together, makes them revolt, or changes history overall. But what is it really? Is it the ability to do or act, or is it political/national strength? Does it always have to be represented by a person in charge? Or is it just something in our minds that has the possession to control our influence. There are so many meanings behind this short yet ‘powerful’ word, such as that which is discussed in Orwell’s Animal Farm, and that which is part of human nature. To begin with, various resources provide†¦show more content†¦In adulthood power still shows, but differs from the naà ¯ve use in childhood. Adulthood power is weighed more definite. Visvira is in her first real relationship where she just started to go out with her new boyfriend. From the first day on, each side shows indirectly his and her strengths and powers. What they’ve learned until now is that one always has to give in, if it’s worth the sacrifice. Visvira’s boyfriend for example learned this earlier in his teenage-years, and decided to be the weaker one, who’d rather do what the powerful tell them to, than risk on his own. Hence, Visvira turns out to be dominant in the relationship. She decides what they’re going to do, when, and why. Visvira got so good in using her power it’s even helping in her career. The power she has at home with her family and with her boyfriend gives her confidence and strengthens her so much, that she’s not afraid of being dismissed when coming up with new ideas. After Visvira and her boyfriend move in and get married, she even makes more money than him, which presents another big presence of power. Her life goes on like this when they have children too. She keeps on making t he decisions because she wears the pants in the family. But as her children grow up, guess what they’re going to do? Like their mother, they’re going to fight for their own power, and Visvira gets to her last part of life: â€Å"Senior-hood†. She knows now, she isn’t the boss anymore, but the power she lost is given to herShow MoreRelatedThe Concept of Power Essay1245 Words   |  5 PagesThe concept of power is present within various realms of all organizations. Power, however, is not something that should necessarily be looked at negatively. There are justifiable types of power that may be important to criminal justice organizations. The main role of power in criminal justice administration should be to gain compliance from subordinates of all types, and turn that power over time into acceptable forms of authority (Stojkovic et al., 2008). 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