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In "The Possibility of Evil," protagonist Miss Strangeworth is particularly enamored with her roses which have been in her family for generations. As the community busybody and self-appointed...

Mercutio is killed in Act III, Scene I, of Romeo and Juliet. In this scene, Tybalt, one of Juliet's cousins, is looking for Romeo and wants to fight with him. This is because Romeo greatly offended...

The girls were puzzled when they saw that the Hirsch’s button shop closed because it was a weekday during business hours and the shop was normally open during these times. The girls do not realize...

In Bradbury's short story "The Pedestrian," the protagonist, Leonard Mead is an outcast in the dystopian society, where the majority of the population remains indoors glued to their televisions,...

At the end of Jeanne DuPrau's novel The City of Ember, Doon and Lina emerge out of the Pipeworks and find a very strange and different world to the one they have been used to. They see stars and...

In Amy Tan's story “Two Kinds,” Jing-mei Woo grows up in San Francisco's Chinatown neighborhood, an area with a vibrant, close-knit Chinese-American community. Jing-mei's mother is an immigrant to...

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes begins by remarking on the number of false beliefs he once held. His solution to this was to abandon all his beliefs, and start again from nothing....

In chapter four Crooks opens up to Lennie, telling him about his childhood and his intense loneliness on the ranch where he is segregated and often the victim of racism. He feels comfortable with...

A group of children sees Miss Strangeworth dropping some letters in the post office slot at dusk. She is aware that it would not be a good idea to let anyone know that she is the person behind the...

"Eating poetry" is an odd image that we usually do not relate to reading a poem. It conjures a vision of tearing a page of poetry from a book, chewing it up, and swallowing it. Strand's speaker...

Miss Strangeworth sends nasty letters because she is appalled by the apparent "evil" in the world around her. She feels that she has some responsibility, as the only and last Strangeworth left in...

Water is used in opposition to blood in Act 2, scene 2. In this scene, Macbeth deeply shaken and filled with horror, comes back from his off-stage murder of Duncan. He is bloody from the deed, but...

In the "to be or not to be" soliloquy, Hamlet continues to have the suicidal ideation that has been plaguing him since his father's death and has only become worse since his encounter with the...

The main conflict in "The Possibility of Evil" takes place within Miss Strangeworth's psyche. A strong desire to look perfect--to have the perfect house, garden, china, and silver, and to appear a...

There are several questions Miss Strangeworth does not ask Mr. Lewis when she gets to the front of the line in the grocery store. First, when he seems to her to look "worried" about a box of...

In The Outsiders, the setting, order of events, point of view, and characters affect the plot by providing details about the tensions between the Socs and the greasers and advancing various plot...

As is always the case with Robinson Crusoe, on his return to England his first preoccupation is his physical survival and financial well-being. As there had been no money on the island. Crusoe had...

The plot of this story, in brief, is that the narrator’s mother has escaped from China to the United States and now, raising a daughter in California in the 1950s and 1960s, believes that her child...

At the beginning of the poem the knight is found by a lake, and we are told that the "sedge has withered ... And no birds sing." The fact that the "sedge" (a kind of grass at the edge of the lake)...

When it comes to describing your perfect town, it is first of all important to think about your priorities. For example, is it important to you where the town is located or how many people live in...

Absolute poverty means that a family or an individual lack(s) all of the means necessary to meet the basic needs of life; when someone doesn't have a sufficient income to obtain food, shelter and...

The learned fool was a stock figure of satire from classical comic writing and was particularly prevalent in eighteenth century verse. Alexander Pope, in a passage Hazlitt certainly knew from the...

It is evident from the beginning of the poem that the duke sees his duchess as a possession. The use of the possessive pronoun "My" accentuates the fact that she belonged to him. He goes as far as...

This is a rather philosophical question, I think. We incorporate values from various points within our culture - from our families, our schools, and from our communities at large (including the...

In Chapter 13 of To Kill a Mockingbird, Alexandra Finch comes to stay with her brother Atticus and his children for an unspecified period of time. Aunt Alexandra lives with her husband at Finch’s...

One might describe Ismene as an unheroic character, but a more sympathetic description would be to say that she is a normal person surrounded by maniacs. Antigone's self-sacrifice is noble, but...

Not all comedy is funny. Dante's Divine Comedy is an obvious case in point. The main purpose of such comedies is not amusement but moral instruction, and reinforcement of the social order. Comedies...

In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes recalls "the gay times of the New Negro era in Harlem." He says that this era was already waning in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash, and...

When Cunegonde enters the park, she observes Pangloss and a chambermaid engaged in an activity that is described as "a lesson in experimental natural philosophy." Voltaire goes on to use language...

At the beginning of “Rough Crossing,” celebrity playwright Adrian Smith, his young wife Eva, and their children board a luxury cruise ship for a six-day voyage from New York to Europe. Exploring...

Dagoberto Gilb opens the essay, "Pride," by juxtaposing the small and local with the vastness of space, planets and stars. This sets the pattern for his essay, which is about pride, but not the...

Heritage is the part of culture which is preserved and transmitted from generation to generation. The culture of a continent, a nation, or an individual is likely to contain a mixture of heritages....

The city is Dublin, Ireland. The place is a city roof top not far from the O'Connell Bridge and the Four Courts and overlooking a quiet street. The time is a moonlit night sometime in June of 1922...

“The Wife of Bath's Tale” in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales features an unlikely hero, or rather heroine. A knight in King Arthur's court gets himself into major trouble when he rapes a young maiden....

The Renaissance was a very innovative time for Europeans. Indeed, some of the period's innovations lasted long afterward. Although they were usually adapted and improved upon over time, there are...

Critical feminism seeks to connect feminist ideals with other forms of critical theory that comment on social issues and culture, including Marxism, formalism, critical race theory, and queer...

In Chapter 10 of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden is in the Lavender Room, when he notices three women sitting nearby: At the table right next to me, there were these three girls around thirty or...

In his numerous tales of Pinocchio, the adventurous marionette who comes alive, Carlo Collodi often addresses the social problems that he observed in 19th-century Italy. He draws on fairy-tale...

The main conflict in Liam O’Flaherty's short story "The Sniper" is a Man vs. Man conflict. It is a kill or be killed scenario for the Republican sniper, who must outwit his enemy before it is too...

In “The Rain Came,” by Grace Ogot, the spirits tell Labong'o, the tribe's chief, that he must sacrifice his only daughter, Oganda, in order to receive rain. Herein lies the conflict, and the tale...

In “The Possibility of Evil,” Miss Strangeworth—the town’s oldest resident and self-appointed barometer of morality—sends poison pen letters to other residents she deems in need of advice, warning,...

We first meet Mr. Heathcliff's dogs at the beginning of the story. Mr. Lockwood, a London native, is the new renter of Thrushcross Grange. His initial interaction with Mr. Heathcliff is anything...

In The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, Ponyboy Curtis lives with his brothers, Darry and Sodapop. Their parents are dead, and Darry has assumed custody of his younger brothers. Ponyboy, however, doesn't...

Bottom is extremely concerned with the effect of the mechanicals' play. Through his domineering and boastful speeches, he goads each of the players to specific action, even suggesting additions to...

Cecile's home in Oakland, California, is described in detail in the chapter titled “Green Stucco House.” Delphine observes that the exterior is “green” and “prickly,” a style which their mother...

This passage starting "Ay, y" continues as follows: Ay, ay, these words of his move me as much,/ As if a Goose should play the Porpentine, /And dart her plumes, thinking to pierce my breast, /But...

Sini and Annie were only supposed to stay with the Oostervelds for two weeks, but in actual fact, they've stayed with them for two whole years. That's because Mr. Hannink never came back for them....

In Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night, Duke Orsino spends much of the play heartsick over Olivia, scheming for her love or sighing over his lack of it in nearly every scene he is in. However, his...

I would argue that there are two overall themes in Alice Sebold’s thought-provoking novel: grief, and letting go. The most memorable scene of grief in this novel is arguably the moment when Susie’s...

The poem is about a mother's fear that her daughter will be "turned into" something other than her daughter. This fear is can be understood in several ways. In one sense, the poem is about the...