Death As The Change That Ends All Changes - Research Paper Example

June 8, Death as the Change that Ends all Changes: Its Meanings and Symbolisms in Literature Death is an inescapable as change, although death is one permanent change in life that ends all expectations for further changes. Literature sees death in different ways, thereby suggesting the authors’ diverse, sometimes conflicting, attitudes towards it. In “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Emily Dickinson writes about a narrator who enjoys her life without thinking about death. She thinks that death is something to be accepted as another form of living. Virginia Woolf sees death as something ordinary, but sudden, in “The Death of the Moth.” Edgar Allan Poe shows how Prince Prospero tries to evade death in “The Masque of Red Death.” Other works symbolize death as a form of liberty from social oppression. Gale Goodwin’s unhappy female protagonist commits suicide in “The Sorrowful Woman,” while Kate Chopin’s Louise dies suddenly in “The Story of an Hour,” after she sees that her husband is alive. These literature works show different attitudes toward death because they see death as having different purpose in life and as a symbolism of different personal aspirations and frustrations. Literature describes various attitudes to death, including acceptance for its inevitability, sadness for its permanence, questions for its meaning, rejection of its coming, and empowerment for people who dream of liberation from their oppressed conditions. One of the motifs about death is that death is certain and people must embrace it through living a good life. The narrator of “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” does not have a negative attitude toward death because she is busy living her life. Dickinson indicates how the narrator’s life goes on until death comes: “Because I could not stop for Death,/He kindly stopped for me” (1-2). The narrator cannot stop for death because it means that she is focused more on living her life than thinking about death. As a result, death stops for her instead to remind her of her mortality. Dickinson, however, has a tone of acceptance and even a feeling of happiness in the idea of dying. The narrator sees dying as not the end of it all, but another beginning: “The carriage held but just ourselves/And Immortality” (Dickinson 3-4). Instead of riding something horrible as the symbolism of passage to death, Dickinson shows a carriage, an ordinary form of transportation that can is used for daily events or important social activities. The narrator views death as ordinary as any activity in life and as a new journey. By saying “Immortality,” the narrator suggests that to die is to not stop existing, but to start another journey of living forever. To live forever, one must know how to live a good life, however, according to Dickinson. She suggests that living includes work and pleasure: “We slowly drove, he knew no haste,/And I had put away/My labor, and my leisure too,/For his civility” (5-8). Dickinson is not afraid of death because it does not claim her instantly, so she has time to reflect on her life. She thinks about her labor and leisure, which hints that a good life is a balance of work and play. She seems to say that as long as people have done what they can as part of their dreams and responsibilities, they should not fear death. This poem argues that people should stop fearing what they cannot control, and instead, live life the best way they could because it is something that, at least, they can have some power over. Not everyone embraces death too readily and sees it too positively because other works show that death is sad and sudden, although it is as normal as life itself. Woolf’s attitude towards death seems to agree with Dickinson that it is something ordinary. The narrator’s fascination in observing a moth suggests that death is like a moth, something that normally appears in human activities. In addition, the moth is ordinary too. Woolf describes its simplicity because it has “narrow hay-colored wings” (1). The narrowness can suggest the shortness of life, while hay-colored suggests simple colors. That life is short is a simple fact that cannot be refuted. Furthermore, the moth is as ordinary as any person. Woolf underscores that the moth is nothing special because it is “neither gay like butterflies nor somber like their own species” (1). Jeanne Dubino thinks that the moth refers to individuals in general (9). Dubino explains what the moth stands for: “He is not just a representative of a species; he is an individual” (9). The moth represents an ordinary person to show that death is ordinary too. Despite death being ordinary, Woolf has a tone of sadness for the moth’s death because it used to be alive and then suddenly gone. When the moth starts to die, Woolf observes images of death around it: “What had happened there? Presumably it was midday, and work in the fields had stopped” (2). By asking, what happened, Woolf seems to be a bit shocked of death coming suddenly to the moth. She wants to understand how and why death occurs. The meaning of “midday” may also refer to a person who is at the middle of his/her life. It suggests that death can be as sudden as coming for someone at the peak of his/her life. The dramatic irony is that people know that death comes, but no one is truly prepared for it when it can happen anytime. Furthermore, Woolf argues that it is sadder when life that is being lived is snatched away through death. The moth, no matter how small it is, is buzzing with life: “[the moth has] enormous energy of the world [that] had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body…He was little or nothing but life” (2). The image of a flying moth that struggles to live is a model of real life. Death comes and ends the buzzing life and Woolf is sad when it does. Apart from knowing that death is certain and people struggle to live despite death, Woolf also struggles to understand life, so she struggles to understand death that can be depressing and lead to suicide. Death is a change from existence to nothingness. Existence itself is hard to understand, but so is death. Woolf says: “Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange” (3). Woolf ponders on the meaning of life and death. Miriam Dauben understands this concern. She says that many people are fearful of death because they cannot even understand life, and yet they have to deal with death too: “…death is not easy to define, because life is not easy to [italics from original work]” (2). Dauben puts life in italics because people have a hard time understanding how something can end something that is also undefined. It is like two strange things cancelling each other out making everything even the more stranger. John Sketon agrees with Dauben that people want to make sense of death, but often, it means making sense of life too. He believes that literature on death serves the purpose of understanding life and death. He says: “One of the central tasks of literature is to impose a structure on life and death, giving meaning to both” (213). Literature is a way for authors to make sense of the meaning of life and death. Literature is also a way of helping the audience in thinking about these issues of living and dying too. Moreover, the struggles in understanding life can also lead to people’s death. Dying is harder when life’s meaning is unresolved. Woolf commits suicide a year after she wrote “The Death of the Moth.” In doing so, the moth can represent her. She sees herself as the moth that cannot understand the forces around her. She cannot make sense of her life, and feels that death is too powerful for her. In her story, she says: “The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am” (Woolf 3). The moth does what is right to live until the very last second of life, but the dramatic irony has a sad tone. Death is stronger means that death is like an opponent that cannot be defeated. It shows Woolf’s attitude in seeing death as something that defeated her, not because she thinks she can fight it off, but because she still has not found the meaningfulness of life. In real life, Woolf battles with mental illness and depression, and not even her writing saves her from suicide. Her story is apt allegory of her life and its ending. In connection to “The Death of the Moth,” Godwin’s story is about a woman who also cannot make sense of her life and so she killed herself too. The woman seems to be breaking down because of gender norms that enforce expectations on her as a wife and as a mother. The first two lines are clear that she feels sick because she is sick of her life’s responsibilities: “One winter evening she looked at them: the husband durable, receptive, gentle; the child a tender golden three. The sight of them made her so sad and sick she did not want to see them ever again” (Godwin 1). It is ironic that the positive images of her husband and son would make her so sad, but they do greatly depress her. She does not want to see them again because seeing them reminds her of what she has to do as a woman and she no longer wants to be a woman who is a slave to gender norms. Judith K. Gardiner stresses that the story is a “feminist parable” against traditions female duties (286). She argues that the traditional woman’s role is “meaningless and suicidal” (287). She understands how these narrow social roles can take away women’s spirit for life for there is no meaning in life lived for society’s demands. The woman, nevertheless, tries to survive, but her efforts are unsuccessful. Like Woolf, the female protagonist already writes to fight away the misery of doing her gender roles and responsibilities, but she has a hard time writing her thoughts and feelings because she has a hard time understanding the meaning of life as a woman. The sorrowful woman wants to write that can be a form of freedom for her: “One day she decided to write a poem… She took up her pen and pad and began working from words that had lately lain in her mind…She put down the pen on top of the pad” (Godwin 3). She cannot write anything because she has not been free to do anything for herself, so freedom confuses her. She is not prepared to be an independent woman at all. At the same time, the woman cannot fully escape her womanhood’s responsibilities. As a result, she did all of them in one day and presented the results to society: The man and boy came home and found five loaves of warm bread, a roast stuffed turkey, a glazed ham, three pies of different fillings, eight molds of the boys favorite custard, two weeks supply of fresh-laundered sheets and shirts and towels, two hand-knitted sweaters (both of the same grey color), a sheath of marvelous watercolor beasts accompanied by mad and fanciful stories nobody could ever make up again, and a tablet full of love sonnets addressed to the man. (Godwin 5). She did everything, from cooking, to washing, to making her family happy, as if she is ridiculing the concept of womanhood since her tasks can be done in a day. But this is not everything that a woman is and should be, as the story shows. If this is everything, then there is nothing, so the woman kills herself because of her society that has turned her identity into nothingness. She cannot resolve her liberty, so death is better than life. Woolf and the woman commit suicide for the life that they cannot understand because it is so cruel on them. While death can be cruel and hard, other stories see death as something dark and evil so it must be rejected and controlled. Edgar Allan Poe has written many Gothic stories and one of them is “The Masque of the Red Death.” Prince Prospero lives at the time of the plague of the Red Death. He thinks that he can avoid it by quarantining himself and his peers in an abbey. He makes sure that basic needs and entertainment desires are in the abbey: “All these and security were within. Without was the ‘Red Death’” (Poe par.2). His attitude toward death is not about embracing but rejecting it. While Woolf thinks that death is more powerful than people, Prospero seems to arrogantly think that he is more powerful than death because he can entirely avoid it. Brian Stableford shows that the story is about the “inevitability of death” (3). Prospero is being arrogant to think that he can stop it. In addition, the story shows death as something dark and evil. The seventh room is a symbol for death, as Poe describes it in threatening ways because it is “closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries”, its panes are “a deep blood color” and “the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme” that no one wanted to enter it at all (Poe par.4). The room is full of suggestions of death as bloody and fearful. It also appears that Prospero made this seventh room to ridicule death. If he can capture the image of death, he might as well feel that he can create and end death’s coming. To continue the meaning of death in “The Masque of the Red Death,” the objects and activities in the abbey represent further negative attitudes toward death. The clock in the seventh room represents the ticking away of life and people fear the coming of the end of their life. Every time the clock strikes after every hour, the reverie changes from gayness to fear and anxiety where the “giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation” (Poe par.5). The people feel this way because the clock reminds them of the ticking seconds of their life, while the striking of the clock is the time of death. By being pale and worried, their attitude toward death is that they are anxious over it and do not want it to come for them at all. While others fear death, Prospero wants to control it. When someone masquerades as Red Death, he becomes so angry that he wants to kill the masked man: “who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him -- that we may know whom we have to hang at sunrise, from the battlements!” (Poe par.11). Prospero is a vain man if he thinks he can kill death. As death comes to him personally, Poe shows that death cannot be stopped. People may delay it, but its darkness will surely come for all. The final attitude toward death is that it is a symbolism for liberation and empowerment for all who are oppressed and who cannot escape their oppression. Both female characters in “The Story of an Hour” and “The Sorrowful Woman” experience gender oppression. The sorrowful woman cannot stand her daily roles and responsibilities. They ruin her sanity slowly but surely until she kills herself. The story notes her transformation: “The house smelled redolently of renewal and spring” (Godwin 5). Death renews her as spring renews the earth. If she dies, all that she has to do that she does not want to do and all that she has to be that society imposes on her ends too. Death is a symbolism of empowerment to do things for herself. The same sentiment is in “The Story of an Hour” too. The attitude toward death is its symbolism of empowerment. The title itself suggests how little society women. By saying that the story is about an hour, it suggests that an hour is negligible compared to the whole life of a person. It is a parallel to women who are less valued in society than men. Furthermore, the setting underscores the oppression of women. The main activity of the story is in the house, which is the symbol of women’s domestic duties. Louise is a mere Mrs. Mallard. She is wedded to her marital duties, so the house is her imprisonment, not her home. Moreover, the story shows how Mrs. Mallard becomes Louise because she realizes that with her husband gone, she is free to control her life: “Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own” (Chopin par.17). She is no longer a wife, but an individual with her free will. Life is exciting all of a sudden. But when she sees her husband, all hopes and dreams die. She dies with them: “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills” (Chopin par. 20). She chooses death to empower herself. Death is her only true answer to her oppression. Moreover, death may not be a literal one but a figurative solution. When Louise and the sorrowful woman die, they die in the sense that they are willing to reject their oppressive society. They did not die physically, but their traditional identities died instead. Being renewed, they are ready to start a new life. Louise sees herself as a “goddess of Victory” (Chopin par.18), while the sorrowful woman sees “renewal and spring” (Godwin 5) because they are prepared to break social norms and be free as human beings. These stories then can also be interpreted as metaphors for women’s courage for empowerment. They showcase women who see death as a new way of living through their own terms and dreams. Death is a common motif in literature as it shows authors who try to understand what it means and how people should approach it. Dickinson wants to embrace it as an eternal journey, while Woolf sees it as sudden and powerful. Poe puts a dark side on death that people hate and want to control, while Chopin and Godwin see death as a figurative or literal form of liberation. These various meanings of death suggest that people are fascinated always with what they cannot fully understand. If life is strange, so is death, as Woolf notes. But as strange as death is, it comes for all. It is better to be positive like Dickinson and to live life as fully as possible to enjoy it before death comes. For a life that is well-lived means that death is sure, but so is the freedom to control the happiness before everything ends for good. Works Cited Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” 1894. Web. 2 June 2014. . Dauben, Miriam. “Emily Dickinson” - The Death Motif in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson. Berlin: Auflage. Web. 2 June 2014. Dubino, Jeanne. “Virginia Woolfs Dance-Drama: Staging the Life and Death of the Moth.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 84(2013): 9-11. Print. Dickinson, Emily. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death.” 1890. Web. 2 June 2014. . Gardiner, Judith K. “A Sorrowful Woman: Gail Godwins Feminist Parable.” Studies in Short Fiction 12.3 (1975): 286-290. Print. Godwin, Gale. “The Sorrowful Woman.” 1971. Web. 2 June 2014. . Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Masque of the Red Death.” 1842. Web. 2 June 2014. . Sketon, John. “Death and Dying in Literature.” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 9 (2003): 219-220. Print. Stableford, Brian. “The Masque of the Red Death.”Masterplots (2010): 1-3. Print. Woolf, Virginia. “The Death of the Moth.” 1942. Web. 2 June 2014. . Read More