Belonging Essay Example for Free

Belonging Essay According to Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, love and belonging is what drives human existence. We search for a sense of belonging every day of our lives, not realising that it is our perceptions and attitudes towards belonging that determine the fulfilment we experience. We can choose how we belong and the level of fulfilment we experience by changing our perceptions and attitude. This concept is expressed through the poetry of Peter Skrzynecki’s â€Å"Immigrant Chronicle†, Marc Foster’s film â€Å"Finding Neverland† and Nam Le’s short story â€Å"Love and Honour and Pride and Pity and Compassion and Sacrifice. Skrzynecki communicates the way that his perceptions and attitudes towards belonging affected his ability to feel fulfilled and content from a cultural perspective through his poetic anthology â€Å"Immigrant Chronicle†. In â€Å"Feliks Skrzynecki† the poet describes the admiration he has for his father and the way that he can remain connected to Poland in his mind whilst living in new country. Skrzynecki uses the word â€Å"gentle† to define his father, demonstrating the level of respect he has for him. He references the saying ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ in the line â€Å"Kept pace only with the Joneses/ Of his own minds making† to communicate that his father is able to feel content and fulfilled by choosing to stay connected with Poland, but only in his mind can he do so because they now live so far away. Skrzynecki doesn’t understand how his father can choose to belong, demonstrating his confusion by saying that his father is â€Å"happy as I have never been. † We begin to understand that Skrzynecki’s attitude towards belonging to his Polish heritage reflects his feelings of disconnection in the poem â€Å"Ancestors†. The line â€Å"where sand and grasses never stir† is a metaphor used to represent the stagnation of Skrzynecki’s connection with his Polish heritage. He is plagued with guilt and frustration as a result of his disconnection and this is demonstrated through the accusatory nature of the figures in his dream. The use of alliteration communicates Skrzynecki’s threat: â€Å"Standing shoulder to shoulder†. Skrzynecki does not realise that it is his own perceptions and attitudes that prevent him from belonging to his Polish ancestors, and this is reflected in his use of rhetorical questions throughout the poem: â€Å"how long is their wait to be? † Skrzynecki’s attitudes towards belonging begin to change in the poem â€Å"10 Mary Street† and a greater sense of fulfilment is communicated. Skrzynecki references his own poem â€Å"Feliks Skrzynecki† in the line â€Å"tended roses and camellias/ like adopted children. † This demonstrates that Skrzynecki’s perception of his father’s sense of belonging to his garden had changed. In â€Å"Feliks Skrzynecki† Skrzynecki felt excluded because his father â€Å"loved his garden like an only child†. In â€Å"10 Mary Street† he realises that the sense of belonging he shares with his father is greater than the connection his father has with the garden and that to him it is just like an â€Å"adopted† child. This change in attitude leads to the last poem of the anthology â€Å"Post Card† in which Skrzynecki comes to the realisation that he has the ability to choose where and how he belongs. He writes of a post card that has been sent to him by a friend visiting Warsaw, the town in Poland where he and his parents once lived. Skrzynecki gives a description of the post card that is plainly devoid of emotion until the last line: â€Å"The sky’s the brightest shade. † This line is positively connoted and reflects Skrzynecki’s realisation that he has the ability to connect with Warsaw. Skrzynecki directly addresses the town by stating â€Å"I never knew you. † This personifies the town and further demonstrates the poets growing connection. Skrzynecki uses the qualifier â€Å"for the moment† to undercut the line â€Å"I never knew you† which is repeated in the fourth stanza. This demonstrates that Skrzynecki recognises that he doesn’t feel a sense of belonging to his Polish heritage, but that he is willing to explore it. He once again addresses the town with a rhetorical question in the fourth stanza: â€Å"What’s my choice to be? † This directly communicates that Skrzynecki understands that he has a choice about connecting to his Polish heritage and belonging, whilst also conveying his sense of indecision. Throughout the entire anthology Skrzynecki communicates his feelings of disconnection from both Australian and Polish cultures. Post Card† is Skrzynecki’s resolution as he is content with acknowledging that he doesn’t have to belong, and at the same time recognising that he doesn’t have to feel excluded from his Polish culture either. He uses the last lines of the poem to communicate that he does feel some sense of belonging to Warsaw, through personifying the town as speaking to him: â€Å"On a rivers bank/ A lone tree whispers:/ â€Å"We will meet before you die. † This externalises Skrzynecki’s new perceptions and attitude towards belonging and his acknowledgement that he will visit Poland one day and then make the choice as to whether or not he belongs to it. Marc Foster’s â€Å"Finding Neverland† alludes to the perception that a place where we belong can be created, through imagination as well as relationships. The protagonist James Barrie James Barrie is the protagonist in â€Å"Finding Neverland† and uses his imagination to create a place where he can hide from the unhappy reality of his failing plays and marriage, a place where he belongs. Foster demonstrates Barrie’s sense of not belonging at the beginning of the movie, when we see the playwright peeping through the stage curtains at the audience in the theatre. This shows us that Barrie is anxious, an emotion that is juxtaposed with those of the laughing, relaxed theatregoers. His anxiety and inner turmoil is further demonstrated when a point of view camera shot shows us that Barrie is imagining a rain storm with a colour pallet of dark blues and blacks within the theatre. The repeated image of a door is used to demonstrate the disconnection between Barrie and his wife. For example, when Barrie asks Mary if she would like to join him on a walk to the park she declines via a shout through a closed door. During another scene Mary and Barrie are left bickering, and are again disconnected by doors when the couple retire to their separate bedrooms. The doorway into which Mary retreats is dark and presents a sense of gloom for the woman, but Barrie’s doorway reveals brightly coloured parkland. This is where we are introduced to the concept of the imaginary Neverland and the purpose it has in allowing Barrie to choose to exist in a world where he belongs. When Barrie meets the Davies family his perceptions and attitudes towards belonging begin to change. The strong relationship he is forming with the four young boys and their mother is represented through the shared experience of imaginary worlds. The scenes swap back and forth between the Davies’ back yard and an old western tavern where the boys play a game of ‘Cowboys and Indians’. Likewise, a setting of a quiet, countryside pine forest becomes an Amazonian jungle in which the Davies’ family are pirates awaiting to be appointed to the crew of Captain Barrie. The editing is fast paced to show that the sense of belonging that Barrie and the Davies are developing through their relationships with one another is becoming stronger. Barrie comes to the realisation that he can belong outside of his imaginary world. Foster uses close up shots that are shared between him and the Davies boys, which communicate the strong bonds of love and friendship that they have with each other whilst also demonstrating Barrie’s new perceptions of belonging. Barrie has a choice as to whether he belongs in reality or in Neverland. Nam Le’s â€Å"Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice† also demonstrates that perceptions and attitudes determine an individual’s ability to belong, through the relationship between a young writer appropriately named Nam and his father. In the title of his short story, Le references William Faulkner and the verities that define human interaction. The words become Nam’s influence in adapting his perceptions and attitudes towards belonging throughout the story. Nam struggles over whether he should use his father’s account of surviving the My Lai massacre as a fourteen year old boy and later Vietnamese prison camps after the fall of Saigon for a writing assignment. A strong sense of disconnection is evident between Nam and his father, demonstrated through the use of short, blunt sentences and pronouns that separate the two characters identities from each other: â€Å"He loved speaking in Vietnamese proverbs. I had long since learned to ignore it. † Nam is influenced by his mentors who tell him that â€Å"ethnic literature is hot†, but he questions whether Faulkner’s verities would apply to any ethnic literature that he could write when he doesn’t feel a sense of belonging to his Vietnamese heritage. Nam feels pressured to get his story done, and the only thing breaking him free of his writer’s block is his father’s past: â€Å"F**k it, I thought. I had two and a half days left. I would write the ethnic story of my Vietnamese father. † Personal pronouns are used in this example to communicate that Nam is writing the story for his own gain, and not his father’s because there is no sense of belonging in their relationship. The use of profanity suggests that there is internal conflict within Nam and guilt over not feeling a true sense of belonging with his father and Vietnamese history. Nam’s attitude towards feeling a sense of belonging to his father’s story changes when a friend tells him that the reason he respects his writing is because he doesn’t â€Å"exploit the Vietnamese thing. † He feels a sense of shame for taking his father’s history so lightly: â€Å"We were locked in all the intricate ways of guilt. † This is where Nam comes to realise that even though his heritage is rich with the verities that Faulkner talked about, he cannot write truthfully without feeling a sense of belonging to his Vietnamese culture or his father. Nam chooses to reach out to his father in attempt to understand and develop a sense of belonging to what he had written about. He uses his new perspective about his father and his father’s past to rewrite the story, and the pronouns â€Å"me† and â€Å"he† are used in the same sentences now, to show the son’s connection to his father: â€Å"He would see how powerful was his experience, how valuable his suffering – how I had made it speak for more than itself. He would be pleased with me. † Nam has chosen to change his attitude towards the relationship he has with his father and as a result can belong through his new understanding. All three texts communicate how changes in perspectives and attitudes towards belonging determine the level of fulfilment we can experience. Through these texts we can perceive that belonging is a choice and that our perceptions and attitudes towards belonging determine how fulfilling our lives are. If we can control our perceptions and attitudes towards belonging, we can effectively control how we belong, and as a result develop a higher understanding and awareness of our own identities.

thelma and louise film review :: essays research papers

AGAINST MEN’S WORLD The film starts with the scenes of daily lifes of two women. Thelma is married to a man who thinks that he is the centre of the world because he is a manager of a carpet. company. He sees his wife as a lower order of life, to be tolerated so long as she keeps her household duties straight. Just like a servant who doesn’t have any rights or freedom. Louise waits tables in a coffee shop and her boyfriend is a musician who is never going to be ready to settle down. They live under high patriarchal domination. They see themselves very ordinary and want to go fishing alone. But that means that they are crossing the lines of their sexual roles in the community. Thelma can’t even tell her husband that she is going on vacation. Because her role in her husband’s eyes is the housewife. If she goes on a vacation with a friend she will be simply considered as a whore. The film continues with the bar scene. We saw the feminist After some drink thelma ends up with, as such flirtations sometimes tragically do, an attempted rape in the parking lot. Louise kills the man with her gun and they start to run away because they think that can’t expect fair treatment from the criminal justice system, since Thelma had been flirting and dancing with the guy all evening. They know that nearly everyone would say that what happened to her is her own fault. The hitchiker appears in the scene as a handsome man who stirs up thelma’s libido for the first time. She never had a happy sexual relationship with her husband and she has sexual intercourse only to fulfill her duty: to please her husband. The policeman takes place who has an empathy with that women. He knows that they dig hole and bury themselves in it and he wants to prevent it. As things go worse the women have enormous changes, they are fightilng only with the law but also with the laws of the nature. They discover the strenght and their abilities to run their own lives, to take a stand against the men’s world.

Laertes and Polonius Essay

When Ophelia tells her father of Hamlet’s â€Å"holy vows from heaven,† his harsh rebuke â€Å"springes to catch woodcocks† likens her to a game bird considered to be foolish. He later speaks of her as if she were nothing more than an animal; â€Å"I’ll loose my daughter to him† (II. ii. 160) which again indicates his lack of respect for his daughter. He and Claudius were concerned only with Hamlet and so she becomes lost in a â€Å"sea of troubles. † Ophelia highlights key themes in the play, building on the ideas of deception, corruption and patriarchy that run through it. Two central themes of the play are deception and the problem of making a distinction between appearance and reality. Few things in the play are what they seem to be; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are apparently Hamlet’s friends, but are in fact spies commissioned by Claudius. There is a play within ‘Hamlet’ itself. Spying or eavesdropping occurs and â€Å"smiling villains† referred to. The actions of Ophelia also highlight this idea in a variety of ways. Ophelia is also used to portray the theme by the use of imagery. Polonius instructs her to â€Å"read on this book, / that show of such an exercise may colour / your loneliness. We are oft to blame in this, / ’tis too much proved, that with devotion’s visage / and pious action we do sugar o’er /the devil himself† (III. i. 44-49). This shows how a holy face can be put on something to cover evil deeds. The expressions of love may appear truthful to Ophelia, who speaks of Hamlet’s ‘affection’ for her, but (if Polonius and Laertes are to be believed) in reality they may be false, concealing less honourable intentions. Polonius swears that the ‘tenders of (Hamlet’s) affections’ for her are mere ‘brokers, not of that dye which their investments show / But mere implorators of unholy suits. † They may be traps, ‘springes to catch woodcocks. ‘ Ophelia also attempts to deceive Hamlet when she partakes in her father’s attempt to discover the cause of Hamlet’s unusual behaviour. She appears to be alone and lies that her father is â€Å"at home† when in reality he is eavesdropping on their conversation. As previously discussed, Ophelia may only appear to be a naive, innocent maid and be, in reality, the very opposite. In addition, her true madness contrasts with and therefore highlights the false nature of Hamlet’s. Hamlet comments upon how â€Å"God hath given you /one face, and you make yourselves another† and Ophelia does present various ‘faces’ to different characters, according to her relationship to them- acting innocent with her father, yet far less so in dealings with Hamlet. Hamlet also refers to the masking of reality by Ophelia when he says â€Å"I have heard of your paintings-† Hamlet believes that Ophelia may be deceiving him. If the interpretation that she commits suicide is correct, then the innocent imagery is another expression of the theme of illusion: her death appears to be an accident, but in reality is not. Through the play runs the idea of necessity of revenge for the cleansing of social corruption. This corruption is portrayed in Ophelia’s demise, which also hints at the downfall of Elsinore. Imagery Hamlet adopts in his first soliloquy implies general corruption of the world and he states that â€Å"things rank and gross in nature / Possess it† (I.ii. 136-137). He therefore aims to cleanse what is rotten in Denmark, but his failure to do so allows the triumph of disease and decay. Laertes warns Ophelia that â€Å"virtue itself ‘scapes not calumnious strokes,/ the canker galls the infants of the spring. † In addition to Shakespeare employing many images of disease and decay, he also includes several expressions relating to physical deterioration such as â€Å"the fatness of these pursy times† (III. iv. 154) and â€Å"the drossy age† (V. ii. 181). Ophelia’s own deterioration accentuates the theme but while all others perish due to their weaknesses, her demise is brought about by her virtues. Ophelia dies from loving too much and for being too pure. The potential of a stronger, wiser side to her character (hinted at by her comebacks at Laertes) is never realised. The coarse nature of the songs she sings in her madness shows that the corrupt world has taken its toll on the pure Ophelia. As discussed, throughout the play she represents innocence, emphasised by imagery and language. Her drowning depicts the death of innocence itself, thus indicates Hamlet’s failure and impending disaster for the court. It has been suggested that Shakespeare’s plays â€Å"reflect and voice a masculine anxiety about the uses of patriarchal power over women, specifically about man’s control over woman’s sexuality. i † (i Coppelia Kahn 1981 Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare). This could indeed be true of ‘Hamlet,’ where the political world of Elsinore is shown not to be a place where women matter much, and this leads to their destruction. They do not have a say in anything; the world is presented as one where men are dominant and, if necessary, prepared to use women (even their own family) to benefit them in terms of power. Ophelia exemplifies this, confused by what is happening around her as she strives to do what Polonius, Laertes and Hamlet want her to. Polonius does not advise Ophelia to be true to herself as he advises Laertes, but points out that Hamlet has the freedom to do as he wishes whereas she does not. She is subject to the double standard of the difference between male and female freedom of choice and action. Laertes is treated very differently by his father in comparison to the lack of regard he shows Ophelia. Ophelia’s wishes are never considered- women had little status. Gertrude, too, has limited influence. Claudius and Polonius wield the power. Both women die but Ophelia’s end bears particular significance because she is driven to it by events she cannot control. Her death indicates the corrupting effects of the male-dominated political realm of Elsinore, in which, as Polonius shows, there is little room for the consideration of love. All of the characters fail in the sinful world of Elsinore, where there is no possibility for a fulfilled life. Ophelia’s demise adds to Shakespeare’s bleak message that evil can triumph. Defeat seems inevitable, whether they accept the conditions of Elsinore and live with the deceitful principles of the political world as Polonius does, or seek out love, as Ophelia does, or attempt to find sense in things, like Hamlet. In conclusion, through Ophelia a greater appreciation of other characters is achievable. She illuminates aspects of Hamlet- his suspicion of women and indecisiveness and, by comparison and contrast with her, also his strength, nobility and sanity. She gives insight into his nature both prior to and following his father’s death, therefore allowing the audience a better understanding of (and more sympathy for) him. Also revealed are aspects of Laertes and Polonius’ characters. Shakespeare uses Ophelia to add more depth to the themes of the play, namely the dangers of patriarchy, illusion and corruption. It is through Ophelia that Shakespeare achieves a genuinely tragic response to the play ‘Hamlet’.

James Mckeen Cattell Contributions to Psychology - 1740 Words

James McKeen Cattell James McKeen Cattell was born on May 25, 1860, in Easton, Pennsylvania, where his father was soon to be president of Lafayette College from 1863 to 1883. He received his bachelors degree from Lafayette in 1880, spent two years traveling and studying in Germany, and returned to the United States in 1882 as a graduate fellow in philosophy at The Johns Hopkins University. Returning to Leipzig in the fall of 1883, he earned his doctoral degree in experimental psychology under Wilhelm Wundt in 1886, with a dissertation that examined reaction times for various simple mental processes (Sokal, 1981). After completing his doctorate, Cattell spent two years at Cambridge University, where he founded Englands first laboratory in†¦show more content†¦As already mentioned, the AAAS was at a critical moment in its history at the turn of the century, as its membership numbers stagnated and attendance at meetings fell off in the face of the rising number of specialist societies that competed for scientists closely guarded time and energy. It both had no official publication, and at the AAAS meeting in 1900, members began grumbling that they were not getting enough for their $3 in dues (Conklin, 1944, p. 153). The journal Science had been founded in 1880, privately published and kept afloat financially first through the generosity of Thomas Alva Edison and subsequently by Alexander Graham Bell and his father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Leaders of the scientific community in America perceived a need for a journal that would keep them abreast of developments across the various scientific fields and that would also promote the interests of science for the public. But the journal had a difficult time in the 1880s and early 1890s for various reasons (Kohlstedt, 1980). Of its first three editors, two were scientific amateurs who failed to gain the respect of scientific researchers. The journal varied in quality from issue to issue, and articles were often derivative of o lder published sources. The subscription list was neverShow MoreRelatedMargaret F. Washburn : An American Psychologist Whose Work For Vassar College987 Words   |  4 Pagesmember of the Kappa Alpha Theta Sorority at Vassar College (Abhinav, 2012). She pursued graduate studies with James McKeen Cattell, an establisher of a new laboratory of psychology at Columbia University. 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