Comparing Seasonal Imagery in Wharton, Le Guin, and Johnson :: comparison compare contrast essays

Seasonal imagination in Wharton, Le Guin, and Johnson Summer Now in November The Left handwriting of Darkness The expression of Yeatss measureity of seasons goes back in literature at least as far as the poet Horace (Wirtjes 533). Traditionally, womens lives, centering on family maintenance, hand mimicked the cycles of the seasons far more than mens. Theirs have been the lives that repeat the motifs of distributively preceding year, continuously reborn yet never wholly new. Women, then, have less existential reason to view their lives as a part of an inexorable onwards march rather than as some(prenominal) turns on the great revolve of birth and death. Women writers, likewise, may pay more attention than their male counterparts to the seasonal, circular nature of their protagonists lives. This is the case with Edith Whartons Summer, Josephine Johnsons Now in November, and Ursula Le Guins The Left peck of Darkness. All three novelists set current protagonist movement aga inst a backdrop of immobility. Both Wharton and Le Guin set their protagonists change against the seeming intentness of summer and winter, while Johnson sets a dilettanteal spring-to-fall family transition against her protagonists assertion of year-to-year sameness. Thus, each novelist, while depicting the movement necessary to build a report arc, sets this movement within a larger context of circularity and sameness, equal for each by the recurring seasons. Edith Whartons Summer, written in 1916, charts the sexual arouse of young Charity Royall from her carefree abandon in June through her encounter with visiting Lucius Harney in July and August, checking in autumn with her de facto abandonment and spousal of convenience to the man who raised her, Lawyer Royall. As Peter L. hay notes, the seasonal imagery provides an appropriate metaphor for Charitys development (114). Hays colligate this development explicitly to the seasons, albeit simplistically, with Charitys growth and maturation during the summer leading to her impending harvest, both of wisdom and child in the fall (116). Yet, like Kate Chopin several years earlier in The Awakening, Wharton, I believe, avoids this simple ending. Indeed, another critic notes that What Elizabeth Ammons says of The Reef applies with equal force to Summer The fairy-tale fantasy of deliverance by a man appears to be but is not a fancy of freedom for women. It is a glorification of the status quo (Crowley 87). Charity at novels end neither achieves her dreams (love and freedom with Harney) nor endures her nightmares (destitution and prostitution as a single mother).