Magic Toyshop Essay Example for Free

Magic Toyshop Essay The Magic Toyshop is the second novel of the feminist writer Angela Carter. It is one of the most popular of her early books. In Carter’s works mythological and Biblical themes often appear, and The Magic Toyshop is a good example of that. This essay is intended to discuss the introductory chapter of The Magic Toyshop, in which Carter rewrites a major Biblical story. The Magic Toyshop follows the story of a teenage girl, Melanie. She is one of three children, her younger brother is Jonathon and her five year old sister is Victoria. They live in the English countryside in a middle class family. Their house is spacious; they all have their own bedrooms. Their parents are rich, successful and the children have everything they need. The children have a middle aged governess Mrs. Rundle. She is overweight, was never married, only added the Mrs. title to her name a few years ago as a present to herself. Melanie has a fear of becoming someone like Mrs. Rundle. She does not believe in God but she prays that she would marry and have sex in her life. She is worried about her weight because she thinks she is too thin, but she would not eat too much either because then she might become fat and never marry. She already sees herself as someone’s wife; she looks at herself as a male would do. (Gamble 69) The novel tells the story of the children becoming orphans and having to leave their home. Their parents are killed in a plane crash and the three children must leave the countryside to live with their uncle in London. Uncle Phillip owns a toyshop and is a toymaker himself. The orphans do not know anything about him; Melanie’s only memory of him is that when she was a little girl he made her a jack in the box which was very scary. They do not know that the world they are about to enter is radically different from the one they lived in until now. At the beginning of the novel Melanie is a happy fifteen year old girl who is starting to discover herself. She explores her body, discovers it as a colonizer discovers the unknown land. She likes to pose in front of her mirror; she plays the roles of the characters of paintings (by male painters naturally). The novel uses the terminologies of explorers thus making us believe there is a male voice behind the words. Melanie’s only wish is to marry well. She is already getting ready for married life, she is making herself ready for a husband. She believes that marriage is the only way to have inancial and emotional security, the only way to be a respectable woman and to have a happy life. This is the only way she knows. This is what the culture, the social background of the age indoctrinated her to believe. She is dreaming of a perfect husband who is handsome, gentle, amiable, who has a good job and adequate financial background. Although she is a little worried about not getting this perfect life, not having sex, she genuinely believes that things are going to work out for the best. Melanie is planning to spend her adolescence preparing for the life that comes after. However soon enough she will realize that life is not a fairytale. She will meet and fall in love with a boy that does not fit in the image of the perfect husband she pictured for herself, a boy that she would have never thought to fell for under normal circumstances. She will realize how these circumstances can make her grow up in a few days or even a few hours as on the train ride to London she realizes she has to be the mother of her little brother and sister , and how they can suddenly take away all of her dreams and principles. However there is another way to interpret the beginning of the first chapter, the scene where she is exploring her body. Melanie is not only preparing herself for her future groom, but she is exploring her own sexuality too. She is in the age when she realizes that she is a woman, that she has not only grown mentally but physically too. â€Å"In Carter’s own words, Melanie ‘is very conscious of desire, she is filled with it. And that gives her power’. † (Gamble 69-70) One night Melanie decides to go further then posing in her own bedroom. Her parents are not home, they are in America. In the darkness of the night, when everyone in the house is asleep, she goes to her parent’s bedroom. She looks at their wedding photograph and starts thinking about her parents. How she cannot imagine her mother naked, as she never saw her that way she even jokes about her mother being born with clothes on -, and how her father always wears the same suit. She wonders if her parents had sex before their wedding – this makes her believe she really is growing up if thoughts like this occur in her mind. She notices Uncle Phillip in the picture and thinks about the old jack in the box she was so afraid of. Then she goes over to her mother’s dressing table and looks into the mirror. She starts posing there too and feels that she looks different in her mother’s mirror. This moment can be understood again as a flesh of transition between childhood and becoming a woman. Being in her parent’s room is like pretending to be an adult just like they are. Posing in her mother’s mirror Melanie is trying to imagine how she will look like and feel as an adult, married woman. This moonlit night is the one when the fall happens†¦ Looking at her parent’s wedding picture Melanie decides to try on her mother’s wedding dress. She finds the dress and puts it on but it is too big. She is a little disappointed but still thinks she looks beautiful in it. She feels like a bride. â€Å"A bride. Whose bride? But she was, tonight, sufficient for herself in her own glory and did nor need a groom. † (Carter 16) Melanie decides to go out to the garden. She first feels free and excited; the night was so different from the one she imagined. The moonlit garden was like the Garden of Eden. â€Å"She was alone. In her carapace of white satin, she was the last, the only woman. † (Carter 17) This realization of loneliness soon turns into panic. She truly feels alone and feels what happening is too much. Crying she runs back to the front door but it is closed†¦ She forgot her keys. Suddenly the sweet, dark night turns into a scary land. Melanie realizes what she did was forbidden. She is frightened, she thinks there is something in the dark. After Mrs. Rundle’s cat appears in the garden, Melanie feels a little more comfortable. She starts to pull herself together and decides she will climb up the apple tree to her window. (The apple tree can be a symbol of Eden again). But she cannot do that in the wedding dress. The cat gives her so much comfort that she can take the dress off. Then something happens: she realizes her own nakedness as never before. â€Å"She was horribly conscious of her own exposed nakedness. She felt a new and final kind of nakedness, as if she had taken even her own skin off and now stood clothed in nothing, nude in the ultimate nudity of the skeleton. (Carter 21) This scene might be interpreted as the happenings in the Bible right after the Fall. The serpent deceives Eve so she and Adam both eat from the forbidden tree. â€Å"Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. † (New International Bible, Genesis 3:7) The naked Melanie puts down the dress and the cat climbs on it. It scratches the dress. Melanie starts climbing up the tree, she does not know how long it takes but she finally gets to her room. She bleeds form â€Å"hundreds of cuts† but does not mind the pain. She honestly regrets what she had done that night, but cannot take it back. She ate from the forbidden fruit and knows that she deserves the consequences. Right now pain seems to be the punishment. The morning has come and when Mrs. Rundle, Jonathon and Victoria leave the house Melanie is alone in the house with her sin. Somebody is knocking on the door. It is a messenger boy with a telegram in his hand. â€Å"As soon as she saw him, she knew what the telegram contained, as if the words were printed on his forehead. (Carter 24) She runs to the bathroom and vomits. She reads the telegram and realizes what she already guessed was true. Her parents were dead. Melanie’s childhood, her fairytale life ended in this moment. She committed a sin last night and now was expelled from Eden. â€Å"This ‘wedding dress night when she married the shadows’ (Carter 77) exiles her and her younger brother and sister from their comfortable, liberal, middle-class home in the country to live in a dark, narrow house above Uncle Phillip’s toyshop in south London. (Sage 15) And what was Melanie’s fault really? As Lorna Sage says it was the â€Å"stepping over the boundary between reality and fantasy† (Sage 15) Melanie, Jonathon and Victoria are taken to their Uncle Phillip’s house. Melanie soon realizes she will have to live there in terror, in constant fear of her uncle. She has to say good bye to the magical life she had in the countryside and has to grow up sooner then expected. We can understand Uncle Phillip’s house as Purgatory. She goes through a grueling rite of passage into the state of being a woman. Whatever way she might once have grown up is simply cancelled after she arrived at Uncle Phillip’s. † (Day 25) Melanie goes through hell until one day Uncle Phillips ends this story. When he learns that his wife has a sexual relationship with her own brother, he sets the house on fire. â€Å"In the end only Melanie and Finn are left standing amongst the wreckage staring at one another in wild surmise, Adam and Eve at the beginning of a new world. †

Free Essays - The role of Antonio in Shakespeares Tempest :: Tempest essays

The role of Antonio in Shakespeare's Tempest          [Note: In this written work Antonio thinks of himself as an innocent person and believes that the world is doing wrong to him .He also believes that his rights have been snatched from him and no one in this world is more miserable and sympathy deserving than him.]       Life is so miserable. Here I sit in a corner of this darkened room all alone thinking about my past and trying to figure out what to do with my futile life .The night is dark and long just like the rest of my life. But it is not too late, as long as I am living I will struggle to get what I deserve. Life has become very upsetting lately and I miss the times when I was the highest authority and the sole Duke on Milan. Now things have changed and I sit here in my room helpless, with nothing in my hand, no charge or position in Milan. What a glory I have experienced, guards on my security at all times, wo castles with several maids at my service, I worked with people I liked and got rid of the useless ones. I was the master and everyone else a slave, my orders were fulfilled in no time and I lived a happy life. If only I had planned more carefully and kept track of my men putting my brother to eternal sleep I would have been living a pleasant life of a duke; I would never ha ve been hopeless to Prospero's powers.       Ugh... I hear Prospero's insulting words in my ears. How could I have possibly heard those insulting words from him at the island when he snatched my dukedom from me? At that time my life was in his hands.   Looking at him now sitting at the place where I have ruled for 12 years is an unbearable sight to me. What is my future? ...A slave for Prospero? No! I will not let this happen. Prospero is taking revenge from me, he treats me like I am nothing .He doesn't miss any chance of teasing me. He did the worst to me today.

The Best Place to Live

Every person has their own ways of living life. When an individual starts to make decisions, the quality of life is always considered. People resides in different parts of the world and the lifestyles varies from where they came from. Determining for the best place to live could give a greater impact in one's life as there are two options that are worthwhile to consider. For any reasons, an individual can freely choose the lifestyle of either in urban and rural living providing the advantages and disadvantages from both places. Urban and Rural settlements affects the lifestyle of a person as it differs from the kind of education, employment opportunities and the environment they live in. Education plays an important role to a successful career depending to the quality of education a person can acquire to learn. In rural areas, poverty is one of the main problems that affects the educational outcome of the students. This often leads to individuals dropping out school just to support and provide for their parents and to also help them manage the household. Moreover, not many children living in less developed villages have the opportunity to study, especially in college. Countless amounts of people may not have the opportunity to have the future they dreamed of due to the fact of where they grew up or certain circumstances in their life that disabled them from their goals. Distance is another problem have to face because of the lack of transportation. Although many struggle to get to places due to lack of transportation, those who live in the rural area struggle more. A teacher also faces many challenges in rural schools. Teachers in rural areas are paid with low salaries and the lack of teachers is another huge obstacle on the way to education. Teachers are extremely important because they give the students a foundation to work from and help the students build their way up in life. So the lack of teachers would make a huge impact on the students life and future. In urban areas, by contrast, an advantage manifested by urban students usually takes place in advanced country and economy. All of the students can get access of the wealth and social opportunities that big cities can offer. Urban schools are usually larger in size and they particularly have the resources and facilities that the rural area tends to lack. Most of the schools in the cities have advanced and qualified teachers as they get ahold of continuing trainings and workshops. The range of employment options must be considered when choosing a kind of job. In Urban areas where the population is high and extremely populated, most people intend to apply for jobs where they can get a good salary. According to the research from Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA), â€Å"the most high-skilled, high paying occupations tend to cluster in urban areas. Urban centers tend to specialize in knowledge-based work with high concerns of Technicians, Engineers, Scientist and Executives, while in rural areas have larger concentration of Machinist and Makers, which generally require less skill and receive lower salaries.† (Florida 2012).In rural areas, residents do not have enough employment options due to the lack of job opportunities and most people has an inverse relationship with agriculture. In contrary, urban areas are developed in an a planned and systematic way in terms of industrialisation. A division of labor is always present in the urban settlement for job allotment and because of the great opportunities for growth and the concentration of people, urban areas are preferred for developmental programs where the business are most likely invested. Environmental conditions gives an impact on an individual's quality of life. People living in remote places is usually described as a quiet and peaceful paradise which is a perfect place to unwind and escape from hustle and bustle of the city life. Besides rural areas are less crowded because there are not many people and cars. The scenery in rural areas are beautiful and well- conserved thus the people can enjoy the nature and have a peaceful mind. In contrast with the city dwellers, who lead a hectic life and often feel annoyed due to great stress in the daily life such as traffic, dealing with higher rates of crime and paying higher taxes. With regards to the nature, the trees are cut in urban areas for construction of roads and buildings that results to the lost of agricultural lands. The pollution and the deforestation has led to environmental imbalance and health problems, which shadow the future of urban living. Urban settlements are determined by the advanced conveniences, opportunities of education, facilities for transport, and business while the rural settlements are based more on natural resources and events. For a person who plans to reside on a specific place and get the kind of dream life however, will note the contrast between the settlement options along with how it differs in the quality of education, employment options, and the environment in both rural and urban areas.

The Invention and Evolution of the Telephone

In the 1870s, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell independently designed devices that could transmit speech electrically. Both men rushed their respective designs for these prototype telephones to the patent office within hours of each other. Bell patented his telephone first and later emerged the victor in a legal dispute with Gray. Today, Bells name is synonymous with the telephone, while Gray is largely forgotten. But the story of who invented the telephone goes beyond these two men.   Bells Biography Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was immersed in the study of sound from the beginning. His father, uncle, and grandfather were authorities on elocution and speech therapy for the deaf. It was understood that Bell would follow in the family footsteps after finishing college. However, after Bells two other brothers died of tuberculosis, Bell and his parents decided to immigrate to Canada in 1870. After a brief period living in Ontario, the Bells moved to Boston, where they established speech-therapy practices specializing in teaching deaf children to speak. One of Alexander Graham Bells pupils was a young Helen Keller, who when they met was not only blind and deaf but also unable to speak. Although working with the deaf would remain Bells principal source of income, he continued to pursue his own studies of sound on the side. Bells unceasing scientific curiosity led to the  invention of the photophone, to significant commercial improvements in Thomas Edisons phonograph, and to development of his own flying machine just six years after the Wright Brothers launched their plane at Kitty Hawk. As President James Garfield lay dying of an assassins bullet in 1881, Bell hurriedly invented a metal detector in an unsuccessful attempt to locate the fatal slug. From Telegraph to Telephone The telegraph and telephone are both wire-based electrical systems, and Alexander Graham Bells success with the telephone came as a direct result of his attempts to improve the telegraph. When he began experimenting with electrical signals, the telegraph had been an established means of communication for some 30 years. Although a highly successful system, the telegraph was basically limited to receiving and sending one message at a time. Bells extensive knowledge of the nature of sound and his understanding of music enabled him to conjecture the possibility of transmitting multiple messages over the same wire at the same time. Although the idea of a multiple telegraph had been in existence for some time, no one had been able to fabricate one—until Bell. His harmonic telegraph was based on the principle that several notes could be sent simultaneously along the same wire if the notes or signals differed in pitch. Talk With Electricity By October 1874, Bells research had progressed to the extent that he could inform his future father-in-law, Boston attorney Gardiner Greene Hubbard, about the possibility of a multiple telegraph. Hubbard, who resented the absolute control then exerted by the Western Union Telegraph Company, instantly saw the potential for breaking such a monopoly and gave Bell the financial backing he needed. Bell proceeded with his work on the multiple telegraph, but he did not tell Hubbard that he and Thomas Watson, a young electrician whose services he had enlisted, were also developing a device that would transmit speech electrically. While Watson worked on the harmonic telegraph at the insistent urging of Hubbard and other backers, Bell secretly met in March 1875 with Joseph Henry, the respected director of the Smithsonian Institution, who listened to Bells ideas for a telephone and offered encouraging words. Spurred on by Henrys positive opinion, Bell and Watson continued their work. By June 1875 the goal of creating a device that would transmit speech electrically was about to be realized. They had proven that different tones would vary the strength of an electric current in a wire. To achieve success, they, therefore, needed only to build a working transmitter with a membrane capable of varying electronic currents and a receiver that would reproduce these variations in audible frequencies. Mr. Watson, Come Here On June 2, 1875, while experimenting with his harmonic telegraph, the men discovered that sound could be transmitted over a wire. It was a completely accidental discovery. Watson was trying to loosen a reed that had been wound around a transmitter when he plucked it by accident. The vibration produced by that gesture traveled along the wire into a second device in the other room where Bell was working. The twang Bell heard was all the inspiration that he and Watson needed to accelerate their work. They continued to work into the next year. Bell recounted the critical moment in his journal:   I then shouted into M [the mouthpiece] the following sentence: Mr. Watson, come here—I want to see you. To my delight, he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said. The first telephone call had just been made. The Telephone Network Is Born Bell patented his device on March 7, 1876, and the device quickly began to spread. By 1877, construction of the first regular telephone line from Boston to Somerville, Massachusetts, had been completed. By the end of 1880, there were 47,900 telephones in the United States. The following year, telephone service between Boston and Providence,  Rhode Island, had been established. Service between New York and Chicago started in 1892, and between New York and Boston in 1894. Transcontinental service began in 1915.   Bell founded his Bell Telephone Company in 1877. As the industry rapidly expanded, Bell quickly bought out competitors. After a series of mergers, the American Telephone and Telegraph Co., the forerunner of todays ATT, was incorporated in 1880. Because Bell controlled the intellectual property and patents behind the telephone system, ATT had a de facto monopoly over the young industry. It would maintain its control over the U.S. telephone market until 1984, when a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice forced ATT to end its control over state markets. Exchanges and Rotary Dialing The first regular telephone exchange was established in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878. Early telephones were leased in pairs to subscribers. The subscriber was required to put up his own line to connect with another. In 1889, Kansas City undertaker Almon B. Strowger invented a switch that could connect one line to any of 100 lines by using relays and sliders. The Strowger switch, as it came to be known, was still in use in some telephone offices well over 100 years later. Strowger  was issued  a patent on March 11, 1891, for the first automatic telephone exchange. The first exchange using the Strowger switch was opened in La Porte, Indiana, in 1892. Initially, subscribers had a button on their telephone to produce the required number of pulses by tapping. An associate of Strowgers invented the rotary dial in 1896, replacing the button. In 1943, Philadelphia was the last major area to give up dual service (rotary and button). Pay Phones In 1889, the coin-operated telephone was patented by William Gray of Hartford, Connecticut. Grays pay phone was first installed and used in the Hartford Bank. Unlike pay phones today, users of Grays phone paid after they had finished their call. Pay phones proliferated along with the Bell System. By the time the first phone booths were installed in 1905, there were about 100,000 pay phones in the U.S. By the turn of the 21st century, there were more than 2 million pay phones in the nation. But with the advent of mobile technology, the public demand for pay phones rapidly declined, and today there are fewer than 300,000 still operating in the United States. Touch-Tone Phones Researchers at Western Electric, ATTs manufacturing subsidiary, had experimented with using tones rather than pulses to trigger telephone connections since the early 1940s. But it wasnt until 1963 that dual-tone multifrequency  signaling, which uses the same frequency as speech, was commercially viable. ATT introduced it as Touch-Tone  dialing, and it quickly became the next standard in telephone technology. By 1990, push-button phones were more common than rotary-dial models in American homes. Cordless Phones In the 1970s, the very first cordless phones were introduced. In 1986, the Federal Communications Commission granted the frequency range of 47 to 49 MHz for cordless phones. Granting a greater frequency range allowed cordless phones to have less interference and need less power to run. In 1990, the FCC granted the frequency range of 900 MHz for cordless phones. In 1994, digital cordless phones, and in 1995, digital spread spectrum (DSS), were both respectively introduced. Both developments were intended to increase the security of cordless phones and decrease unwanted eavesdropping by enabling the phone conversation to be digitally spread out. In 1998, the FCC granted the frequency range of 2.4 GHz for cordless phones; today, the upward range is 5.8 GHz. Cell Phones The earliest mobile phones were radio-controlled units designed for vehicles. They were expensive and cumbersome, and had extremely limited range. First launched by ATT in 1946, the network would slowly expand and become more sophisticated, but it never was widely adopted. By 1980, it had been replaced by the first cellular networks. Research on what would become the cellular phone network used today began in 1947 at Bell Labs, the research wing of ATT. Although the radio frequencies needed were not yet commercially available, the concept of connecting phones wirelessly through a network of cells or transmitters was a viable one. Motorola introduced the first hand-held cellular phone in 1973. Telephone Books The first telephone book was published in New Haven, Connecticut, by the New Haven District Telephone Company in February 1878. It was one page long and held 50 names; no numbers were listed, as the operator would connect you. The page was divided into four sections: residential, professional, essential services, and miscellaneous. In 1886, Reuben H. Donnelly produced the first Yellow Pages–branded directory featuring business names and phone numbers, categorized by the types of products and services provided. By the 1980s, telephone books, whether issued by the Bell System or private publishers, were in nearly every home and business. But with the advent of the Internet and of cell phones, telephone books have been rendered largely obsolete.   9-1-1 Prior to 1968, there was no dedicated phone number for reaching first responders in the event of an emergency. That changed after a congressional investigation led to calls for the establishment of such a system nationwide. The Federal Communications Commission and ATT soon announced they would launch their emergency network in Indiana, using the digits 9-1-1 (chosen for its simplicity and for being easy to remember). But a small independent phone company in rural Alabama decided to beat ATT at its own game. On Feb. 16, 1968, the first 9-1-1- call was placed in Hayleyville, Alabama, at the office of the Alabama Telephone Company. The 9-1-1 network would be introduced to other cities and town slowly; it wasnt until 1987 that at least half of all American homes had access to a 9-1-1 emergency network. Caller ID Several researchers created devices for identifying the number of incoming calls, including scientists in Brazil, Japan, and Greece, starting in the late 1960s. In the U.S., ATT first made its trademarked TouchStar caller ID service available in Orlando, Florida, in 1984. Over the next several years, the regional Bell Systems would introduce caller ID services in the Northeast and Southeast. Although the service was initially sold as a pricey added service, caller ID today is a standard function found on every cell phone and available on most any landlines. Additional Resources Want to know more about the history of the telephone? There are a number of great resources in print and online. Here are a few to  get you started: ​The History of the Telephone: This book, now in the public domain, was written in 1910. Its an enthusiastic narrative of the telephones history up to that point in time. Understanding the Telephone: A great technical primer on how analog  telephones (common in homes until the 1980s and 1990s) work.   Hello? A History of the Telephone: Slate magazine has a great slide show of phones from the past to the present. The History of Pagers: Before there were cell phones, there were pagers. The first one was patented in 1949. The History of Answering Machines: Voicemails precursor has been around almost as long as the telephone itself.