This textual intervention is taken place when Wilson arrives to meet Myrtle and leave Wilson alone. The intention is to refer to the American Dream in a lower-socioeconomic area.…
Not being in the lower class is a privilege to the people who witness how difficult it is to live in those conditions and imagine what it would be like to live off of lower class jobs. Barbara Ehrenreich saw this and decided that she wanted to experience what it would be like and experience the hardship that they push through. Barbara discusses the difficulty of living in the lower class with the use of her first point of view/ honesty and her use of figurative language. In the novel, “Nickel and Dimed”, Barbara Ehrenreich uses a sarcastic, dramatic tone to support her argument that people who live in the lower class have a difficult time getting by with the present American economy.…
Low class, middle class, and high class. Mayella is in a class that is lower than low class. She lives behind a dumpster where there is an old slave shelter. Nobody in the town wants to help her and her family because of how low her class is. The only person who wanted to help was Tom Robinson. He felt bad for her and helped her out. When Tom helped her out with things, people of the town thought of them as lower than the African-Americans. The yard that Mayella lives in is dirty. The only thing that is clean there is her red geraniums, they were Mayella’s red…
Throughout the novel, we see that the characters are divided into certain distinct groups, which represent the major groups in general society. We also see the social divide between these groups, and while some groups are well represented in society, others are marginalised (i.e. they have barley or no social standing in society).…
* The book says a lot about the differences in classes and status in society, but in my opinion, the very best example of this is when Antipas writes from the point of view of Simon ben Joseph. This small digest gave a very real look into the hard life of peasants and slaves as compared to the almost frivolous lives of noblemen. While in the cities, these noblemen are involved in petty politics that eventually decide the lives of the ones below them. For the peasants and slaves, this vicious cycle never ends. Their children and grandchildren suffer the same hard life that the parents endured in an attempt to make life better for the next generation.…
One theme that is present is that money doesn't buy happiness. In the poem, the rich man had pride of a millionaire, but depression of a homeless man. Life was hollow and gold was just as common as oxygen. On the other hand, the man living in poverty was exuberant since he didn’t take things for granted and put a great deal of endeavor for things he desire. In relation, Soc’s in the novel Outsiders went around flaring off their wealth to have power over the greasers. Even though they had all this money, Socs did not have such a strong bond as the…
Myrtle is the wife of Gorge Wilson who is an auto mechanic. She represents the lower class in society and more than anything she wants to become part of the upper class. Myrtle is very unsatisfied with her husband everything in her life is dull and gray. Even her husband is always covered in dull brown colour of dirt and he does not wear the kind of vibrant clothes that Tom Buchanan wears, the person with whom she is having an affair with. The apartment she shares with Tom in New York, is the complete opposite of the house she lives in. The Wilson's home is in "a valley of ashes... where ashes take to form of houses and chimneys... a line of gray cars crawls along... the ash-gray men..." (Fitzgerald, 23) The author describes the part of the region in which Myrtle lives, as well as the other people of the lower class as this very hideous place full of pollution. Her life with Wilson is very colourless, she does not attended any parties with him like the rich people do. Myrtle wants colour and joy in her life and that is why she has a romance with Tom who is part of the upper class. Once she is with Tom she begins to act and dress differently. The clothes she wears are glamorous. The first time Nick meets Myrtle in the garage he describes her wearing "dress of dark blue... containing no facet or gleam of beauty..." (Fitzgerald, 25) When she is with her…
“The Great Gatsby illustrates perfectly the divisions between rich and poor” consider how effectively this is achieved in the opening two chapters…
Fitzgerald is highlighting the poverty of wealth. This is an underlying theme throughout the novel. He is trying to show the reader that the certainty of status that wealth brings is a fallacy held only by those who entertain such thoughts.…
In the novel, the people act dull and in unison. Even their houses have “no front porches… they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches” (pg. #). The…
After going over this reading, I realized the importance of attempting to get rid of the lower class, in the sense of the poor no longer being poor. Even if that isn’t an attainable goal, I feel us as a society at least need to change the way the lower and upper class are recognized as. I enjoyed the connection that was made to the story, “The Great Gatsby”, “the fact that Gatsby has made a great deal of money isn’t enough to win Daisy Buchanan back. Rich as he has become, he’s still ‘Mr. Nobody from Nowhere,’ not Jay Gatsby but Jimmy Gatz.” (Michaels pg. 674). Our Society may have gotten much better at race diversity, but we still have a huge problem with the way we see and treat people from different classes. These…
Thousand of families flooded to California just so they could feed their families, but by showing the treatment the landowners show to these families, or lack thereof, Steinbeck points to the fact that they don't even plan on letting them eat, and that money is the only thing they're really worrying about. When explaining to his family that Jim Casy had gone on strike because of the poor wages, Tom says, "Yeah. What we was a-doin' was breakin' strike. They give them fellas two an' a half cents." Pa responds, "You can't eat on that." When their outlook gets so desperate, the first priority is to feed their families and hope for better times. By showing these small, seemingly insignificant, noble acts, Steinbeck shows the determination of these families to press on. The poor wages set by the landowners show that they, the landowners, care nothing for the families even in their destitution. With such low wages set, the landowners are alienating these poor families and giving reason for hostilities. This form of alienation demonstrates that these landowners plan on keeping every penny they possible can. With lower wages paid to more workers, things get done quicker while the rich can keep their pockets lined.…
In addition, Priestley presents the contrast between the privileged middle and upper classes and the exploited working class. The Birlings and Gerald represent the middle and upper classes respectively, and their closed-minded, “hardheaded” attitude strongly contrasts with Eva Smith’s seemingly moral principles. Birling does not hesitate to tell Eva to “clear out”, but when Eva discovers that Eric had been supplying her with stolen money, she “wouldn’t take any more, and she didn’t want to see me [Eric] again.” The class structure provides a life of privilege and ease for some whilst ensuring a life of hardship and tragedy for others. The Birlings and the Crofts enjoy luxurious lifestyles with servants and “public school” education while the working class is forced to work in low paid jobs from which they can be easily and unfairly dismissed, such as Eva Smith.…
The geography is key here. Situated in East Egg, the Buchanan house is described as having “gleaming white...windows” (Fitzgerald 8). The “red-and-white...colonial mansion”had a lush green lawn that extended a quarter-mile in each direction, coupled with a dock (Fitzgerald 6). The house and its surroundings exude purity and health, cut off from the dirty industrial quarters the lower classes are relegated to. The upper class lives in a place where they don’t even see the neighborhoods of the poor. The distant, almost fantastic land they inhabit is an excellent exhibit of just how meager the lifestyle of the lower class is due to the greed of the upper class. Second, the lower class inhabitants of the house are subject to violence at the hands of the upper class. Tom, the character that best symbolizes the upper class, breaks his wife Daisy's little finger. Tom’s violent acts are used by Fitzgerald to shed light on the abuse the poor suffer at the hands of the wealthy.…
Divisions exist among groups of people which are derivative of seemingly frivolous differences, such as wealth, race, religion, and gender. People are implicitly assigned a social class at birth based upon their parents’ circumstances, and this class tends to define people throughout their lives. The concept of social classes is one that reviles us, yet we are able to easily understand it in its basic form. However, the more intricate details resulting from the existence of a strict social hierarchy are not so easy to comprehend. In Wuthering Heights, author Emily Bronte explores various ideas of social class, among which are the hierarchical—yet somewhat unstable—structure of a classist system, the idea of the underdog, and how the existence…