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Literature Essay Compilation Thread

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SheriSingsALittle:
Hey guys, I don't know whether this thread is still running, but I think it's great we have a place to share lit essays. Anyway, here's an essay on Antony and Cleopatra that I'm willing to share, even though it really isn't much! :P It was a response to one of my SACs at school.

The divisions within Antony are emblematic of the divided world as he attempts to negotiate a self. Discuss.

Through the characterisation of Antony as a man precariously caught between the sensuous, decadent discourse of Egypt and the honour bound, logically blunt words of Rome, Shakespeare presents the palpable tensions between the two realms as the centrepiece of the play. Antony’s subconscious acceptance and repudiations of different aspects of the Roman and Egyptian binaries within the formation of his identity, result in his inability to inhabit a world so vehement in the categorisation of its inhabitants, which brings his ultimate downfall. Yet, paradoxically, it is also this same duality of values that gives Antony’s character depth and complexity. Thus, Shakespeare critiques the imposition of binaries and boundaries upon society and self, suggesting that these dangerously constrict one’s identity and limit one’s agency.

Shakespeare’s grandiose creation of Egypt immersed within passion and infinite expansiveness through its language and imagery, presents Egypt as the extremities of indulgence. The hyper-sensory description of Cleopatra’s entrance, evoking the vivid colours of “gold”, “silver” and “purple the sails”, the sweet scent of “a strange, invisible perfume” and the tangible softness of “silken tackle” and “those flower soft hands” in the sound of velvety long vowels and crisp t’s, gives the scene a sensuality and liveliness that elicits feeling within the audience, drawing them into this exotic, beauteous realm. Through the idyllic gracefulness and harmonious beauty of the scene, Shakespeare implicitly affirms the passion and livelihood of Egypt. Indeed, Antony’s expansive, eloquent language shows his acceptance of the Egyptian lust and passion. His divine exaltation, “for the love of Love and her soft hours” luxuriates in similar long, soft vowels, which accompanied by the enjambment of the lines, gives it a sense of flowing that mirrors the fluidity of Egyptian nature. Cleopatra’s entwinement with the elements to the point where the elements seem to defy natural laws to etherealise her, making her “burnished throne/burn on the water” and “her sighs and tears… greater storms and tempests”, combined with the unearthly transformation of Cleopatra’s subjects into “smiling Cupids” and “mermaids”, suggests that the Egyptian realm transcends mortal constraints to occupy a space of infinite proportions. However, unlike nature’s elevation of Egypt and Cleopatra into power, Antony cannot seem to fully assimilate with nature, as he is tied down to the world by his value of the Roman honour and pietas, and “the nobleness of life”, ultimately leaving Antony without elemental power in Egyptian discourse. The apocalyptic imagery of Antony’s “good stars… former guides/ Have empty left their orbs”, and the symbolic “rack dislimns and makes itself indistinct” mirroring Antony’s loss of concrete identity provides a stark contrast to the grandeur that resulted from Egypt’s conflation with nature. Thus, through the dramatization of Antony as Egyptian, but not completely imprisoned within the definition of that nation, Shakespeare challenges the strict dichotomies of society.

In direct opposition to the vibrancy of Egypt, Shakespeare’s Rome is encased within incarcerating institutions and an obsessive will to conquer, evoked through its formal, structured discourse and passionless imagery, rendering Rome the extremity of logic and discipline. The Roman discourse is punctuated with the language of pietas through “experience, manhood, honour” and “the article of your oath”, as well as conquest and wars evoked through “sword”, “kingdom” and “blood”. The measured beat, enacted by the hard consonants that seem to periodically appear within Caesar’s language, in “Pompey, good night. Good brother”, clipped by excesses of punctuation, evokes the strict disciplines of war inherent within everyday discourse. The controlled monotony of Agrippa’s “Her love to both/ Would each to other and all loves to both” and Caesar’s “join our kingdom and our hearts” with the almost mechanical repetitions of “love” and “hearts”, and invocations of colonial “kingdoms” even within a discourse of “love”, exposes Rome’s entrapment within its imperialistic strictures, which render them unable to express honest human emotion. Furthermore, the logicality of Rome inhibits its ability for a broader, expansive view of the world, suggested through the contrast between Cleopatra’s majestic entrance and Octavia’s arrival as a poorly “market maid to Rome”, a “castaway”.  Even in the imaginations of a grand entrance, Caesar is held back by the intrinsic ties of Rome to the language of combat, rationality, and transaction, where the dullness of “an army for an usher”, and the unromantic “neighs of horses… tell her approach”, further illuminate the monotony and mechanical nature of a Romanised lifestyle.  The subsequent dehumanized atmosphere of Shakespeare’s Rome, devoid of freedom and emotion, distances the audience from the rigid Roman discourse and propels them into the open arms of Egypt, thus expressing the playwright’s repudiation of the Roman lifestyle, which quells the human spirit.

Within his discourse, Antony is perceived to value the Roman codes of pietas, through his invoking of “[his] greatness… [his] power” and “the honour [that] is sacred”. However, he transcends the imposing strictures of the tight Roman discourse, broadening its possibilities through the expansiveness of his language and imagery, which permeate from his Egyptian self. Antony’s conflation of the decadence and fluidity of Egypt with the moral, honorific words of Rome, results in a new form of discourse that broadens the possibilities of Roman language with Egyptian expansiveness, breaking the discursive limits that govern the world he inhabits. His grandiloquent declaration "Let Rome into Tiber melt" conflates the Roman concern for empire in “Rome” and “Tiber” with the vivid imagery of a natural disintegration of “melt” rather than a Roman ‘fall’ or ‘break’. The cosmic proportions of “The next time I do fight/ I’ll make Death love me” evokes both Roman war and Egyptian emotion coexisting within the identity of Antony to depict a momentary potential for greatness. Through the beauty and complexities of Antony’s multivalent language, Shakespeare affirms the value of extending beyond the boundaries of dichotomous society to explore one’s true self.

However, Antony’s vacillating identity cannot be sustained within the brutal binary of the world, and thus Antony tragically “becomes his flaw”, spiralling towards his end. In the conflation of Roman war and Egyptian emotion in the Battle of Actium, Antony comes out in humiliating defeat, as his potential as a great Roman leader, exalted as “triple pillar of the world” and “plated Mars”, is overridden by his Egyptian indulgence in passion and lust after Cleopatra “like a doting mallard” overcome by primal instinct. It is only through his death that he is able to combine the two extremities, through the dualities of the intent of his suicide, for the Egyptian desire to “o’ertake… Cleopatra” in death and forever be with his love, but also for the redemption of his pietas, which was lost in the “disgrace and horror... [of his] command”. He dies by his own sword, “a Roman by a Roman/valiantly vanquished” and thus is killed in the honourable Roman way of combat, and yet the words upon his death depict a raw emotion and sincerity, through the simple tenderness of “carry me now, good friends, and have my thanks for all” and “Gentle, hear me”, which is unconstrained by the mechanistic Roman discourse. Thus, through the tragic death of Antony, a man who embodied potential greatness his breaking of barriers and invention of personal, freeing discourse, Shakespeare highlights the tragedy of a world constricted by imposing binaries and discursive limits, as it is these divides which stifle one’s identity and takes away their agency. ((I THINK I REWROTE THIS PARAGRAPH IN THE SAC, THE ONE HERE IS A BIT MEH...)

In this play, Shakespeare centralises the tensions between the binaries of Egypt through the characterisation of Antony as a man embodying both in varying degrees. The resultant downfall but the imaging of complexity and potential greatness ultimately asserts that these boundaries set upon society and self tragically bring one’s doom.

Hope this can help someone somewhere!

kandinsky:
For what it's worth:

1.   8-9 Elizabeth and the Baronetage
2.   29-30 Anne reflects on her having been persuaded.
3.   193-194 Anne and Mrs Smith discuss Mr Elliot.

A lexicon of miscomprehension – “folly” and “ignorance” - pervades the dialogue of Anne at the opening of Passage Three, striking the reader for its bluntness in telling of the difficulty of “having much truth left” when in Regency Society facts pass through the hands of so many. This forms a powerful contrast against Elizabeth’s personification of the Baronetage as “an evil” in the first passage, where indications of body movement – “with averted eyes…pushed it away” are inserted by Austen to convey how the book is itself a physical emblem of the social restrictions of women. This same feeling of societal confinement is carried across into Passage Two; in the hyperbole of Anne that the breaking off of her engagement with Wentworth “clouded every enjoyment of youth”, and the repeated stress on time indicated by the constant use of the pluperfect tense – “had seen”, “had softened down much” - the reader notes how curbing inner desires to the dictums of common decorum results in an endearing turmoil within. Though civility is essential to human dignity, Austen admonishes that we must never allowed it to subdue the irrepressibility of individual human sentiments.

The deleterious consequences of forgetting this are that we are left lost in both the social and the moral sphere. The satiric delineation of social context in Passage One, where the comic absurdity of Elizabeth being “not quite equal her father in personal contentment” morphs into her “disappointment” of not having been “properly solicited by baronet-blood”, directs the reader to see how the pursuits of the aristocracy are without proper utility, and thus useless in the broader framework of society. And the diction for social gratification embodied in Austen’s characterisation of the young Mr Elliot, “agreeable”, is striking for its evident praise of outer decorum and neglect of inner worth. The reader is to recall the unctuousness of even the young Mr Elliot in the dialogue of Mrs Smith in the third passage, where the careful pauses of her dialogue (“Mrs Smith paused a moment”) indicate the very great import of the information she is providing to Anne – information which will by the denouement of Persuasion result in Anne’s rejection of artifice and acceptance of realism as embodied in the navy. Our lives might be better lived, Austen suggests, if we, like Anne, were to place rationality and integrity above folly and façade.

But even such an understanding has its limits. Mrs Smith throughout Passage Three refers to the importance of “acquaintance” not only in the sense of it being between individuals, but also between social groups and classes. And the centrality in her dialogue of Bath – “coming to Bath”, “came to Bath” – reflects the importance of social gatherings in a Georgian world where one’s acquaintances are the only modus by which to acquire news. And the repetition of vocabulary denoting social obligation throughout the first and second passages – “domestic habits”, “maintaining the engagement”, “he had distinguished himself” – connotes the authorial approbation of those who pursue lives with a dual commitment to the necessities of selfhood and the obligations of society. In Persuasion as a whole, Austen suggests that existence must be crafted not only by duty to the self,  as is evident in Elizabeth’s self-centred dialogue in the Passage One, but also a duty to the community and by extent the nation. Much of the novel revolves around the notion of service to others, and Anne in Passage Three rejects her father’s desire that she attend the Dalrymples’ function in favour of her visit to the socially inferior Mr Smith. Austen moves then to capture how it is not mere duty that gives an individual worth, but the underlying values which give that duty substance; truthfulness and reason such as that of Mrs Smith and Nurse Rooke are required to ensure not only the integrity of the individual, but also the reliability of civilization itself. We can easily renounce our obligations to others, but Austen suggests that in so doing we would lose touch with reality – our lives would become as meaningless as our own social irrelevance.

Yet this deference to social norms is nevertheless destructive to the inner self. The authorial insistence upon age in Passage One, evident in the maxim that “it so happens that, a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before”, alerts the reader to the underlying irony of the scene: the empty verbiage of Elizabeth bemoaning the appearance of her family members – “Anne haggard, Mary coarse” – alerts the reader to a certain simmering tension, where the true effect of age on Anne is not in the physical withering, but in the inner recline it is causing, which by the third passage will be on the growth again. It is also in the geographical transitions of Anne evident in the passages, from Kellynch Hall in the first two passages, then to Lyme as mentioned and Bath in Passage Three, that Austen constructs an increasing independence in her heroine. By freeing herself from the geographical limitations of Kellynch Hall, Anne is able to gain a physical but also an inner freedom. It is in the syntactic vigour and brevity of Anne’s dialogue in Passage Three, and its sharp discrepancy with the heavy sentences of Passage Two, that we see Austen’s approbation of those who are able to challenge the stifling limitations of intransigent social sets. Our lives are fruitless if we are without the audacity to go beyond the comfort of our own parochial sphere; humanity can only attain a wholesome and fulfilling existence if it does not hide in safety, but delves in search.

From this we can begin to comprehend the earnest suffering of Anne in the early stages of Persuasion. In the narrative ambiguity of “they knew not each other’s opinion” in Passage Two, Austen reflects on the stifling social convention which prevents Anne and Wentworth from discussing or referring to Anne’s having been persuaded by Lady Russell. The syntactic complexity of the passage, pervaded with constant dashes indicating emotional turbulence of Anne, and the repetition of “she did not blame…she did not blame”, indicate the equivocation of Anne in believing that she was right to have allowed herself to be persuaded. And the awkward conditional phrase that “she should yet have been….than she had been” reflects Anne’s difficulty in comprehending the possibly limitless “sacrifice” she has made of herself in having yielded to Lady Russell. It is in this ambivalence of emotion, punctuated with the anaphoric economic qualifiers “the usual share…a usual share of all such solicitudes”, that Austen reminds that our true emotions do not manifest under the guise of syntactic order, but only under the semblance of an evident inability to control language.

It is because of this that we must never depreciate the importance of the individual within society. In the authorial characterisation of Anne’s vision of the world – “she thought very differently from what she had been made to think at nineteen” – the reader perceives the importance of individual thoughts and sentiments within the scheme of Persuasion. And this same approbation of individual sentiments, rather than those of the whole community, is evident in the dialogue of Mrs Smith (“you will soon be able to judge of the general credit due [of her information]” in Passage Three and the authorial projection of Elizabeth’s individual vicissitudes in the first passage. Austen suggests that even the obligations of civility can succumb to the entropic powers of the self, as the individual is able to penetrate through these restraints and conventions. Austen is therefore never hesitant to affirm the freedom of the individual within the schema of societal cohesion. It is not the conventions of society which restrict us, but our reaction to them; society is an affirmation of, and not a prison for, our individual existence.

* please note that this was an early essay and there are issues; for instance, I repeat myself all through the final paragraph.

HopefulLawStudent:
Is this thread still active? I'd love to read some more stuff you guys wrote. These are all super interesting to read, esp. because there is no structure in Lit so everyone's essays are so different and amazing.

qazser:

--- Quote from: HopefulLawStudent on April 01, 2016, 03:34:57 pm ---Is this thread still active? I'd love to read some more stuff you guys wrote. These are all super interesting to read, esp. because there is no structure in Lit so everyone's essays are so different and amazing.

--- End quote ---

This is where the Prem Awardees in Lit hang out, these essays are very classy  ;D

Only doing Lit 1/2, maybe share some of yours  ;)

HopefulLawStudent:
It's because they're so classy that I want to read them. They make an interesting read. I seriously wish there were more essays to read though... :'(

I wish. But I can't, for two reasons:
a) My essays are nowhere near as classy
b) My school has a strict rule that prevents me from making any of the essays I write and submit to my teacher (be it SACs or practices) publically available whilst I'm still a student. The only reason there are some of my essays floating around AN for English is because I never submitted any of those to my teacher so there was nothing to stop me from posting it.

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