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

Seasonal Imagery in Wharton, Le Guin, and Johnson Summer Now in November The go away Hand of Darkness The expression of Yeatss circularity of seasons goes back in literature at least as far as the poet Horace (Wirtjes 533). Traditionally, womens lives, centering on family maintenance, restrain mimicked the cycles of the seasons far more than mens. Theirs have been the lives that repeat the motifs of each preceding year, always reborn yet never wholly new. Women, then, have less experiential earth to view their lives as a part of an inexorable forward march rather than as several turns on the great wheel of birth and death. Women writers, likewise, whitethorn 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 Hand of Darkness. All three novelists preen current protagonist movement against a backdrop of immobil ity. Both Wharton and Le Guin set their protagonists change against the seeming constancy of summer and winter, while Johnson sets a critical 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 story arc, sets this movement within a larger context of use of circularity and sameness, represented for each by the recurring seasons. Edith Whartons Summer, written in 1916, charts the sexual awakening of young Charity Royall from her carefree abandon in June through her affair with visiting Lucius Harney in July and August, ending in autumn with her de facto abandonment and marriage 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 links this development explicitly to the seasons, albeit simplistically, with Charitys growth and maturation during the summ er leading to her impending harvest, two 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 tinge force to Summer The fairy-tale fantasy of deliverance by a man appears to be but is not a dream of freedom for women. It is a resplendence 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).