Blanche and Stanley

Both Blanche and Stanley both desire similar things in the play. They want stability and power. Blanche desires power over men, using her attractive figure and flirty nature to lure and control them. Stanley desires the same over women. He shows his power when he demands Stella's presence even after striking her and when he rapes Blanche after revealing her lies. Blanche tells her lies because she is driven by the desire for power. She knows that in order to control men the way she does, she has to seem sexy but somewhat innocent. Blanche puts out a constant effort to stay out of the light and hide her age and lies about her past. Stanley shows his desire for power when he reveals all of Blanche's lies and rapes her.

On the other hand they both want a peaceful life. Stanley desires a healthy relationship with Stella. With a newborn baby boy, Stanley desires to be a good father figure. Blanche desires a relationship like the one she once had with Alan. She wants steady relationship with Mitch so bad that she puts her sexual desires aside.

Stanley

Stanley is portrayed purely as a controlling, brutal man in the play. Although when Stanley has common small chat with Blanche when they first meet, he is blunt in his talking and sees right through her lies and desire for attention. He shows that he would much rather be with his wife, Stella instead. He always tries to control Stella, and doesn't believe her word. Even though Stella and Blanche have the same story about what happened to Belle Reve, Stanley doesn't trust either of them and thinks that Blanche took money from Stella. When he finds out about Blanche's past life, he uses it against her. He goes out of his way to buy Blanche a ticket back to Belle Reve, even though she cannot return back to that community. He also tells Mitch about Blanche's past, maliciously trying to ruin her image for other people. Even though Stanley has love for his wife and is popular among the guys, he is a rude person to everyone around him. He is portrayed as a brute and can only be seen that way in the play.

David Lurie

David Lurie is a constantly evolving character. After he gets fired from his college and he has to move to the country, his morals and views change.

He starts out viewing women as objects for his pleasure and don't consider their opinion in his actions. In his relationship with Melanie, this view of women cost him his job. In this professor-student relationship, David pressured Melanie for sex when she didn't really want it. However, this does not justify the inquiry committee firing him from his job. By law their sexual relationship was legal and technically it wasn't rape. He refuses to admit he is wrong because he believes that he wasn't wrong. Melanie did accept his offers readily. The only thing wrong David could've happened is that Melanie had a boyfriend.

As he spends more time in the country with Lucy, his view towards women changes. Especially after she is raped, David treats women with more respect. As a white man, he is privileged in South Africa. Even though apartheid is over, he holds a position of power, although it makes him blind from the opinion of others. If he were to stay in Cape Town, his views probably would not have changed. He would've had no consequence for his actions and he would've thought that everything that he was doing was okay. He also would not have built his relationship with his daughter that was key to changing his view on women.

Eveline

Eveline is torn between two worlds: her past and her family in Dublin and a happy, married future with Frank. The life that she currently lives is hard and uneventful. Her mother and one of her brothers died and her other brother moved away. With no one to protect her, she is in constant fear of her father hurting her. Although her life is hard, she calls it "not wholly undesirable." She has shelter and food and she has stability in her life. Eveline also knows that her father has a soft side that comes out once in awhile. She says she has "a right to happiness." Frank promises to take her away to Buenos Aires and marry her. She can leave behind her past and start anew in an unknown country. However, seeing Frank is against Eveline's father's wishes and if she were to suddenly leave her home town, she would be ridiculed by the people there. Her life in Dublin is not perfect, but it is not bad either. Eveline in paralyzed in a sense that she has no clue whether to throw away her current life for Frank or not.

Her epiphany comes when she hears the street organ playing down her avenue. The night her mother died, an Italian organ player was playing. That night Eveline promised her dying mother that she would "keep the home together as long as she could." And Eveline's mother screamed as she died, "Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!" The memory haunted Eveline. Her reaction to escape was just reacting to terror. When she asks God on the docks what she should do, she has already made the decision to stay with her family. Eveline decided to keep true to her promise to her mother.

This is similar to the paralysis and epiphany in "Araby". The boy in "Araby" wishes for more than his going-nowhere life. He, too is paralyzed in the same spot. But his epiphany doesn't come by choice. When he realizes that the bazaar is some run-down place and that he can't afford anything there, he realizes that his life will remain paralyzed and he is forced to stay in the past.

Melanie

I knew he had his eye on me when he said, 'Hi.' His name was David Lurie, my Romantics professor. I've had no previous conversations with him until he approached me in the gardens on a Friday evening. Right away, he invited me to his home for a drink. I was hesitant at first but accepted his invitation. We talked a little of literature when he invited me to stay for supper. Again I was hesitant, unsure of his intentions, but again I accepted. Instead of desert, he offered a dance. I was not enthused at all and walked away as soon as we were done. He asked me to stay the night with him. I was charmed. I already had a boyfriend, but I had not been courted for some time and Professor Lurie was quite good at seducing women. I almost stayed, until he said, 'From fairest creatures we desire increase, that thereby beauty's rose might never die.' I left. Sunday he called. He asked me to join him for lunch. I could've denied his offer but was lost in confusion. I was not hungry, so he took me to his home and used my body for his pleasure.

Because of his relationship with Melanie, David Lurie gets fired from the college and thus starts his life on the farm and his "Disgrace." Melanie was just another woman that David imagined having a romantic relationship with. She wasn't at all interested in the relationship they had, but she wasn't exactly forced into it. Melanie let David do what he pleased. She had many opportunities to turn him down but she didn't have the willpower to say no. David could've recognized that she didn't really want any of this and could've stopped at any time. But his desire and her passiveness led to David's fall. When she decides to stay the night with him and to seem like she wants him, it is merely a trap. Melanie wants to recover on the work she missed and get David caught.

In 1952 the owners of a little bog near Windeby, in the vicinity of Schleswig, Germany, discovered the corpse of a 2,000-year-old girl, aged 14 at her death, as they cut up the peat for sale. Birch branches and a large stone covered the girl when alive, weighing her down so that she drowned in the bog. Photographed, analyzed, her well-known remains now rest in the Archäologisches Landesmuseum in Schleswig, vivid testimony that the bog peoples of northern Europe enforced their moral code with capital punishment. Danish archaeologist Peter Vilhelm Glob in 1965 published Mosefolket, a book about these iron-age bog folk; and in it he placed some photographs of the body of the teenager by then named the Windeby girl

Seamus Heaney's "Punishment" famously compares the Windeby girl with Catholic girls in Northern Ireland, her "betraying sisters" (38), who consorted with British soldiers.

In the 1970’s, Heaney--born in 1939 to a pious, Catholic, moderately Nationalist rural family--felt himself uncomfortably caught between physical-force Republicanism, about which he was generally skeptical, and the discriminatory rule of entrenched Protestant political power, one of whose Paisleyite newspapers referred to Heaney as “the well-known papist propagandist.”

At about the same time as the tar-and-feather incident, at which it is possible Heaney might actually have been a bystander, he and his own young family decided to move out of Belfast, south to the less fractious Irish Republic.

The presence and fear of conflict and violence are a part of Irish history. Whether it is from ancient times or from around the time of 'The Irish Troubles', it is an ever present part of Ireland and consequently makes it in to Heaney's poetry.

In “Punishment” Heaney establishes a metaphorical connection between two extravagantly violent events: on the one hand, the execution of a young adulteress, whose body has been preserved for two millennia in a North European bog; and, on the other, in an analogous tribal ritual, the savage chastisement in 1972 of certain Belfast Catholic girls who, because they had dated British soldiers, were shorn, tarred-and-feathered, and chained in the city center by the IRA.

This paradoxical poem, it will occur to many, helps explain Ireland and its centuries-long "trouble," where Christians, in killing each other, simultaneously feel revulsion and sorrow, and vindictive triumph.

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