Abstract Doris Duke was christened the "richest woman in the world" at the age of twelve when her father, James B. Duke, founder of the American Tobacco Company, passed away. On October 28, 1993, Doris Duke was murdered in her Beverly Hills estate. This paper examines the mystery surrounding the strange death of Duke and role that her butler, Bernard Lafferty played (or did not play) in her murder.
From the Paper "In addition to Tammy Payette's affidavit causing a stir throughout world, it also caused a stir at the Los Angeles Police Department. They launched an investigation into Miss Duke's death. Unsettled about the murder investigation, Lafferty "relinquished control of the Duke estate" (CBS 2 News 3). With the battle over the will concluded a large percentage of the money went to charities for such things as abused animals and children."
Abstract The purpose of this paper is to introduce and discuss the story "The Old Chief Mshlanga" by Doris Lessing. It deals with issues such as what kind of dominance is sought, to what degree victims collaborate in their own destruction, the views of the oppressed and the oppressor. It concludes by exploring the kind of future that this work seem to predict.
From the Paper "This short story is really an autobiographical work, discussing the author's experiences while living in the white dominated society of Rhodesia, in southern Africa. The main characters of the tale are the Jordan family, who seek to take over native lands, because they need them for white colonization. The family, just like all the colonists, seeks to dominate, and eventually eliminate the natives from the area. They do not care where they go, just as long as they leave, and leave the colonists alone. "Conflicts with the Jordan family perhaps incur and certainly expedite the re-settlement. A dispute over village goats that trample the Jordan's farm ensues between Chief Mshlanga and Nkosikaas' father after Mr. Jordan confiscates the goats" (Hurley)."
Abstract This paper takes a look at the Doris Lessing story, "A Sunrise on the Veld". The author examines the use of symbolism and irony in the Lessing story, showing that death is part of living and must be experienced to mature. With many quotes from the actual text.
From the Paper "The transition between childhood and adulthood can be very dramatic. As children we live in a fantasy world where death and tragedy cannot touch us but as we mature into adults the reality of the real world sets in. This is best portrayed in "A Sunrise in the Veld" by Doris Lessing. The story starts with a young boy and his morning routine of an early swim and a hunt. On his hunt the boy hears a "sound of pain" coming from a clearing, the boy goes to investigate and finds a dying buck."
Abstract The paper discusses the book "Jailed for Freedom: American Women Win the Vote" the electric story of the battle for suffrage, written by Doris Stevens in 1920, a leader of the National Woman's Party (NWP) in that era. The paper then reviews a new, abridged version of the book, edited by Carol O'Hare and shows how this author has changed the book to suit popular audiences more than the academic ones.
From the Paper "Originally brought into a memoir as the history of the National Woman's Party, the revision of the 1920 edition made its timely appearance in the year celebrating the 75th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment. O'Hare editions aim to keep the narration lively, and to maintain flow and continuity. Yet it is an attempt to retain the integrity of the original in tone and content. The introduction is a capsule to the history of the women's suffrage movement and the leaders? strategies and personalities.
"Despite the fact that this edition makes a truly heroic story accessible to a larger audience beyond the college classroom, O'Hare has edited out the ?minute detail of legislative politics, author bias, and verbiage,? leaving a vivid partisan account that clearly conveys the excitement of both battle and victory."
Abstract This paper demonstrates the losses for the both the occupier and the occupied during the colonial era. It illustrates this through the literary works of Doris Lessing, Chinua Achebe and Albert Camus.
From the Paper "The colonial experience is very different for the colonists than it is for the colonized, generally corresponding to the oppressors and the oppressed respectively. Yet, as various literary works show, there is often loss on both sides of the equation, though the loss for the colonized is usually more readily apparent than the loss for the colonists. Today we can see many of the effects of the colonial era, with failed and failing governments in former colonies, with former colonial powers trying to make up for wrongs of the past and having to live with the turmoil their own actions created."
Abstract Starting with the first lines of the story, the paper shows how the characters in the story suppress emotions and over-emphasize intellectuality. It explores the dynamics of Mathew and Susan's family in light of this overemphasis. It discusses Susan's oppressive life as a housewife and the various means she employs in her quest to escape this life. The demons that plague Susan are studied and the paper concludes with a look at the significance of the man in the garden.
From the Paper "Throughout the first half of the story, Susan and Matthew do everything their minds tell them to do. They each have a sensible number of affairs, marry at a sensible age, and produce a sensible number of children. At no time during the story is there any mention of love for the children, and the only mention of love for each other is in an intellectual context. It comes as Lessing tries to impart what accounts for their so-called success: "Their love for each other" Wall, that was nearest it?.Yes, it was around this point, their love, that the whole extraordinary structure revolved.? Family and home are usually not referred to as ?structure.? Obviously, the Rawlings? regard for love, family and prosperity comes purely from an intellectual place."
Abstract Susan Rawling, the main character in Doris Lessing's short story "To Room 19", fights against her inner emptiness and the roles she is supposed to play as a mother, a wife and a house manager. The paper shows how, in order to express this psychological process, Lessing progressively describes the different views the character has of her surroundings - such as the starkness of her white house, the big and "wild" garden and, finally, "Room 19", to demonstrate how these settings influence her troublesome emotional status.
From the Paper "Aiming to forget about herself and where she comes from, she decides to have a place "where she could go and sit, by herself, no one knowing where she was" (p. 674). Then, she starts to isolate herself in a hotel room - room 19 - so as to unchain herself from her duties as Mrs. Rawlings. There, at last, Susan can have a setting of her own where she does not have to think about anything, but only observe the time passing by, with neither past nor future. She is totally empty there, "feeling emptiness run deliciously through her veins like the movement of her blood" (p. 6 80). These journeys, which range from one to five times a week, last (for) a year. These days of loneliness enable Susan to "play her part" as a mother and wife easily since she is not Mrs. Rawlings anymore, she is an impostor, completely detached from this family."
Abstract This paper examines how in Flannery O'Conner's "Good Country People" and Doris Betts' "The Ugliest Pilgrim" symbolism is displayed in a number of ways. It confronts the symbolism behind certain objects in both stories, and reveals the true identity of the characters.
From the Paper "In a relationship between O'Conner's own Roman Catholic religion in her position in a by and large Protestant South she relates Hulga's own relationship with God, or lack there of, to her own and how she sees the people around her "It is clear that O'Connor sees Hulga's belief system, not her missing leg, as her greatest handicap. Hulga is shut off from a proper communion with God, not because she is knowingly evil, but because she is morally smug; she thinks she has within herself everything she needs to be a functionally complete person. Essentially this boils down to an argument between Protestantism and Catholicism -- Protestantism holding that each person ultimately determines his own belief and that salvation comes wholly from a personal relationship with God, and Catholicism maintaining that salvation comes through a right relationship to God through the traditions and sacraments of His Church." "
Abstract Wine" by Doris Lessing deals with the differences between men and women as it applies to sexuality, personality and evaluation or understanding of certain situations. It brings to light our societal stereotypes (as they were in the late fifties when this piece was written and even as they appear now), and our failing appreciation of one another as separate genders. The paper shows that with the use of merely one man and one woman, Lessing builds a path, based on both misconception and misunderstanding, that leads to a doorway into what she conceives is the truth about the depth any heterosexual relationship can actually achieve.
From the Paper "Even later yet, the woman refuses to follow his cue when he raises his glass of wine for a toast, though only the moment before she had loved him wholly. Unlike the couple first seen coming from the hotel, they now seem out of sync, uncoordinated, and almost strangers to one another. First, they had looked at ease and comfortable with each other, now they seem as they are simply coping. However, this is but a tidbit of their true personalities. The main course of their dysfunctional relationship is shown through their parallel memories."
Abstract The paper discusses the book "Clover" by Doris Sanders that portrays the life of a young black child reared by a white woman in a close-knit, African-American farming community. The paper considers the book's dominant themes of intermarriage and women and work and highlights Sanders' depiction of gender-specific expectations.
Outline:
Part One: Summary of Text
Intermarriage
Women and Work
From the Paper "Dori Sander's, Clover, is a thoughtful look at what it is like to be a young black child reared by a white woman in a close-knit, African-American farming community. The book explores Clover's own conflicting feelings towards Sara Kate and the difficult time Sara Kate experiences by virtue of being a white interloper in a protective and tightly-bound black extended family. Furthermore, the book looks at how Clover finds herself uncomfortably straddling two worlds that are divided by cleavages that extend beyond race. To wit, Sara Kate is well-educated and intelligent and white (and apparently fairly upper-class) and Clover's family is working poor, African-American, rural and not terribly urbane. In a real sense, the little girl is the embodiment of the fears, tensions and insecurities many children endure when thrust into biracial marriages in a society that has not yet embraced them."
Abstract This paper compares and contrasts the use of point of view in "To Room Nineteen" by Doris Lessing and "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver. The paper describes the plots and the characters of each story and discusses and compares the narrative style in the two works. The paper then focuses on what the choices of narrative style portray about the story and how this affects the reader's perceptions.
From the Paper "Thus, even more so than having an affair, Lessing's wife realizes that she cannot go on living a double existence, one existence characterized by an absence of autonomous identity and one in a room by herself, in Room Nineteen. She is 'cheating' on her husband--with herself, by enjoying her solitude. Finally, Susan lies on the bed in her room, smells the sex of other people in the stale motel sheets and she chooses to annihilate herself, a scene that would be unbearably painful if the reader identified with her as completely the reader inevitably identifies with Carver's first-person narrator. Thus Lessing's use of a third-person narrator deliberately creates distance, and encourages the reader to see Susan as a case study that shows the limits of female existence as fully human beings with an identity beyond sexuality. Carver in contrast encourages the reader to identify with the narrator, as the narrator identifies with the blind man, because the story is about an internal shift that occurs within the narrator, and about a case study of humanity."
From the Paper "Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, a novel about the process of subverting the traditional novel, is the embodiment of the new type of fiction envisioned by its protagonist. For the novelist Anna Wulf the problems of achieving authenticity in life and in fiction are inseparable. Her compulsive desire to write fiction is constantly frustrated by her inability to produce work that imposes order on a world that she sees as descending into chaos. Such a fiction will provide a new way of viewing the world but it cannot be achieved, she feels, because she cannot impose such order on her own life--the source material for this transcendent fiction. Anna fears that the inability to achieve authenticity in her own life--demonstrated by her inability to get an ordering grip on it--means that she will never be able to write this type of book. Lessing's novel, with its multiple ..."
Abstract The paper provides a detailed analysis of the character Kate Brown's journey into self-consciousness in the novel "The Summer Before the Dark" by Doris Lessing. The paper traces Kate Brown's dual journey into on both the physical and spiritual planes as she comes to an awareness of herself as mother, over the course of one critical summer at the crossroads of her life.
From the Paper "In The Summer Before the Dark, Kate Brown, mother of four, embarks upon a journey of self-discovery and self-awareness. Over the course of the summer she will awake to a new understanding of the role of Motherhood, her own life, and the multi-dimensional relationship between the two. Kate's journey into consciousness is simultaneously outwardly manifested by her travels on the physical plane. The most telling sign that the two journeys are inter-related is their parallelism of form. In order to reach a state of psychological and spiritual harmony, Kate must complete her mandala. The mandala, which is the psychological symbol for a state of wholeness and completion is generally symbolized in physical terms by a circle. Kate completes her Mandala on the psychological plane during the course of her travel experiences on the physical plane."
Abstract This paper discusses how much of literature conveys the male-female relationship through the review of three different pieces of literature: John Steinbeck's "The Chrysanthemums", Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen" and Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants". It shows how all three pieces of literature, attempt to prove that the basic truth in a male-female relationship is that men and women are different, in our habits, in the way we react to situations in life, environmental stimuli and in our attitudes regarding relationships. It examines how through the stories presented, it can be seen that communication undoubtedly plays a foundational role in the development of any healthy relationship and it often serves to bridge the gap between people with misunderstandings, or to solidify a mutual sense of commitment.
From the Paper "Another story depicting a man and woman relationship is Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen". Susan, a married woman, feels a lose of freedom from being a wife and a mother whose days are spent taking care of her family and hardly had time for herself. Because of this feeling, which she was unable to communicate to her husband, she ended up killing herself. She rents a hotel room every afternoon where she spends time alone for herself, and just sits and thinks. Apparently, her husband assumes that she is having an affair. Knowing that her husband won?t understand her feelings, she tells him that she is indeed having an affair. In the end, Susan returns to the hotel room and kills herself."
Abstract This paper states that the book addresses the political views held by Johnson and many of the events that shaped his public and his private life. The paper reveals that the book examines in depth most of Johnson's major defining moments at the time of its publication in 1977. The author points out that Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize-winner, pis actually an authority on Johnson,and is well qualified to write a book of this nature.
