Some extracts from sample essays (Postcolonialism/poststructuralism for Heart of Darkness, Close Analysis is 12th Night). Am selling full essays for 12th Night, Heart of Darkness, Browning's Dramatic Monologues! Have around 10 essays each for 12th Night and Heart of Darkness, around 5 for Browning, plus sample sentences/paragraphs which I incorporated into the exam (to get raw 50). Please PM for inquiries or email
[email protected](Heart of Darkness)
...Conrad presents Marlow as anticipating moral and spiritual enlightenment through the Biblical intertextuality which compares his journey down the river Congo with man’s prehistoric state of prelapsarian innocence: “The snake had charmed me”. Similarly, anticipation is created through the delayed synchronous appearance of Kurtz, being venerated by various European voices as a “prodigy”, and an “emissary of pity, and science, and progress”. Just as “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz”, the Harlequin, an image of Europe’s credulity of colonialism, becomes Kurtz’s “last disciple”; Conrad parallels the dress of the Harlequin, “bright patches” of “blue, red, and yellow”, with the map of an Africa colonised by Europe, thereby reflecting Conrad’s suggestion that Europe idolised Kurtz as the apogee of its civilisation, a writer, poet, musician, artist. Marlow himself, traumatised by his Congolese experiences, subconsciously alludes to Kurtz in the frame narrative through this religio-mythic semantic field, as the “idea” which he becomes, “something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…” Thus, for Marlow, and by extension, Europe, Kurtz’s ignominious fall represents a symbolic failure of European ideals, principles, and language, rendered “less than chaff in a breeze” in the utter alterity of the Dantean “Inferno”. The repetition of Kurtz’s primal cry “The horror! The horror!” suggests that meaningful elaboration is impossible, and in this “supreme moment of complete knowledge”, Conrad combines the allegorical nature of the prelapsarian quest for knowledge with the ultimate nihilism of the existential “wilderness” to chillingly evoke an unconquerable darkness, the ultimate darkness of man’s soul. This revelation utterly destroys Marlow’s “belief in mankind”; he is overcome by Nietzschean nihilism, expressible only by the inexpressibility of the repetitive “The horror! The horror!” Thus, the Biblical allegory of cosmogonic knowledge is shattered, with Marlow helplessly captive to the “voice” of the demonic Kurtz, believing that faith itself can only ever be “a great and saving illusion.” ...
(12th Night-Some sample sentences)
Shakespeare presents desire as a fleeting metaphysical dream, as existing in the painless insubstantiality of thought, yet, as being delusive and illusive in its attempt to seek an object which remains perpetually elusive in the abstract psychological world. Yet, through the androgynous character of Viola, these narcissistic, trivial loves of Olivia and Orsino are catalysed into an ardent attraction towards the composite figure Viola-Cesario. Shakespeare comically resolves this romantic dilemma through the heteronormative introduction of Sebastian; Olivia finds the man in Viola, and Orsino obtains the woman in Cesario.
Mellifluous music allows the characters of the low comedy to enter an atemporal trance in which the cares of the quotidian and the hierarchal strictures of society are self-therapeutically forgotten; music is the metaphysical medium through which they enter an illusionary and hedonistic dimension in which they are free to explore the alternate identities of Saturnalia, of “Twelfth Night”.
The musical solos of Feste evoke a romantic paradigm of unrequited and unfulfilled yearnings; through the medium of unaccompanied song, love remains perpetually unanswered, expressed only from the singular perspective of the singer, thereby functioning as suitable emotional stimulation for Count Orsino, wallowing in his self-absorbed, self-obsessed, and self-indulgent narcissism.
(Browning's Dramatic Monologues-Introduction, Paragraphs 2&3, Conclusion)
In order to explore the contemporary issues of religious inadequacy, the truth of our human imperfection, and the artifice covering hedonism within the social milieu of Victorian England, Browning sets many of his poems in mediaeval and Renaissance Europe. The spatio-temporal remoteness allows him to directly address such concerns without seeming didactic and moralising to his readers. Analogous to his proto-modernist views, Browning’s dramatic monologues set out to illustrate human imperfection and limitations, as he demonstrates in Two in the Campagna, where the human speaker’s attempt to express the fullness of his love is ultimately frustrated. Likewise, by listening to the A Toccata of Galuppi’s, the monologist vicariously gazes upon the hedonistic tableau of Venice, only to be confronted with the inevitability of his mortality. In addition, by enclosing the internalised, overflowing envy of the Cloister within the speaker’s own warped psychology, Browning presents the corrupted contempt of the soliloquist without imposing external judgement upon him. Thus, Browning’s authorial intent emerges from dramatic context rather than conventional diegesis, requiring his readers to complete the scene from inference and imagination, as opposed to traditional narrative exposition.
By exploiting the subjective nature of dramatic monologue, Browning is able to present multiple perspectives in Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, thereby demonstrating that the nature of truth and reality fluctuates, while resisting the temptation to deliver moral judgements....
While Browning characteristically celebrates love throughout his poetic oeuvre, such as in its sweetness in Confessions, he powerfully demonstrates human shortcomings in love, such as in Two in the Campagna. The frequent repetition of “such” suggests that the human lover is unable to fully represent his love adequately. Furthermore, Browning not only depicts our inability to describe God’s creations in terms of love, but also our incapacity to perfectly represent God’s world visually, as he explores in Fra Lippo Lippi. As such, at the climax of the speaker’s attempt to express his love: “And love it more than tongue can speak”, he loses it: “Then the good minute goes.” Thus, language and art are portrayed alike as intrinsically insufficient mediums in representing the lives we have been given. Yet, for Browning, this only augments their importance, in following the aesthetic aims of Lippi, the everyday resonates with enriched meaning and becomes epiphanic in its own right. Likewise, through Galuppi’s music, the listener indirectly experiences the world of Venice at carnival. Browning emulates the auditory qualities through many elements of his own prosody; the rhythmic beat of the troche mimics the emphasis of the musical downbeat, the octameter supports the length of the line as a musical phrase, and the catalexis serves as a cadential ending. Thus, the dramatic monologue metapoetically composes itself. As the reader listens to the music in the poem, Browning positions them to reflect upon music, their pleasure-seeking, and death inexorable, paralleling the Venetians listening to Galuppi’s toccatas in the episode preceding the given extract. Therefore, Browning asserts that through art, the human becomes perceptive of his own shortcomings.
By representing humanity with all its limitations and failures, Browning draws the reader’s attention to the hypocrisy of Victorian moral standards, while distancing such transgressive behaviours from his contemporary audience. The metaphor of “Wed the sea with rings” rings of the lavish wealth of the golden days of Venice, where “the merchants were the kings.” Yet, in the midst of such wealth, the imagery of “burning” serves a threefold purpose: literally as the burning torches illuminating the midnight balls, and figuratively to indicate not only the lust of the youthful Venetians, but also their inevitable deaths, paralleled not only by the death of Venice but also by the ending of the music. Therefore, by placing the line “It’s as if I saw it all” in a contemporary setting, in referencing “England”, Browning alludes to the prevalent sexual promiscuity within Victorian society, thereby positioning his reader to question their own behaviours.
Although he portrays humanity as intrinsically flawed, as illustrated in the disturbing interior journey of Soliloquy, Browning observes the world through a lens sympathetic to human imperfection. Though the reader witnesses the human lover succumbing the sensual “pluck the rose”, wealth giving way to hedonism, and spiritual devotion yielding to possessed demonic cries of “Hy, Zy, Hine”, Browning poignantly acknowledges the beauty of the truth by means of a realistic representation, in contrast to the hypocrisy of an idealised illusion.