Atonement vs. Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet has always been one of William Shakespeare's most popular and successful plays, even though critics have sometimes dismissed it as an immature or sentimental work. In that respect, Atonement is not sentimental at all but rather grimly realistic, although the love of Ronnie and Cecelia also ends tragically. Both the play and novel have a great deal of seemingly irrational and senseless violence that destroys the lives of the main characters. In Atonement, the violence takes the form of a system that convicts Robbie unjustly of a crime he did not commit, and then gives him a choice of either serving in a war as cannon fodder or staying in jail. Cecilia and Briony also experience the violence of wartime London with regular bombing and endless numbers of badly mangled bodies that flood into the hospitals where they work. In Romeo and Juliet, the violence is the endless feud between the Monatgue's and Capulet's, in which Romeo kills Tybalt in retaliation for the death of his friend Mercutio. Great Britain in 1935 was not nearly as repressive and patriarchal as the Italy of the 17th Century which is the setting for Romeo and Juliet. Women had won the right to vote by that time, and were beginning to attend universities or work outside the home, as Cecelia and Briony Tallis did. Unlike Juliet, they were not being forced into arranged marriages contracted by their father, who actually seems indifferent to them.
John Locke\'s Understanding of Freedom and Equality
Essay assignment: John Locke's understanding of freedom and equality is the essential basis of any happy and prosperous society." How would the following individuals react to this quote: Rousseau, King Louis the Fourteenth, and Napoleon.
With Rousseau, for instance, hiw views oiwuld ahve been the following: Rousseau is most famous for saying that "Man was/is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." (Social Contract, Vol. IV, p. 131 in Ashcraft, 22). We are born good but are essentially not free since we are forced to live in a pretentious society with conventions and masquerade. The most liberated and content people, according to Rousseau, were primitive people since they had no manmade convictions and social niceties to bind them.