Admissions paper

I have come to a point in life that many people have not.   I have made a firm decision to recommit myself to pursuing my dreams.   While there are those who believe that with an ounce of luck and a ton of persistence anything can be accomplished, I believe that there is no reason to expend so much energy and rely on luck.Life is simply too short and too precious to be left to luck alone.   After serious investigation and reflection I am convinced my educational goals will be far better achieved at this prestigious University.It is not an easy decision for me, as I struggle to perform many various tasks and jobs at this point in my life.   I feel, however, that there is no substitute for a proper education and I feel that this course will be very beneficial to my future.One of the many wonderful concepts I have learned from my parents is to strive for academic excellence while balancing life with other activities and contributions.   I am proud of my previous academic recor d at (insert undergraduate school) as well as my extracurricular involvement in campus activities, part-time employment and community service.   Yet I feel that in order to reach my full potential I need to be in an environment that best caters to my interests and goals.The world is fast becoming a borderless place.   Cultures, races, beliefs and ideologies are blend together and interact because of the growing advances in communications.   In order to succeed in this world, one needs to be able to adapt to the various cultural differences as well as be able to maintain a certain sense of individual identity.My former school did not have the same diversity that I see environment where cultural diversity is promoted.     This is why I believe that this educational environment is the perfect place for me.   Not only does this University exceed my expectations but it is also enjoys a global reputation.I have learned from my parents two â€Å"laws†: the law of learnin g and the law of giving. I believe the more you learn the more open you become for learning. I am convinced this University is a great fit for â€Å"the law of learning.†Ã‚   That is why I believe that this move is a crucial step for me.   My success and my accomplishments here will herald the beginning of the fulfillment of my personal and professional goals.It is said that the one thing that nobody can ever take away from you is your education and that is the one thing that I plan to not only gain for myself but for others as well.   I have learned from my parents the critical importance of the law of giving, and I am both attracted and committed to this model of community service, particularly that â€Å"students apply skills to effect social change.†I bring to this campus a variety of assets and commitments. I have benefited from a multi-cultural mentoring program in high school.   As an open-minded student, I believe I am able to contribute to not only the c ultural diversity, but also the global views of the learning community.   My experience and perspective will greatly benefit those that I will be able to interact with on campus.   I look forward to the rich academic and cultural experience that this fine University has to offer.I have also always been committed to community service and campus government, and plan on continuing these important activities.   I will bring to the campus what others have considered in me an infectious â€Å"joy of learning, excitement for the future, and need for world contribution.† That is in essence my philosophy and I believe it will be able to contribute to the campus community if given the opportunity to do so.While I personally believe that â€Å"there is no such thing as a free lunch† and that everything a person has in life must come from hard work and perseverance, I also believe in charity.   I believe in helping others who do not have much in life.   I believe in help ing people regardless of their nation, race or creed.   I believe in being a better person so I can best help myself and others around me.I believe that this academic environment is the best place for me to turn these beliefs into realities.   I am fully aware of the significance of being considered for acceptance, and I am sincerely grateful for your time and consideration of my application.

MBA admission essay

I dream of becoming one of the most successful electrical engineers the world has ever produced. This idea may seem farfetched, but I intend to pursue this dream in the not so distant future. To begin with, I would like to complete my MBA degree and become an accomplished student. I know that it will take more than just a strong-willed personality to achieve this, but I know I’m off to a good start. I have been working as an Applications Engineer for the past four years and a half. With my experience, I have learned how to handle various challenges and difficult situations in a mature way. I acquired an Engineering Management degree which I earned recently has somehow helped me in becoming a better person than I used to be. I am able to handle I believe that my qualities are enough to qualify me into your MBA program. I am dependable, flexible and can easily get along well with others. With my friendly attitude, I was able to gain more than the usual number of friends which has helped me a lot in performing my duties and responsibilities as an employee. I do not allow pressures to get the better of me. With my sense of humor, I can very manage well the challenges that come my way.   I am pro-active, making certain that I meet my projects before the set deadline. This way, I need not cram over my projects and waste precious time crying over lost opportunities or chances. I pay great attention to micro-level details.   I am likewise patient and hardworking. I make sure that I give 100% of my time and effort in any project that is assigned to me. My parents have always told me that education is an important inheritance. Your diploma can actually take you anywhere. It is important to possess a degree during these time and age. Education is such a significant ingredient to success. Without education, it will be difficult to be qualified for the next job. Education is such a learning experience. Without it, it will be impossible to reach for your goals. This is just one of the many reasons why I am interested in earning my MBA degree. I believe that my undergraduate degree is not enough to earn me a ticket to success. It takes ore than just a college degree to arm me with the right weapons to face the challenges that go through life. I can only aim high and earn high if I was able to achieve my MBA diploma in the not so distant future. I understand that it’s a long way to go. That this education will be another tuition and another burden to carry, but I know how important it is to fully discover my potentials and I am happy that my parents are supporting me in my endeavor. As Khan (2000) puts it in her article, the importance of education is quite understandable. It is the knowledge of placing one's potentials to the maximum. It will be such a waste if a person is not educated. Besides, it will be difficult to train a person if he’s not educated. With the right education, we are able to make the right decisions and think things in a better perspective. As I have mentioned, taking an MBA degree is a learning experience. I am aware that although I have earned my college degree, there is still so much to learn about the world and to so much to discover. Someone once said that unless you find your missing link, you will not be complete. Unless you become what you are destined to become, you will not be happy. I can truly say that unless I earn my MBA degree, I will not be the person I have always wanted to be. Aside form the characteristics that made me unique, I am hopeful that I can be accepted to this degree program and that I will eventually find the fulfillment of my dreams. Then and only then will I be able to shout to the world that yes, I made it and I am proud and happy for everything. Source: Maulana Wahiduddin Khan. Importance of Education. The Milli Gazette. RNI DELENG/2000/930; ISSN 0972-3366 (2000) MBA Admission Essay To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there (Kofi Annan).My primary childhood objective was to obtain a Masters in Business Administration from the US. To this end, I worked very hard at school and obtained very good academic grades. My parents are illiterate and poor. We hail from a rural area of the country. However, my single minded devotion to acquiring knowledge resulted in my obtaining very good scores, not only in the tenth grade but also the twelfth grade. In some of the subjects of study I even obtained the highest marks in the entire state.Subsequently, I joined a college in Hyderabad, India. While commuting to college, one dismal day in June 1986, I was involved in a traffic accident which led to the complete loss of wrist movement in the right hand. Since, I am a right handed person; this constituted a terrible blow to my educational and other prospects. In this hour of my t rial, my family and friends extended all possible cooperation. The upshot of this was that I managed to emerge from a state of depression and move on in life. Inter alia, I made strenuous efforts to acclimatize my left hand to the functions that had previously been the exclusive preserve of my right hand.Another source of inspiration was offered by the numerous physically and mentally challenged persons, who had overcome their disabilities and forged ahead in life. Some of these people were at the very front of technological and scientific research. One such person from whose life I drew inspiration is Stephen Hawking, who is an acclaimed authority in theoretical physics. Stephen developed motor neurone disease, an incurable ailment. He lost his voice, mobility and was confined to a wheel chair. Nevertheless, such adversity failed to deter him and he continues to make significant contributions to cosmology (Hawking).I recovered my equanimity and writing skills in six months and obta ined very high grades in the second year examinations. In addition to attending college, I regularly underwent physio therapy and I was able to complete my graduation along with the other students of my class.The year 1988, was witness to the demise of my father. This compelled me to shoulder the family responsibilities. My mother developed nephrological complications and my younger brother and sister had to be supported financially. This forced me to keep in abeyance my dream of higher studies and to commence employment. This experience taught me the value of responsible behaviour. A few years after graduation, I set foot in the US and in this manner I came very near to achieving my goal.These experiences served to strengthen my resolve and boosted my self confidence tremendously. I could clearly discern what Napoleon had meant when he had stated that â€Å"Impossible, ce n'est pas francais† or the word impossible does not exist in my dictionary. This attitude proved to be o f great help to the management of F.J. Benjamin and Holdings of Singapore, where I was employed in the year 1996. The management wanted to purchase an application software package, whereas my director was of the opinion that this package could be developed by the existing software professionals.Accordingly, the management permitted our group to develop the required application. However, after some days, the pace with which our work was progressing diminished greatly, due to the departure of a number of programmers for greener pastures. At the same time management became insistent upon our showing results and stated that it would purchase the software if we failed to develop it. At this crucial juncture, I took the bull by the horns and managed to convince the management that I would deliver the software package.In order to succeed in my challenge, I approached my friends in the software industry and obtained their invaluable help. Some of them even joined our organization and in thi s manner I ensured that the project was completed successfully and well within the allocated budget. The management of our organization was extremely pleased with my dynamism, organizing capacity, knowledge, determination and single minded devotion to duty. This reveals my aptitude for management.I had been devoting my time to several orphanages and helping their inmates in their scholastic endeavours. On seeing my friend lose his eyesight, I developed concern for the disabled and I organized a number of blood donation and organ donation camps. Moreover, I successfully established an orphanage in the city of Vishakhapatnam, India. At present I am in constant touch with Shankar Netralaya in Chennai, India, which is one of the best ophthalmologic centres in India, to treat more persons afflicted with diseases of the eye.The MBA Program of UCLA Anderson is one of the best of its kind in the world. The faculty is constantly engaged in research and their findings are conveyed to the stud ents. In addition to this, analyses of relevant international event are commonplace in this program. Moreover, the mandatory twenty weeks long Applied Management Research project, which every student has to complete, is with respect to some real business situation.Thus the alumni of this institution are truly bestowed with the latest theoretical and practical knowledge (MBA PROGRAM). I would like to become a part of this great management movement and my accomplishments, courage, positive attitude, optimism, perseverance and experience of life should ensure that I render complete justice to this superlative course in management. MBA Admission Essay To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there (Kofi Annan).My primary childhood objective was to obtain a Masters in Business Administration from the US. To this end, I worked very hard at school and obtained very good academic grades. My parents are illiterate and poor. We hail from a rural area of the country. However, my single minded devotion to acquiring knowledge resulted in my obtaining very good scores, not only in the tenth grade but also the twelfth grade. In some of the subjects of study I even obtained the highest marks in the entire state.Subsequently, I joined a college in Hyderabad, India. While commuting to college, one dismal day in June 1986, I was involved in a traffic accident which led to the complete loss of wrist movement in the right hand. Since, I am a right handed person; this constituted a terrible blow to my educational and other prospects. In this hour of my t rial, my family and friends extended all possible cooperation. The upshot of this was that I managed to emerge from a state of depression and move on in life. Inter alia, I made strenuous efforts to acclimatize my left hand to the functions that had previously been the exclusive preserve of my right hand.Another source of inspiration was offered by the numerous physically and mentally challenged persons, who had overcome their disabilities and forged ahead in life. Some of these people were at the very front of technological and scientific research. One such person from whose life I drew inspiration is Stephen Hawking, who is an acclaimed authority in theoretical physics. Stephen developed motor neurone disease, an incurable ailment. He lost his voice, mobility and was confined to a wheel chair. Nevertheless, such adversity failed to deter him and he continues to make significant contributions to cosmology (Hawking).I recovered my equanimity and writing skills in six months and obta ined very high grades in the second year examinations. In addition to attending college, I regularly underwent physio therapy and I was able to complete my graduation along with the other students of my class.The year 1988, was witness to the demise of my father. This compelled me to shoulder the family responsibilities. My mother developed nephrological complications and my younger brother and sister had to be supported financially. This forced me to keep in abeyance my dream of higher studies and to commence employment. This experience taught me the value of responsible behaviour. A few years after graduation, I set foot in the US and in this manner I came very near to achieving my goal.These experiences served to strengthen my resolve and boosted my self confidence tremendously. I could clearly discern what Napoleon had meant when he had stated that â€Å"Impossible, ce n'est pas francais† or the word impossible does not exist in my dictionary. This attitude proved to be o f great help to the management of F.J. Benjamin and Holdings of Singapore, where I was employed in the year 1996. The management wanted to purchase an application software package, whereas my director was of the opinion that this package could be developed by the existing software professionals.Accordingly, the management permitted our group to develop the required application. However, after some days, the pace with which our work was progressing diminished greatly, due to the departure of a number of programmers for greener pastures. At the same time management became insistent upon our showing results and stated that it would purchase the software if we failed to develop it. At this crucial juncture, I took the bull by the horns and managed to convince the management that I would deliver the software package.In order to succeed in my challenge, I approached my friends in the software industry and obtained their invaluable help. Some of them even joined our organization and in thi s manner I ensured that the project was completed successfully and well within the allocated budget. The management of our organization was extremely pleased with my dynamism, organizing capacity, knowledge, determination and single minded devotion to duty. This reveals my aptitude for management.I had been devoting my time to several orphanages and helping their inmates in their scholastic endeavours. On seeing my friend lose his eyesight, I developed concern for the disabled and I organized a number of blood donation and organ donation camps. Moreover, I successfully established an orphanage in the city of Vishakhapatnam, India. At present I am in constant touch with Shankar Netralaya in Chennai, India, which is one of the best ophthalmologic centres in India, to treat more persons afflicted with diseases of the eye.The MBA Program of UCLA Anderson is one of the best of its kind in the world. The faculty is constantly engaged in research and their findings are conveyed to the stud ents. In addition to this, analyses of relevant international event are commonplace in this program. Moreover, the mandatory twenty weeks long Applied Management Research project, which every student has to complete, is with respect to some real business situation.Thus the alumni of this institution are truly bestowed with the latest theoretical and practical knowledge (MBA PROGRAM). I would like to become a part of this great management movement and my accomplishments, courage, positive attitude, optimism, perseverance and experience of life should ensure that I render complete justice to this superlative course in management.

Network Design Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Network Design - Essay Example floods etc. Furthermore, the distance between the two buildings is 120 meters that is manageable for connecting the sites physically. However, in case of configuring a wireless network, IEEE-802.11g Compliant will be recommended for covering the distance of 250 meters. Figure 1.1 demonstrates the current architecture and Figure 1.2 illustrates the network architecture for Tyrell Corporation Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 2 Addressing Deployment Approach for Departments Star topology is recommended for the wired local area network. It is the most widely adopted topology. The star topology supports the centralized provision of network resources and services. The support staff can manage the network administrative and troubleshooting tasks centrally. Star topology helps to implement centralized security architecture for improved and enhanced security of the network. The network implementation cost can be saved by provisioning the core systems located centrally. The security controls and backup s ystems are also located centrally for better troubleshooting and management. For deploying the local network for Tyrell Corporation, CAT 5 cable is the best option. It supports both voice and data transmission. CAT-5 is in the form of twisted pairs. This cable consists of 4 copper wire pairs, connecting the network node with RJ 45 connectors.CAT-5 supports up to 100 to 1000 MHz speeds in a ‘full duplex’ mode (Category 5 Cable. 2007). The Tyrell Corporation enterprise network will corresponds to request related to internet applications, online transactions, requests by sale contractors, file transfer protocol and Emails. CAT 5 can support these features with ease. However, CAT 5 cable can support up to 300 feet equal to 100 meters in distance. A requirement of the switch is mandatory for every 300 feet. Data switches perform packet distribution tasks within the local area network. Acting as a core backbone, Tyrell Corporation network requires fast Ethernet switches to su pport the internet and external communication. The Cisco Catalyst 3750 v2 series switch is recommended to cater the requirements for the current scenario as well as for the future. The deployment of switches will be carried out by disconnecting one department at a time on a non-working day, as the installation will be conducted by the vendors or the staff available at Tyrell Corporation. From each of these available departments, human resource department will be the first one to be replaced with the new switch supporting VLAN and addressing security issues. The next department will be the technology department itself for enabling compatibility with the human resource department switch, as proper configuration and testing is required. Each department follows the similar approach with finance department to be the last one. Cisco Catalyst 3750 is the OSI layer 3 stackable switch, supporting the energy efficiency factor. Stackable means that more switches can be added to the current swi tch configuration for providing more network nodes. This switch supports the Cisco Energy Wise technology, which assist in the provision of power management of the big switch network. At the same time, the Cisco energy wise technology reduces the cost and carbon foot prints. The latest invention to the energy wise technology is the ‘Cisco Energy Wise’ Orchestrator which is a dedicated turnkey power management solution

EnronBlack GoldP2P Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

EnronBlack GoldP2P - Essay Example This is a documentary film that is based on the book "The Smartest Guys in the Room". Basically, it dramatizes the rise and fall of Enron. It is quite entertaining due to smart use of storytelling devices, imagery and soundtrack. In fact, it is amazing to look on leading role played by banks, financial media, accounting firms and government. The film Enron is weak on clearing up how the company brought up its image from a simple gas pipeline business to a post-modern corporate megalith. One of the most important things regarding the film's strength is in its representation of the massive group thinking within and outside of the corporation that helped enormously to support the rise in Enron's. The film, explains how the earning loads of money by exploiting commodities trading and accounting methods at the same time how it is losing plenty of money in real world undertakings. In fact the film portraits beautifully and makes it understandable even for a lay man how Enron set up its fir st commodities trading desk to take advantage of on inside knowledge of the gas business, and then tried to implement the same model with water, broadband, electricity, etc. In reality as a trading firm, Enron avoided investment firm policy by portraying itself as an industrial firm. The films dramatization of Enron's role and the political manipulations behind the California energy-crisis is well portrayed.In fact through the film there is great deal of emphasis given on the fact that this can happen again. It has happened before for instance in the cases of leveraged buyouts, the Savings and Loan crisis, the burst Internet IPO bubble, the 1920s Stock Market crash etc and it can happen again in future. It can be said that Enron, the film, is a lesson on how one corporation recently stole from investors, employees and its "customers" (Independent Lens). Additionally, as an investigation of corruption in corporate sector the film gives a sensible look at the culture and the intrinsic problems within the companies. The movie provides a few mechanisms such as the vitality curve and the Milgram experiment. This is especially for attractive an immensely immoral and profit-driven corporate culture. In fact the vitality curve represents the idea of invariable contest in the work place. To be more specific the individuals are ambitious to compete with each other because wherever possible the employees who are not performing will be thrown out of the company at any moment. In the film it is clearly shown how Enron constantly hired new staff just because of the reason that even with high profits it was firing people for production of less than 1000 times what they were being paid. Therefore the environment was such that it caused people to not only ignore the law, but also to take action competitively in breaking the law. This film clearly shows that how the top officials of the company and the government play a role in bringing in an energy crisis in the state of California. In the film it is shown that the Enron employees makes plan for the transfer of electricity from the state of California into nodes in other states where there was a surplus and was not required at all. California had signed legislation allowing for a free market in energy and as an answer to this, Enron shaped a demand by causing blackouts across the state. As soon as this happened the price of electricity increased drastically, and Enron made billions and billons of dollars in profits to ship back the energy they took out of California back into California. Breaking laws and doing illegal acts were encouraged in Enron. With a goal derived from the hunt of profit, Enron employees were always asked to break laws or perform acts that could be considered immoral. In fact it was seen that none of the Enron employees ever came forward to report the corruption. The factor that unavoidably led to people coming forward was a "sinking ship" feeling, resulting in some of the Enron executives

See requirements Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

See requirements - Essay Example llying with his wife lovingly during their separation on raising a son just like his father who wanted to get rid of the suitors who harassed his life and mothers life and wifes life, Odysseus has lead the life of a Greek warrior who believed that fighting wars is just a manner of appreciating the powers given to man by the gods and a way of showing himself that he lead the life of a decent man who showed perfect control of his lifes wisdom of existence and mentality, although the gods did not appreciate his believing that he had won the wards because he was fit to and not because he was backed up by the gods. The adventure is a way of saying to him that giving up in front of unjust gods would lead humanity to suffering. This is the case that portrayed the adventures he went through to his home from Troy. He lived and was alone for the rest of the journey since he left the oceans which killed his friends and warriors at sea by sea monsters, Odysseus grows to appreciate his life more throughout the journey as he knows that his wife and son are awaiting him, which is a way of believing in the reason to exist and appreciate ones own intellectual powers to face his own fate even if it means standing up in front of gods who do not appreciate mans believing in himself and his own freely willed powers of himself which are given to him by them and that they had nothing to do with his victories. Odysseus proves throughout the journey that madness is not in going to hell to ask for directions to find his way homewards with a sacrificial goat for the dead but in not taking such a step to free men who had nothing to do with the fate he had been put in but because of a personal opinion he has given which has put him in the fate and put others fates in his hands. He was given the position of a god deciding in front and against gods of what hed do with his wisdom to free or kill his companions and end his treasured memory of life with his wife and child before going to war wh ich

The Voluntary Service of Citizens in the Armed Forces Essay

The Voluntary Service of Citizens in the Armed Forces - Essay Example Many nations, including the United States, although reliant on voluntary service still do reserve the right to impose a draft. The debate on whether a draft should, at some time, be reinstated is often a discussion drawn between positive (â€Å"what is†) and normative (â€Å"what ought to be†) considerations: the distinction between whether it is economically feasible, objectively necessary, or ultimately practical and whether it is morally justifiable, philosophically contradictory (for a country committed to freedom like the United States), or politically oppressive. To make the argument for or against the draft, a discussant must address both aspects of the issue. Put in this context, the practice of conscription is at once positively and normatively unjustifiable: not only does it create an inferior fighting force, making it ineffective at accomplishing its goals, but it is a severe violation of the individual’s freedom that a government exists to protect. On the normative side, the military draft (or conscription) is a defining feature of totalitarian regimes, having been imposed by and large in the totalitarian countries and their dictators throughout history. Napoleon and Bismarck serve as two examples of despots willing to sacrifice individuals for the state. Having been instituted by these aggressive leaders and countries, the military draft carries with it aggressive force. By â€Å"aggressive force†, one means the force applied to countries other than one’s own, and not in self-defense. It is doubtful, after all, that in the event of a large-scale invasion of a country, that the country will have to force its citizens to fight to save their own lives unless of course it is ruled by a dictatorial regime unworthy of its citizens’ defense. One cannot consistently hold that individuals have rights to self-determination and individual liberties and yet that the state has the right to make them null and void.  

Influence of Globalization on Organizational Network Structures Essay

Influence of Globalization on Organizational Network Structures - Essay Example Globalization can be identified as the increased â€Å"mobility of goods, sources of labor, technology and capital† on a worldwide prospect. Considering the impact of globalization on the organizational factors, it can be studied that several new possibilities and opportunities are opening as a result of globalization. Newer ways are cropping up with respect to delivery of different functions. There is an increase in the number of options available to a company and hence greater number of decisions to be taken. Moreover such decisions have to be communicated to all divisions and all levels within an organization. This undoubtedly increases the complexity of an organizational network structure as well. However corporate globalization increases the number of opportunities for an organization; but at the same time it sets up more numbers of interdependencies between a variety of organizations. Learning from a World Class Company: IBM (International Business Machines Corporation): The IBM is â€Å"one of the largest providers of information technology and services†. The primary missions of the company include becoming the leader in creating, developing, and manufacturing superior information technologies and transforming those skills and expertise into â€Å"value† for its customers. Computer systems that include â€Å"software, networking systems, storage devices and microelectronics† are designed, developed and manufactured by IBM. The operations of the company are spread across the world providing work opportunities for more than 200,000 people. The headquarters of the company is in Armonk, New York (Tung, 2001, p.40). A brief history of the company: IBM was first initiated in New York in the year 1911. However the company’s history dated back to 1890s when mass immigrants were entering the United States and an efficient system was required to measure the level of population. Initially although the company had been operating only in New York, but within a short duration of time, its operations expanded worldwide. Under the management of Thomas J. Watson the company’s products and services were even more expanded. â€Å"IBM refers to the decades between 1939 and 1963 as the ‘Era of Innovation’†. The product line of the company appreciably enhanced during this period of time. The company moved towards the advancement of computers during the period of the Second World War (Tung, 2001, pp.40-41). Gradually over the years, the company developed several new products that included â€Å"automatic-sequence-controlled calculator†, â€Å"IBM 701† which was the first large computer manufactured with vacuum tube, â€Å"system/360 computer†, and so on. In the year 1969, the company brought in modifications in its product selling and started selling individual components instead of hardware or software devices. IBM had also introduced â€Å"personal computers for small bus inesses, schools and homes†. The company initiated an establishment for network computing and several facilities of such computers. In the year 1993, Louis V. Gerstner joined the company as the CEO and he highlighted the necessity to

FEMELE EFFIGY IN THE PRESS AND TV ADVERTISEMENT AS THE SOURCE OF Essay

FEMELE EFFIGY IN THE PRESS AND TV ADVERTISEMENT AS THE SOURCE OF STERETYPICAL IMAGE - Essay Example In presenting women in this way, in both the press as serious representation and in advertising as everyday representation, the media serves to reinforce and reintroduce concepts of the female gender as something less than or less capable than men. To prove this concept, the present study will investigate images of the female in news media as press and in advertising as representations of the everyday to determine whether this concept of female effigy in the media remains true today. To accomplish this, the study will look at a number of media theories regarding how images seen on television and in advertising reinforce and introduce social ideals and investigate several case studies in which gender messages can be discerned. Philosophies will be presented in a literature review segment while case studies will be presented individually. As this study will demonstrate, the media has made some strides toward more positive representation, but there remains a great deal to be done before women are actually portrayed as equal by the mainstream structures of news media and advertising. The subject for the present study was suggested by an interest in discovering more about how the media functions as a tool of reinforcement of ‘traditional’ concepts regarding women. Although the modern world has obviously moved beyond the concepts of the woman as relegated to the home and family alone, these ideas continue to persist. Thus, the purpose of the study was to determine if these persistent antiquated ideas of woman’s ‘rightful’ place were being reinforced through media channels so that I, as a future member of the media, can work to counteract these concepts if necessary. However, in looking to the media to discover the ways in which the female might be shaped and defined by the messages sent, the scope needed to be narrowed to a more manageable size. This

The Dominican Republic and Haiti Conflict Essay

The Dominican Republic and Haiti Conflict - Essay Example This is a real life incident. It is the difference people see in two countries and the unnecessary disputes occurring due to it, that has made me identify Betty's story with this novel. Betty from America and Moody from Iran are married for a long time. They are settled in the US and they have a very young daughter, Mahtob. For some reason, Moody starts missing his family. He convinces his wife to go to Tehran to visit his family. Betty is familiar with the violence going on in Iran and she hesitates. Finally realizing her husband's desire to visit his family, she yields and makes him swear on the Koran to return in two weeks' time. Thus they set out happily to Iran. Betty only receives an unwelcoming welcome from Moody's family. The moment she sets her foot in Iran she is demanded to adapt to an Iranian style of dressing. She is asked to wear the black veil and for accidentally exposing her hair on the forehead she nearly gets arrested. The days of long suffering begin for Betty. She finds the ways and means of Moody's family rather unpleasant. She realizes that they are unhappy about Moody being Americanized. Her husband's family turns out to be fanatically devout Muslims. The only thing that kept her moving was the thought of getting back to the US in the scheduled time. Towards the end of Towards the end of the planned vacation, Moody declares that they are not going back. He explains he got fired from his job for being a Muslim. Since it is hard to find a job again in the US, he plans to find one in Iran itself. Betty is alarmed. She tries to convince him to go back to Iran and that she does not want Mahtob to grow up in Iran. They end up in an argument. He beats her up and takes custody of her money, credit card and identity card and prisons her in her sister-in-law's house. Betty tries to get the help of her mother and gets information about an embassy contract. Under suspicion, Moody cuts all the telephone connections. Somehow, she sneaks out of the house to the Swiss Embassy to find methods to leave home. There she learns that getting married to Moody has made her an Iranian citizen. The only way to get back to the US is to be done with his permission. Getting a divorce helps, but only Betty shall be allowed to leave and Moody will get the custody of the kid. Moody's suspicion grow day by day. Betty is put under the scrutiny of his unsympathetic relatives all the time. When her plans to run away seem a distant dream she starts to play the role of an obedient devout Muslim wife. She attends Koran classes, learns to speak Iranian language. They celebrate Mahtob's birthday. When it is time for her to start school, Mahtob is enrolled in a Muslim school. Betty is given the opportunity to accompany her daughter to school. At her Koran classes she finds an American woman and befriends her. With her help Betty tries to mail a letter. But she ends up beaten by her husband for helping Betty secretly. The contact ends there. Moody slowly loosens the grip. He trusts her to visit the market. There she finds a man who is a part of the underground network that helps American women who are held hostages by husbands, to leave to their nation. The various processes go on. Meanwhile Betty's father falls sick and when she demands to visit him, Moody arranges a ticket for her. However, Mahtob is not allowed to go with her. He also demands her to

UNDERSTANDING INCLUSIVE LEARNING AND TEACHING IN LIFELONG LEARNING Essay

UNDERSTANDING INCLUSIVE LEARNING AND TEACHING IN LIFELONG LEARNING - Essay Example To counter overreliance on this slides and handouts, student involvement in discussions and feedbacks is handy. I also collect suggestions and answers and clarify any issues that are not well understood on the whiteboard. This enhances inclusion of all the students in my clothe design lesson. Much of the teaching time is spent on practical work. I try to encourage group work as part of teaching though there is some resistance faced. However, individual work is also important to balance and meet the learners need. All this I work them within the restriction of time at hand. The incorporation of modern technology also poses a challenge to some students. Most cognitive theorist such as Piaget, Ausubel among others were interested in the changes in the learner’s understanding that resulted from learning and the environmental importance in the process (Powell & Tummons 2011, p.49). Regardless of the variations in constructivism, it promotes free exploration of the students within a given structure of the framework. From the theories, have looked at the best way my students can benefit from learning. I plan my lessons with a demonstration and brainstorming activities. The materials and tools to be utilized are identified and availed for the lesson to help my lesson objectives be accomplished. I utilize practical activities whereby the students are divided into groups that assist them in explore the issue at hand, solve the problem, and use their techniques to answers questions as demonstrated. During the lesson, I facilitate to ensure that tasks are well understood, and learners fully participate. I have realized that each student is unique, and each has a particular need. Therefore, allowing the students discover the technique that is workable for them helps them achieve their goals. Through the groups, the students share their solution at the end of the lesson thus motivating them. They also demonstrate the various creative approaches to the

Psychological Factors of the Issue Essay Example for Free

Psychological Factors of the Issue Essay Psychological factors include motivation, perception, learning, beliefs and attitudes. These factors are largely unconscious and that a person cannot fully understand his own motivations. People decide based on what h perceives as dictated by his environment that serves as the stimulus and not necessarily that which is real. In marketing, perceptions are more important than reality. Characteristics of Adolescence Adolescence is often a period of stress and conflict, particularly in Western society. The adolescent confronts a host of new, varied and difficult problems of adjustment within a brief period of time. The adolescent attempts to acquire a sense of identity, a sense of who one is and where one is going. Every adolescent wants to be popular. They commonly think, †What can I do to have all the kids at school like me? † â€Å"What can I do to feel I belong to a group? † â€Å"How can I be popular with both girls and boys? † â€Å"What kinds of clothes will make me feel like I am one of them? † Sometimes adolescents go to great lengths to be popular. In some cases, parents go to even greater lengths to try to insulate their adolescents from the rejection and to increase the likelihood that they will be popular. Students show off because it gets attention and makes their peers laugh. Parents set up elaborate parties, buy clothes for their teens and drive adolescents and their friends all over in the hope that their sons and daughters will be popular (Santrock, John). Dr. Riesman in his study of the basic changes taking place in the American characters during the twentieth century (that is, from inner-directed to outer-directed) found that our growing pre-occupation with acts of consumption reflects the change. This pre-occupation, he noted, was particularly intense (and intensively encouraged by product makers). He characterized the children of America as ‘consumer trainees. ’ (Santrock, John). The adolescent confronts a host of new, varied and difficult problems of adjustment within a brief period of time. Physiological changes – rapid body growth, sexual maturity, increases in sex hormonesoften precipitate special conflicts and self-doubts. Almost simultaneously, the adolescent is expected to achieve independence from the family, establish satisfying relationships with peers of both sexes, decide on – and prepare for – a set of consistent moral principles to guide decisions and actions. Fashion, therefore, lures the adolescents to try something new and not get stuck with the traditional ways of dressing and doing things. Back then in the 60s, the clothes that the â€Å"old school† hip hop artists donned were expressions of individuality but they even carried a purpose which was a functional one. The Puma branded sneakers that sported fat-laces and sweatsuits were all the rave back then. The colorful clothing which also had resemblance to the beautiful graffitis on the walls were also very popular back then. The dress-code of being loose and comfortable became a style of dressing which identified all those people as exceptional and unpretentious. Because the people in the ghettos had limited resources, they made the most out of what they had. The style and the fashion sense that they sported spoke of a willingness to create a style of their own despite several constraints (Wikipedia 2004). In the hip-hop culture today, fashion has undoubtedly become more stylish, more pronounced and more accessible in this day and age. It has indeed come a long way in the past twenty or so years. Ever since its inception, it has been proven to be a driving force in the fashion scene. From its modest beginnings in the â€Å"ghettos† of the African-American suburbs of New York, the hip hop fashion has transcended race, culture, gender as well as international borders as you will now see different ethnicities and races who have adopted their own hip hop style. The one thing that will immediately identify a person if he listens to hip hop or not is by the way they dress and what they put on themselves. Today, the hip hop clothing and apparel industry grosses over a billion dollars but despite its popularity among people who have the money to spend for the type of look they are sporting, it is still accessible by even the youngest boy in hopes of making it big in the future as an advocate of the hip hop music and fashion (Wikipedia 2004)

Analysis of the Term Victorian Through Literature

Analysis of the Term Victorian Through Literature The era of Queen Victorias reign witnessed the passing of milestones in social, economic, and personal progress. It was the age of industrialisation, a time of travel, a battleground for the conflict between science and religion. Yet further to these great markers by which many of us recognise the nineteenth century, and indeed because of them, Victorias reign inspired change within the individual; a revaluation of what it meant to be a human being. The literary artists gave new form to the questions on the lips of the society around them: questions that were no longer so easily answered by Christianity. This dissertation will explore how the term Victorian does or doesnt fit into the context from which it supposedly arises. I will look at trends such as the development of literary criticism, pioneering scientific discoveries, the exploration into psychic phenomenon, the increasing independence of women, the mapping of the world, all of which contribute to what we know and understand as Victorian, and have in some way shaped the work of authors such as Eliot, Conan Doyle, and H.G Wells. Using some close textual analysis I hope to identify the nature of the inspiration behind the literature of the time and whether or not such work transcends the limits of the term Victorian. Many great literary minds of the time such as Arnold, Dickens, and Ruskin helped define the era in their critical attitudes towards it. (Davis 2002, p.10). Criticism appears to have become a form of exploration in an attempt to turn what concerned and worried the artist into something that questioned and reassured. Arnold, in his dissertations in Criticism (Arnold 1865, p.V) explains how he perceives the difference between logical and artistic thought The truth is I have never been able to ht it off happily with the logicians, and it would be mere affectation in me to give myself the airs of doing so. They imagine truth something to be proved, I something to be seen; they something to be manufactured, I as something to be found. It is this growing awareness of difference that was to become a defining feature of Victorian literature. Differences appeared in the very perception of things, which led to feelings of isolation, despair, alienation all prominent themes in nineteenth century work. In Arnolds A Summer Night (http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/A/ArnoldMatthew/verse/EmpedoclesonEtna/summernight.html) we see the poetic mind struggling to find meaning on a moonlit street where the windows, like hostile faces, are silent and white, unopening down: And the calm moonlight seems to say Hast thou then still the old unquiet breast That neither deadens into rest Nor ever feels the fiery glow That whirls the spirit front itself away, 30 But fluctuates to and fro Never by passion quite possessd And never quite benumbd by the worlds sway? And I, I know not if to pray Still to be what I am, or yield, and be Like all the other men I see. Arnold recognises that the society around him is unfulfilled, that men are giving their lives to some unmeaning taskwork and he questions whether he should be questioning at all. He is aware of a gap between the reality of working life and life outside of work; a difference that he strives to find explanation for. Arnold appears to be lost amidst the streets of his own mind afraid of not being able to define who he is, what he is. These feelings in part express what it meant to be a Victorian struggling to place thoughts and feelings which appear to no longer fit into society. The Victorian era contained much of what had past and much of what was still to come it cannot be seen as an isolated time, nor as an isolated term. It contained aspects of the Romantic period for instance in Arnolds poem, The Buried Life, we see vestiges of Wordsworths legacy of Ode to Immortality. In both poems there is a sense of something lost an old passion or instinct that has gone with the passing of time yet Arnold, unlike Wordsworth, finds it more difficult to come to terms with this: A longing to inquire / Into the mystery of this heart that beats / So wild, so deep in us, to know / Whence our thoughts come and where they go. (http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Arnold_M/Buried.htm). The language is more passionately discontent than the resolute tone of Wordsworths visionary acceptance: We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains behind. (Wordsworth 1928, p.136). The styles are obviously connected, but the trouble with defining the era using literary terminology is that it is clearly neither a quirky extension of the Romantics vision, nor is it a straightforward path to the modernists. The 1870s saw the maturation of authors such as Anthony Trollope who brought out his later novels, yet only twenty years later in 1896 these publications are sitting beside the considerably different form and subject matter of work such as H.G. Wellls The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau, with literary experiments with the modern such as Richard Jefferies The Story of My Heart (a spiritual autobiography) -occurring between in 1883. A growing concern in nineteenth century life was the potential loss of the Romantic link between human nature and the natural world, and the gap which sudden industrial progress highlighted between nature and mechanisation. As technology developed so did the notion of artificiality. It is worth noting J.S.Mills dissertation on Nature (Mill 1874, p.65) where he says that it is mans nature to be artificial, to remedy nature by artificial pruning and intervention. Further to this, a contemporary of Mills Richard Jennings also drew a line between the province of human nature and the external world. (Lightman 1997, p.80). In the countryside more efficient methods of farming were employed (see the contrast between Henchards methods and Farfraes ciphering and mensuration in Hardys Mayor of Casterbridge, (Hardy 1886, p.122)), and new machines introduced which no longer required the labour force to run them, encouraging people to migrate to towns and cities. The urban reality was harsh in 1851 roughly four million people were employed in trade and manufacture and mining, leaving only one and a half million in agriculture. (Davis 2002, p.13). City life, as portrayed by Dickens, was a cruel, unhealthy and unwholesome existence for many. Working conditions in cities were often cramped, unhygienic and poorly ventilated, and living conditions could be even worse. Mrs. Gaskell, living in Manchester, witnessed the appalling pressures that these conditions forced upon family life, and in North and South depicts the difficulties of urban living, offering that salvation for the working classes lay with themselves and their employers, working together. However, city life was not all desolate based in cities, the development of the detective novel brought the city back to human scale (Lehan, p.84). Detectives pieced together and reconstructed past events through clues for example, the murder of Bartholomew Sholto in The Sign of Four by Conan Doyl e: As far as we can learn, no actual traces of violence were found upon Mr Sholtos person, but a valuable collection of Indian gems which the deceased gentleman had inherited from his father had been carried off. The discovery was first made by Mr Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson () Mr. Athelney Jones, the well-known member of the detective police force, happened to be at the Norwood police station () Mr Jones well-known technical knowledge and his powers of minute observation have enabled him to prove conclusively that the miscreants could not have entered by the door or by the window but must have made their way across the roof of the building, and so through a trapdoor into a room which communicated with that in which the body was found. (p.66) The city provided an exciting backdrop to crime scenes its labyrinthine streets similar to the mapping of the pathways of the human mind so that the two became inextricably linked. As Joseph McLaughlin says in Writing the Urban Jungle, the urban jungle is a space that calls forth a pleasurable acquiescence to something greater, more powerful, and, indeed, sublime () also an imaginative domain that calls forth heroic action: exploring, conquering, enlightening, purifying, taming, besting. (McLaughlin 2000, p.3). Further to what McLaughlin suggests, the Victorians perception of time and space in the city and the countryside was changing radically from the medieval perceptions that still existed in the Romantic period. People saw the finished products in both manufacturing and farming no longer involving the long, drawn-out means to an end, instead the end result was being achieved faster and with more control. Here developed the root of modern industry which continues today in intensive farming and factory lines. Yet here too the beginnings of waste and excess. Richard Jefferies, a nineteenth century naturalist and mystic, known for his dissertations on nature, remarks on the abundance of food in the natural world in his dissertation Meadow Thoughts: The surface of the earth offers to us far more than we can consume the grains, the seeds, the fruits, the animals, the abounding products are beyond the power of all the human race to devour. They can, too, be multiplied a thousandfold. There is no natural lack. Whenever there is lack among us it is from artificial causes, which intelligence should remove. (Jefferies 1994, p.26). Unfortunately there was plenty for those who could afford it but not enough to spare for the poorer lower classes. (Ritvo 1997, p.194). Trends of over production and wastage which became a worry in Victorian times are reflected in the literary concerns of Jefferies childrens story, Bevis, where words, despite their abundance, are in danger of becoming an insufficient medium of expression and not filling the metaphysical space on the page. In describing a sunrise and the thoughts and feelings associated with watching it, Jefferies struggles to articulate the beauty before him: The sun had not yet stood out from the orient, but his precedent light shone through the translucent blue. Yet it was not blue, nor is there any word, nor is a word possible to convey the feeling. (Jefferies 1881, p.391) We see too in James Thomsons City of Dreadful Night (Thomson 1892, p.2) the desperateness of trying to articulate thoughts and feelings: Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles, False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth; Because it gives some sense of power and passion In helpless impotence to try to fashion Our woe in living words howeer uncouth. In both passages there is a sense of trying to convey so much more than the words will allow. And that is the essence of the problem of defining the era with a word which the era itself selected Victorian like the authors of its time struggles to convey the enormity and the condensed nature of its changing environment. Victorian literature is thus perhaps best studied between the lines of its texts rather than for what it offers at face value. Thomsons words to try to fashion our woe in living words although appearing dismal could actually withhold a more positive message: it deals with the notion of perseverance that by creating words, however difficult, the author is refusing to give in to despair by trying to transform it into creative energy. There is a sense of crisis in the work of Thomson, just as there is to be found in Jefferies futuristic After London where the lone explorer Felix discovers the land after humanity has overreached itself to sociological disaster and has lost the harmonious relationship between mankind and nature. London becomes no more than a crystallised ruin in a ground oozing with poison unctuous and slimy, like a thick oil. (Jefferies 1885, p.205). Through work like this we see that Victorian was an era of possibility where visions of the future suddenly became tangible concerns and possible realities, and where contemporary conceptions of language and life might no longer hold up to the pressures of the time. In H.G. Wells the Time Machine, the time traveller discovers a land in the year 802,701: The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi; everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither. The ideal of preventative medicine was attained. diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay. And i shall have to tell you later that even the processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly affected by these changes. (Wells 1995, p.28) In this description of a futuristic age the Victorian imagination still retains the idea of a paradise a place full of butterflies and flowers. This Christian concept is a literary hangover from Miltons Paradise Lost, and remains an important theme for the moderns such as D.H. Lawrence. The Victorian age suffered from a dualistic split between a bright future on the one hand promised by leaps in technology, education and economical success and an increasingly alienated, confused society on the other. There were those writers like Huxley who believed that by human intervention within a political and economic framework humans could evolve out of their condition seeing no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will () may modify the conditions of existence (Huxley, 1893, Evolution and Ethics, The Romanes Lecture (http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE9/E-E.html), and there were those like Hardy whose characters were destined to fail because they were not emotionally fitted into the cosmos out of which they evolved . It was the nineteenth century spiritual crisis which precipitated the literary shift into the new genre of the realist novel. By the mid-nineteenth century, society had begun to grow away from the idea of atonement for sin within an omnipotent religion, where judgement would come solely in heaven, and towards the more humanistic idea of God as in-dwelling, so that salvation could be achieved on earth: We have now come to regard the world not as a machine, but as an organism, a system in which, while the parts contribute to the growth of the whole, the whole also reacts upon the development of the parts; and whose primary purpose is its own perfection, something that is contained within and not outside itself, an internal end: while in their turn the myriad parts of this universal organism are also lesser organisms, ends in and for themselves, pursuing each its lonely ideal of individual completeness. (Gore (ed) 1890, p.211) A spiritual lack created a need to define, order and categorise a world that suddenly appeared chaotic. When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 he raised issues of public concern as to the truth of the bible and the essence of Christianity. However, its content and its methodology were seriously criticised (Appleman 2001, p.200). It was a difficult work to accept as it caused the public to rethink and redefine their history that they were a product of evolution and not a tailor made being came as a shock. The future of thought and literature was suddenly changed as people tried to sew together the threads of the past. Natural Science became a national obsession exotic flora and fauna from across the world were brought into London daily, to be displayed in the British Museum or Kew Gardens (Lightman, 1997 p.1). In literature, we see the author begin to play the part of evolutionist: Eliots Middlemarch although concerned with the evolving character of Dorothea Brooke follows the threads of sub-plots and the successes and failures of other characters which form a pattern of development. As Gillian Beer says: There is not one primitive tissue, just as there is not one key to all mythologies () emphasis upon plurality, rather than upon singleness, is crucial to the developing argument of Middlemarch. (Beer 2000, p.143). Gone is the tradition of the valiant hero or heroine singularly conquering their environment (a trend set by classics such as Homers The Odyssey (1967)) and in its place a landscape upon which the author grafts and nurtures developing shoots of life. It is this sort of growth that is in danger of remaining unseen to the contemporary historian or critic as it can become shrouded by generalising concepts which are so often prescribed to the term Victorian concepts such as repression, old-fashioned and prudish. (http://www.victorianweb.org/vn/victor4.html). These sort of terms restrict the individuals perception of the era when it was a time when growth was encouraged rather than restricted. Authors used the metaphor of pruning and nurturing plant life to symbolise the development of the self for example in North and South Gaskell discusses the problem of the working individual who struggles to reach his or her potential when the manufacturers are unsparingly cutting away all off-shoots in the direction of literature or high mental cultivation, in hopes of throwing the whole strength and vigour of the plant into commerce. (Gaskell 1865, p.69). For Gaskell, it is through the everyday interaction between people that such difficulties are given the chance to be overcome. And this was the essence of the realist novel set amidst a world which had witnessed such alteration to transform the lostness felt by society into a seeing of the smaller things in life which could withhold qualities of greater spiritual value. As Philip Davis says, the realist novel was the holding ground, the meeting point, for the overlapping of common life. (Davis 2002, p.144). And it was within this common life that a more calm acceptance of the new state could be achieved. Gillian Beer suggests that through her novels organisation Eliot creates order and understanding of the evolving process of novel-writing. In Middlemarch, the naming of Casaubons books Waiting for Death, Two Temptations, Three Love Problems draws attention to the books organisation by emphasising categorisation: But the process of reading leads into divergence and variability. Even while we are observing how closely human beings conform in the taxonomy of events we learn how differently they feel and think. For Dorothea and Casaubon waiting for death means something very different from what it means for Mary Garth and Featherstone. The relations are different. The distances between people are different. Lydgate, here at one with the project of the book, longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of living structure (1:15:225). In this double emphasis on conformity and variability George Eliot intensifies older literary organisations by means of recent scientific theory. In Darwinian theory, variability is the creative principle, but the type makes it possible for us to track common ancestry and common kinship. (Beer 2000, pp.143-4) Writing itself was becoming an almost divine representation, an inner order of a chaotic external world. The idea that humans had evolved from primates meant that the boundaries between what was one thing and what was another were no longer so clearly defined. There developed a fear of the animate and a fear of the inanimate, and efforts were sought to understand them. As Harriet Ritvo says in The Platypus and the Mermaid: Depending on the beholder, an anomaly might be viewed as embodying a challenge to the established order, whether social, natural, or divine; the containment of that challenge; the incomprehensibility of the creation by human intelligence; or simply the endless and diverting variety of the world. And beholders who agreed on the content of the representation could still disagree strongly about its moral valence whether it was good or bad, entrancing or disgusting. (Ritvo 1997, p.148). In a world where categorisation was important but not so easily achievable, the novel too became neither one thing nor another; realism became a melting pot for ideas, a sort of hybrid of styles. In Eliots The Lifted Veil realism is used as a vehicle for the exploration of her ideas into psychology and psychic phenomena. Latimers clairvoyance forces him to endure a painful insight into the minds of the people around him: I began to be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from the languid and slight nature of my intercourse with others since my illness, I had not been alive before. This was the obtrusion on my mind of the mental process going forward in first one person, and then another, with whom I happened to be in contact: the vagrant, frivolous ideas and emotions of some uninteresting acquaintanceMrs Filmore, for examplewould force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned insect. But this superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enough when it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, became an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a close relation to me when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.(Eliot 1859, pp.13-14) Latimer is no longer caught up in the web of peoples characters. Eliot plays with the idea that his consciousness has the ability to transcend the mundane the rational talk, the kindly deeds in order to gain insight into an alternative and not so rosy vision of the mechanics of the human mind where thoughts are make-shift and chaotic. The nineteenth century saw the acceptance of the concept of otherworldly phenomena into the working classes. Robert Owen, a social reformer, who influenced the British Labor movement (Oppenheim 1985, p.40) encouraged many working class Owenites to follow him into the spiritualist fold, where they enthusiastically continued their ongoing search for the new moral world. Interests such as spiritualism and psychology which had previously been more underground pursuits, were brought out into the open. The concept of telepathy, a term coined by Frederic Myers in 1882 (Luckhurst 2002, p.1) even helped to theorize the uneasy cross-cultural encounters at the colonial frontier. (Luckhurst 2002, p.3) These developments suggest that the Victorians felt imbued with the power of their age they felt confident of their ability to communicate on different planes of consciousness. So it could be argued that Victorian was not simply a time devoted to the discovery of the self and the workings of the inner mind, but a time that also focused on the projection of ideas and thoughts outside of the self; ideas which themselves stand outside of the category Victorian. In 1869 the Spiritualist Newspaper began selling first as a fortnightly, then as a weekly publication. (Oppenheim 1985, p.45). This draws the discussion to the point of representation the social nature of Victorians seems to suggest that they enjoyed the focus being on themselves. Self-obsession is an aspect of the time which the term Victorian usefully represents: by specifically referring to the rule of the Queen the term draws attention to the importance of the individual. The era saw the development of many different styles of fashion and the use of photography. As part of the Freudian influence great importance was placed on childhood and it was during the nineteenth century that the first laws concerning child welfare were passed. (Mavor quoted from Brown (ed) 2001, p.i) The focus on the central, the ego, was paramount. As Mavor says, it was as if the camera had to be invented in order to document what would soon be lost, childhood itself; and childhood had to be invented in order for the camera to document childhood (a fantasy of innocence) as real. (Brown (ed) 2001, p.27). Perhaps because of societys awareness of change there seems to have been a necessity to record and keep track of the world around. Discovery took place on a much grander scale in the exploration of the world. The British Empire was global, yet as Patrick Brantlinger suggests in Rule of Darkness, (Brantlinger 1988, p.4) imperialism was not generally reflected in the literature of the time. What we do see evidence of however is the mapping of new worlds and territories (Richard Jefferies Bevis). The development of the adventure story suggests that Victorians desired to explore what lay outside of what they knew and in this respect the term Victorian which people can think of as representing a society closed within in itself is misleading. The rise of imperialism began to shape the ideological dimensions of subjects studied in school (Bristow 1991, p.20) and so through literature the Victorian child was offered an exciting world of sophisticated representation and ideas with the knowledge that the world was theirs to explore. Does the term then encourage us to think of the society as a class of people set apart from the rest of the world? In The Island of Dr. Moreau it is not just the future of science that is explored but the concept of a new territory and its effects on the mind. For example, when the protagonist first sees the beast-servant on board the ship he is immediately frightened: I did not know then that a reddish luminosity, at least, is not uncommon in human eyes. The figure, with its eyes of fire, struck down through all my adult thoughts and feelings, and for a moment the forgotten horrors of childhood came back to my mind. Then the effect passed as it had come. An uncouth black figure of a man, a figure of no particular import, hung over the taffrail, against the starlight. (Wells 1997, p.31). The circumstances of being at sea is disorientating and causes the imagination to play tricks so that the man is first one thing a figure with its eyes of fire and then suddenly becomes an uncouth black figure of a man. The effect is that the protagonist suddenly regresses to the forgotten horrors of childhood. This sudden fluctuation is important as it represents the fluidity of the era and how change and discovery on a global scale, although empowering, also caused instability within the individual. Therefore, when considering the age in the context of its name we can understand that the term was perhaps created out of both the desire to represent achievement but also out of a need to belong. This desire to belong which manifested itself during an age ruled by one woman placed great importance on the role of the female in society. It was a time when women began to travel and write without the necessity of using a pseudonym (see Cheryl McEwan on Kingsley in West Africa, (2000, p.73)). In books such as Hardys Tess of the DUrbervilles the idea of the fallen woman is tested when Tesss crucial lack of belief in herself causes her never to discover the paradise with Clare that might have been. The nineteenth century began to be more explicit concerning issues of gender: for example, the relationship between Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick (see McClintock 1995, pp.132-138) where Cullwick is photographed cross-dressed as a farm worker. A Victorian man however appears to have had more stigma attached to him and in this context the term is commonly associated with heroism and English valour (Ridley/Dawson 1994, p.110). There is less flexibility surrounding the notion of Victorian men -as if the term somehow threatened their masculinity. However, this did not seem to affect the male authors of the time. Lewis Carroll captured the public imagination through Alices Adventures in Wonderland, which although following the story of a little girl, depicts many male characters. (see Carroll 2000). In conclusion, the term Victorian although useful to refer to a specific time period in history, does however encourage us to make sweeping generalisations without investigating how diverse the era was. In terms of the subject matter of Victorian Literature there is no clear cut distinction between early, middle and late Victorian for example, Bulwer-Lytton attempts at the beginning of the century what Richard Jefferies does at the end the difference is in style and form. Within that time frame there was condensed an incredible diversity of styles, tastes and attitudes, yet the term suffers from being associated with prejudices and assumptions about Victorians. However, it is worth bearing in mind that prejudices were indeed a part of Victorian society. When the Victorians explored the rest of the world they made generalisations and assumptions based on what they found (eg: The Island of Dr. Moreau) where experience and the nature of what is discovered defines behaviour. As a critic in 1858 wrote we are living in an age of transition (quoted from Houghton 1957, p.1); therefore when considering the Victorian age we should remember that values and trends were evolving it was not a static time governed by repression or old fashioned values. From the research carried out for this dissertation it appears that through the gaining of knowledge, Victorians also realised how little they knew and how much more there was to discover. As Arnold says in A Summer Night: How fair a lot to fill / Is left to each man still. (http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/A/ArnoldMatthew/verse/EmpedoclesonEtna/summernight.html). In this context the term Victorian can be dualistically representative: discoveries of the time, although revolutionary, were often rudimentary in nature, and it was humbling for the individual to consider how much further knowledge and discovery had yet to go. On the other hand, the term suffers too from being inadequate: a single word is too smaller term for the vast wealth and diversity of discovery, and it could be argued that the era is better realised if seen as a second revolution. Like the Victorian authors themselves we are left with no suitable words to convey the entirety of an era as John Lawton says in his introduction to The Time Machine (1995, p.xxvi) the term Victorian is used too loosely to encompass a sequence of eras, the diverse reign of a woman who lent her name to objects as diverse as a railway terminus and a plum. When studying Victorian Literature it is worth bearing in mind the fluidity of the time and the changeability which arose out of living on the cusp between the passing away of old values and the unknown territory of the new. Realism recognised the gaps which were forming in society such as the distancing of the self from religion and offered to paper the cracks through its vision of bringing people together on a mundane level. Its territory stretched to include the darkest recesses of the mind to the smallest of everyday events, celebrating the grey area between extremes as we now know as Victorian. Bibliography Arnold, M., Reprint of 1865 ed. dissertations in Criticism With the addition of Two dissertations not hitherto reprinted. London: Routledge. Appleman, P, 2001, Darwin. London: Norton Beer, G., 2000, Darwins Plots. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Brantlinger, P, 1988, Rule of Darkness:British Literature and Imperialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Bristow, J., 1991, Empire Boys:Adventures in a Mans World. London: Harper Collins. Brown, M., 2001, (ed) Picturing Children. Aldershot: Ashgate Bulwer-Lytton, E., 1853, A Strange Story. Analysis of the Term Victorian Through Literature Analysis of the Term Victorian Through Literature The era of Queen Victorias reign witnessed the passing of milestones in social, economic, and personal progress. It was the age of industrialisation, a time of travel, a battleground for the conflict between science and religion. Yet further to these great markers by which many of us recognise the nineteenth century, and indeed because of them, Victorias reign inspired change within the individual; a revaluation of what it meant to be a human being. The literary artists gave new form to the questions on the lips of the society around them: questions that were no longer so easily answered by Christianity. This dissertation will explore how the term Victorian does or doesnt fit into the context from which it supposedly arises. I will look at trends such as the development of literary criticism, pioneering scientific discoveries, the exploration into psychic phenomenon, the increasing independence of women, the mapping of the world, all of which contribute to what we know and understand as Victorian, and have in some way shaped the work of authors such as Eliot, Conan Doyle, and H.G Wells. Using some close textual analysis I hope to identify the nature of the inspiration behind the literature of the time and whether or not such work transcends the limits of the term Victorian. Many great literary minds of the time such as Arnold, Dickens, and Ruskin helped define the era in their critical attitudes towards it. (Davis 2002, p.10). Criticism appears to have become a form of exploration in an attempt to turn what concerned and worried the artist into something that questioned and reassured. Arnold, in his dissertations in Criticism (Arnold 1865, p.V) explains how he perceives the difference between logical and artistic thought The truth is I have never been able to ht it off happily with the logicians, and it would be mere affectation in me to give myself the airs of doing so. They imagine truth something to be proved, I something to be seen; they something to be manufactured, I as something to be found. It is this growing awareness of difference that was to become a defining feature of Victorian literature. Differences appeared in the very perception of things, which led to feelings of isolation, despair, alienation all prominent themes in nineteenth century work. In Arnolds A Summer Night (http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/A/ArnoldMatthew/verse/EmpedoclesonEtna/summernight.html) we see the poetic mind struggling to find meaning on a moonlit street where the windows, like hostile faces, are silent and white, unopening down: And the calm moonlight seems to say Hast thou then still the old unquiet breast That neither deadens into rest Nor ever feels the fiery glow That whirls the spirit front itself away, 30 But fluctuates to and fro Never by passion quite possessd And never quite benumbd by the worlds sway? And I, I know not if to pray Still to be what I am, or yield, and be Like all the other men I see. Arnold recognises that the society around him is unfulfilled, that men are giving their lives to some unmeaning taskwork and he questions whether he should be questioning at all. He is aware of a gap between the reality of working life and life outside of work; a difference that he strives to find explanation for. Arnold appears to be lost amidst the streets of his own mind afraid of not being able to define who he is, what he is. These feelings in part express what it meant to be a Victorian struggling to place thoughts and feelings which appear to no longer fit into society. The Victorian era contained much of what had past and much of what was still to come it cannot be seen as an isolated time, nor as an isolated term. It contained aspects of the Romantic period for instance in Arnolds poem, The Buried Life, we see vestiges of Wordsworths legacy of Ode to Immortality. In both poems there is a sense of something lost an old passion or instinct that has gone with the passing of time yet Arnold, unlike Wordsworth, finds it more difficult to come to terms with this: A longing to inquire / Into the mystery of this heart that beats / So wild, so deep in us, to know / Whence our thoughts come and where they go. (http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Arnold_M/Buried.htm). The language is more passionately discontent than the resolute tone of Wordsworths visionary acceptance: We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains behind. (Wordsworth 1928, p.136). The styles are obviously connected, but the trouble with defining the era using literary terminology is that it is clearly neither a quirky extension of the Romantics vision, nor is it a straightforward path to the modernists. The 1870s saw the maturation of authors such as Anthony Trollope who brought out his later novels, yet only twenty years later in 1896 these publications are sitting beside the considerably different form and subject matter of work such as H.G. Wellls The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau, with literary experiments with the modern such as Richard Jefferies The Story of My Heart (a spiritual autobiography) -occurring between in 1883. A growing concern in nineteenth century life was the potential loss of the Romantic link between human nature and the natural world, and the gap which sudden industrial progress highlighted between nature and mechanisation. As technology developed so did the notion of artificiality. It is worth noting J.S.Mills dissertation on Nature (Mill 1874, p.65) where he says that it is mans nature to be artificial, to remedy nature by artificial pruning and intervention. Further to this, a contemporary of Mills Richard Jennings also drew a line between the province of human nature and the external world. (Lightman 1997, p.80). In the countryside more efficient methods of farming were employed (see the contrast between Henchards methods and Farfraes ciphering and mensuration in Hardys Mayor of Casterbridge, (Hardy 1886, p.122)), and new machines introduced which no longer required the labour force to run them, encouraging people to migrate to towns and cities. The urban reality was harsh in 1851 roughly four million people were employed in trade and manufacture and mining, leaving only one and a half million in agriculture. (Davis 2002, p.13). City life, as portrayed by Dickens, was a cruel, unhealthy and unwholesome existence for many. Working conditions in cities were often cramped, unhygienic and poorly ventilated, and living conditions could be even worse. Mrs. Gaskell, living in Manchester, witnessed the appalling pressures that these conditions forced upon family life, and in North and South depicts the difficulties of urban living, offering that salvation for the working classes lay with themselves and their employers, working together. However, city life was not all desolate based in cities, the development of the detective novel brought the city back to human scale (Lehan, p.84). Detectives pieced together and reconstructed past events through clues for example, the murder of Bartholomew Sholto in The Sign of Four by Conan Doyl e: As far as we can learn, no actual traces of violence were found upon Mr Sholtos person, but a valuable collection of Indian gems which the deceased gentleman had inherited from his father had been carried off. The discovery was first made by Mr Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson () Mr. Athelney Jones, the well-known member of the detective police force, happened to be at the Norwood police station () Mr Jones well-known technical knowledge and his powers of minute observation have enabled him to prove conclusively that the miscreants could not have entered by the door or by the window but must have made their way across the roof of the building, and so through a trapdoor into a room which communicated with that in which the body was found. (p.66) The city provided an exciting backdrop to crime scenes its labyrinthine streets similar to the mapping of the pathways of the human mind so that the two became inextricably linked. As Joseph McLaughlin says in Writing the Urban Jungle, the urban jungle is a space that calls forth a pleasurable acquiescence to something greater, more powerful, and, indeed, sublime () also an imaginative domain that calls forth heroic action: exploring, conquering, enlightening, purifying, taming, besting. (McLaughlin 2000, p.3). Further to what McLaughlin suggests, the Victorians perception of time and space in the city and the countryside was changing radically from the medieval perceptions that still existed in the Romantic period. People saw the finished products in both manufacturing and farming no longer involving the long, drawn-out means to an end, instead the end result was being achieved faster and with more control. Here developed the root of modern industry which continues today in intensive farming and factory lines. Yet here too the beginnings of waste and excess. Richard Jefferies, a nineteenth century naturalist and mystic, known for his dissertations on nature, remarks on the abundance of food in the natural world in his dissertation Meadow Thoughts: The surface of the earth offers to us far more than we can consume the grains, the seeds, the fruits, the animals, the abounding products are beyond the power of all the human race to devour. They can, too, be multiplied a thousandfold. There is no natural lack. Whenever there is lack among us it is from artificial causes, which intelligence should remove. (Jefferies 1994, p.26). Unfortunately there was plenty for those who could afford it but not enough to spare for the poorer lower classes. (Ritvo 1997, p.194). Trends of over production and wastage which became a worry in Victorian times are reflected in the literary concerns of Jefferies childrens story, Bevis, where words, despite their abundance, are in danger of becoming an insufficient medium of expression and not filling the metaphysical space on the page. In describing a sunrise and the thoughts and feelings associated with watching it, Jefferies struggles to articulate the beauty before him: The sun had not yet stood out from the orient, but his precedent light shone through the translucent blue. Yet it was not blue, nor is there any word, nor is a word possible to convey the feeling. (Jefferies 1881, p.391) We see too in James Thomsons City of Dreadful Night (Thomson 1892, p.2) the desperateness of trying to articulate thoughts and feelings: Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles, False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth; Because it gives some sense of power and passion In helpless impotence to try to fashion Our woe in living words howeer uncouth. In both passages there is a sense of trying to convey so much more than the words will allow. And that is the essence of the problem of defining the era with a word which the era itself selected Victorian like the authors of its time struggles to convey the enormity and the condensed nature of its changing environment. Victorian literature is thus perhaps best studied between the lines of its texts rather than for what it offers at face value. Thomsons words to try to fashion our woe in living words although appearing dismal could actually withhold a more positive message: it deals with the notion of perseverance that by creating words, however difficult, the author is refusing to give in to despair by trying to transform it into creative energy. There is a sense of crisis in the work of Thomson, just as there is to be found in Jefferies futuristic After London where the lone explorer Felix discovers the land after humanity has overreached itself to sociological disaster and has lost the harmonious relationship between mankind and nature. London becomes no more than a crystallised ruin in a ground oozing with poison unctuous and slimy, like a thick oil. (Jefferies 1885, p.205). Through work like this we see that Victorian was an era of possibility where visions of the future suddenly became tangible concerns and possible realities, and where contemporary conceptions of language and life might no longer hold up to the pressures of the time. In H.G. Wells the Time Machine, the time traveller discovers a land in the year 802,701: The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi; everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither. The ideal of preventative medicine was attained. diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay. And i shall have to tell you later that even the processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly affected by these changes. (Wells 1995, p.28) In this description of a futuristic age the Victorian imagination still retains the idea of a paradise a place full of butterflies and flowers. This Christian concept is a literary hangover from Miltons Paradise Lost, and remains an important theme for the moderns such as D.H. Lawrence. The Victorian age suffered from a dualistic split between a bright future on the one hand promised by leaps in technology, education and economical success and an increasingly alienated, confused society on the other. There were those writers like Huxley who believed that by human intervention within a political and economic framework humans could evolve out of their condition seeing no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will () may modify the conditions of existence (Huxley, 1893, Evolution and Ethics, The Romanes Lecture (http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE9/E-E.html), and there were those like Hardy whose characters were destined to fail because they were not emotionally fitted into the cosmos out of which they evolved . It was the nineteenth century spiritual crisis which precipitated the literary shift into the new genre of the realist novel. By the mid-nineteenth century, society had begun to grow away from the idea of atonement for sin within an omnipotent religion, where judgement would come solely in heaven, and towards the more humanistic idea of God as in-dwelling, so that salvation could be achieved on earth: We have now come to regard the world not as a machine, but as an organism, a system in which, while the parts contribute to the growth of the whole, the whole also reacts upon the development of the parts; and whose primary purpose is its own perfection, something that is contained within and not outside itself, an internal end: while in their turn the myriad parts of this universal organism are also lesser organisms, ends in and for themselves, pursuing each its lonely ideal of individual completeness. (Gore (ed) 1890, p.211) A spiritual lack created a need to define, order and categorise a world that suddenly appeared chaotic. When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 he raised issues of public concern as to the truth of the bible and the essence of Christianity. However, its content and its methodology were seriously criticised (Appleman 2001, p.200). It was a difficult work to accept as it caused the public to rethink and redefine their history that they were a product of evolution and not a tailor made being came as a shock. The future of thought and literature was suddenly changed as people tried to sew together the threads of the past. Natural Science became a national obsession exotic flora and fauna from across the world were brought into London daily, to be displayed in the British Museum or Kew Gardens (Lightman, 1997 p.1). In literature, we see the author begin to play the part of evolutionist: Eliots Middlemarch although concerned with the evolving character of Dorothea Brooke follows the threads of sub-plots and the successes and failures of other characters which form a pattern of development. As Gillian Beer says: There is not one primitive tissue, just as there is not one key to all mythologies () emphasis upon plurality, rather than upon singleness, is crucial to the developing argument of Middlemarch. (Beer 2000, p.143). Gone is the tradition of the valiant hero or heroine singularly conquering their environment (a trend set by classics such as Homers The Odyssey (1967)) and in its place a landscape upon which the author grafts and nurtures developing shoots of life. It is this sort of growth that is in danger of remaining unseen to the contemporary historian or critic as it can become shrouded by generalising concepts which are so often prescribed to the term Victorian concepts such as repression, old-fashioned and prudish. (http://www.victorianweb.org/vn/victor4.html). These sort of terms restrict the individuals perception of the era when it was a time when growth was encouraged rather than restricted. Authors used the metaphor of pruning and nurturing plant life to symbolise the development of the self for example in North and South Gaskell discusses the problem of the working individual who struggles to reach his or her potential when the manufacturers are unsparingly cutting away all off-shoots in the direction of literature or high mental cultivation, in hopes of throwing the whole strength and vigour of the plant into commerce. (Gaskell 1865, p.69). For Gaskell, it is through the everyday interaction between people that such difficulties are given the chance to be overcome. And this was the essence of the realist novel set amidst a world which had witnessed such alteration to transform the lostness felt by society into a seeing of the smaller things in life which could withhold qualities of greater spiritual value. As Philip Davis says, the realist novel was the holding ground, the meeting point, for the overlapping of common life. (Davis 2002, p.144). And it was within this common life that a more calm acceptance of the new state could be achieved. Gillian Beer suggests that through her novels organisation Eliot creates order and understanding of the evolving process of novel-writing. In Middlemarch, the naming of Casaubons books Waiting for Death, Two Temptations, Three Love Problems draws attention to the books organisation by emphasising categorisation: But the process of reading leads into divergence and variability. Even while we are observing how closely human beings conform in the taxonomy of events we learn how differently they feel and think. For Dorothea and Casaubon waiting for death means something very different from what it means for Mary Garth and Featherstone. The relations are different. The distances between people are different. Lydgate, here at one with the project of the book, longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of living structure (1:15:225). In this double emphasis on conformity and variability George Eliot intensifies older literary organisations by means of recent scientific theory. In Darwinian theory, variability is the creative principle, but the type makes it possible for us to track common ancestry and common kinship. (Beer 2000, pp.143-4) Writing itself was becoming an almost divine representation, an inner order of a chaotic external world. The idea that humans had evolved from primates meant that the boundaries between what was one thing and what was another were no longer so clearly defined. There developed a fear of the animate and a fear of the inanimate, and efforts were sought to understand them. As Harriet Ritvo says in The Platypus and the Mermaid: Depending on the beholder, an anomaly might be viewed as embodying a challenge to the established order, whether social, natural, or divine; the containment of that challenge; the incomprehensibility of the creation by human intelligence; or simply the endless and diverting variety of the world. And beholders who agreed on the content of the representation could still disagree strongly about its moral valence whether it was good or bad, entrancing or disgusting. (Ritvo 1997, p.148). In a world where categorisation was important but not so easily achievable, the novel too became neither one thing nor another; realism became a melting pot for ideas, a sort of hybrid of styles. In Eliots The Lifted Veil realism is used as a vehicle for the exploration of her ideas into psychology and psychic phenomena. Latimers clairvoyance forces him to endure a painful insight into the minds of the people around him: I began to be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from the languid and slight nature of my intercourse with others since my illness, I had not been alive before. This was the obtrusion on my mind of the mental process going forward in first one person, and then another, with whom I happened to be in contact: the vagrant, frivolous ideas and emotions of some uninteresting acquaintanceMrs Filmore, for examplewould force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned insect. But this superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enough when it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, became an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a close relation to me when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.(Eliot 1859, pp.13-14) Latimer is no longer caught up in the web of peoples characters. Eliot plays with the idea that his consciousness has the ability to transcend the mundane the rational talk, the kindly deeds in order to gain insight into an alternative and not so rosy vision of the mechanics of the human mind where thoughts are make-shift and chaotic. The nineteenth century saw the acceptance of the concept of otherworldly phenomena into the working classes. Robert Owen, a social reformer, who influenced the British Labor movement (Oppenheim 1985, p.40) encouraged many working class Owenites to follow him into the spiritualist fold, where they enthusiastically continued their ongoing search for the new moral world. Interests such as spiritualism and psychology which had previously been more underground pursuits, were brought out into the open. The concept of telepathy, a term coined by Frederic Myers in 1882 (Luckhurst 2002, p.1) even helped to theorize the uneasy cross-cultural encounters at the colonial frontier. (Luckhurst 2002, p.3) These developments suggest that the Victorians felt imbued with the power of their age they felt confident of their ability to communicate on different planes of consciousness. So it could be argued that Victorian was not simply a time devoted to the discovery of the self and the workings of the inner mind, but a time that also focused on the projection of ideas and thoughts outside of the self; ideas which themselves stand outside of the category Victorian. In 1869 the Spiritualist Newspaper began selling first as a fortnightly, then as a weekly publication. (Oppenheim 1985, p.45). This draws the discussion to the point of representation the social nature of Victorians seems to suggest that they enjoyed the focus being on themselves. Self-obsession is an aspect of the time which the term Victorian usefully represents: by specifically referring to the rule of the Queen the term draws attention to the importance of the individual. The era saw the development of many different styles of fashion and the use of photography. As part of the Freudian influence great importance was placed on childhood and it was during the nineteenth century that the first laws concerning child welfare were passed. (Mavor quoted from Brown (ed) 2001, p.i) The focus on the central, the ego, was paramount. As Mavor says, it was as if the camera had to be invented in order to document what would soon be lost, childhood itself; and childhood had to be invented in order for the camera to document childhood (a fantasy of innocence) as real. (Brown (ed) 2001, p.27). Perhaps because of societys awareness of change there seems to have been a necessity to record and keep track of the world around. Discovery took place on a much grander scale in the exploration of the world. The British Empire was global, yet as Patrick Brantlinger suggests in Rule of Darkness, (Brantlinger 1988, p.4) imperialism was not generally reflected in the literature of the time. What we do see evidence of however is the mapping of new worlds and territories (Richard Jefferies Bevis). The development of the adventure story suggests that Victorians desired to explore what lay outside of what they knew and in this respect the term Victorian which people can think of as representing a society closed within in itself is misleading. The rise of imperialism began to shape the ideological dimensions of subjects studied in school (Bristow 1991, p.20) and so through literature the Victorian child was offered an exciting world of sophisticated representation and ideas with the knowledge that the world was theirs to explore. Does the term then encourage us to think of the society as a class of people set apart from the rest of the world? In The Island of Dr. Moreau it is not just the future of science that is explored but the concept of a new territory and its effects on the mind. For example, when the protagonist first sees the beast-servant on board the ship he is immediately frightened: I did not know then that a reddish luminosity, at least, is not uncommon in human eyes. The figure, with its eyes of fire, struck down through all my adult thoughts and feelings, and for a moment the forgotten horrors of childhood came back to my mind. Then the effect passed as it had come. An uncouth black figure of a man, a figure of no particular import, hung over the taffrail, against the starlight. (Wells 1997, p.31). The circumstances of being at sea is disorientating and causes the imagination to play tricks so that the man is first one thing a figure with its eyes of fire and then suddenly becomes an uncouth black figure of a man. The effect is that the protagonist suddenly regresses to the forgotten horrors of childhood. This sudden fluctuation is important as it represents the fluidity of the era and how change and discovery on a global scale, although empowering, also caused instability within the individual. Therefore, when considering the age in the context of its name we can understand that the term was perhaps created out of both the desire to represent achievement but also out of a need to belong. This desire to belong which manifested itself during an age ruled by one woman placed great importance on the role of the female in society. It was a time when women began to travel and write without the necessity of using a pseudonym (see Cheryl McEwan on Kingsley in West Africa, (2000, p.73)). In books such as Hardys Tess of the DUrbervilles the idea of the fallen woman is tested when Tesss crucial lack of belief in herself causes her never to discover the paradise with Clare that might have been. The nineteenth century began to be more explicit concerning issues of gender: for example, the relationship between Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick (see McClintock 1995, pp.132-138) where Cullwick is photographed cross-dressed as a farm worker. A Victorian man however appears to have had more stigma attached to him and in this context the term is commonly associated with heroism and English valour (Ridley/Dawson 1994, p.110). There is less flexibility surrounding the notion of Victorian men -as if the term somehow threatened their masculinity. However, this did not seem to affect the male authors of the time. Lewis Carroll captured the public imagination through Alices Adventures in Wonderland, which although following the story of a little girl, depicts many male characters. (see Carroll 2000). In conclusion, the term Victorian although useful to refer to a specific time period in history, does however encourage us to make sweeping generalisations without investigating how diverse the era was. In terms of the subject matter of Victorian Literature there is no clear cut distinction between early, middle and late Victorian for example, Bulwer-Lytton attempts at the beginning of the century what Richard Jefferies does at the end the difference is in style and form. Within that time frame there was condensed an incredible diversity of styles, tastes and attitudes, yet the term suffers from being associated with prejudices and assumptions about Victorians. However, it is worth bearing in mind that prejudices were indeed a part of Victorian society. When the Victorians explored the rest of the world they made generalisations and assumptions based on what they found (eg: The Island of Dr. Moreau) where experience and the nature of what is discovered defines behaviour. As a critic in 1858 wrote we are living in an age of transition (quoted from Houghton 1957, p.1); therefore when considering the Victorian age we should remember that values and trends were evolving it was not a static time governed by repression or old fashioned values. From the research carried out for this dissertation it appears that through the gaining of knowledge, Victorians also realised how little they knew and how much more there was to discover. As Arnold says in A Summer Night: How fair a lot to fill / Is left to each man still. (http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/A/ArnoldMatthew/verse/EmpedoclesonEtna/summernight.html). In this context the term Victorian can be dualistically representative: discoveries of the time, although revolutionary, were often rudimentary in nature, and it was humbling for the individual to consider how much further knowledge and discovery had yet to go. On the other hand, the term suffers too from being inadequate: a single word is too smaller term for the vast wealth and diversity of discovery, and it could be argued that the era is better realised if seen as a second revolution. Like the Victorian authors themselves we are left with no suitable words to convey the entirety of an era as John Lawton says in his introduction to The Time Machine (1995, p.xxvi) the term Victorian is used too loosely to encompass a sequence of eras, the diverse reign of a woman who lent her name to objects as diverse as a railway terminus and a plum. When studying Victorian Literature it is worth bearing in mind the fluidity of the time and the changeability which arose out of living on the cusp between the passing away of old values and the unknown territory of the new. Realism recognised the gaps which were forming in society such as the distancing of the self from religion and offered to paper the cracks through its vision of bringing people together on a mundane level. Its territory stretched to include the darkest recesses of the mind to the smallest of everyday events, celebrating the grey area between extremes as we now know as Victorian. Bibliography Arnold, M., Reprint of 1865 ed. dissertations in Criticism With the addition of Two dissertations not hitherto reprinted. London: Routledge. Appleman, P, 2001, Darwin. London: Norton Beer, G., 2000, Darwins Plots. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Brantlinger, P, 1988, Rule of Darkness:British Literature and Imperialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Bristow, J., 1991, Empire Boys:Adventures in a Mans World. London: Harper Collins. Brown, M., 2001, (ed) Picturing Children. Aldershot: Ashgate Bulwer-Lytton, E., 1853, A Strange Story.