Shirley Jacksons The Lottery :: The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Why would a civilized and peaceful town would ever suggest the horrifying acts of violence can take place anywhere at anytime and the most ordinary people can commit them. Jackson's fiction is noted for exploring incongruities in everyday life, and â€Å"The Lottery†, perhaps her most exemplary work in this respect, examines humanity's capacity for evil within a contemporary, familiar, American setting. Noting that the story’s characters, physical environment, and even its climactic action lacks significant individuating detail, most critics view â€Å"The Lottery.† As a modern-day parable or fable, which obliquely addresses a variety of themes, including the dark side of human nature, the danger of ritualized behavior, and the potential for cruelty when the individual submits to the mass will. Shirley Jackson also addresses cruelty by the citizen’s refusal to stand up and oppose â€Å"The Lottery.† Violence and cruelty is a majo r theme in â€Å"The Lottery.† The theme in â€Å"The Lottery† is violence and cruelty. Violence and cruelty is a major theme because there is a lot of violence and cruelty in the world. The Lottery has been read as addressing such issues as the public's fascination with salacious and scandalizing journalism, McCarthyism, and the complicity of the general public in the victimization of minority groups, epitomized by the Holocaust of World War II. The Holocaust was very cruel and violent cause other people didn’t like certain people so they just kill them and their children and still now we have violence and cruelty with wars and people that hate each other.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  On the morning of June 27 of a recent year, the 300 villagers of an American village prepare for the annual lottery in a mood of excitement. The horrible tradition of the lottery is so old that some of its ritual has been forgotten and some has been changed. Its basic purpose is entirely unremembered, but residents are present to take part in it. The children in the village created a â€Å"great pile of stones† in one corner of the stoning square. The civic-minded Mr. Summers has been sworn in and then he hands a piece of paper to the head of each family. When it is discovered the Hutchinson family has drawn the marked slip, each member of the family Bill, Tessie, and the children is given another slip. Silence prevails as suspense hovers over the proceedings. After helplessly protesting the unfairness of the first drawing, Tessie finds that she holds the marked slip.

Closely Examine the Character of Melanie in Hitchcock’s the Birds

The Birds is a psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It centres around Melanie, a young city girl, who journeys into danger into a small coastal town called Bodega Bay to play a practical joke on a potential lover, Mitch. A series of unfortunate Bird attacks follow her and wreck havoc on the town and its inhabitants. As the film progresses, Melanie tries, on several occasions, to go against the social norm of women of the 1950’s; every time she does she gets punished and gradually destroyed until she becomes the dominant ideology.At the start of the film, Melanie seems strong and independent. From the offset she is seen as an individualist. In the first scene she is first seen walking down a street in a fitted jacket and pencil skirt, this was seen as too provocative and was not the usual dress code for a 1950’s woman; the norm would be a dress with either a swing skirt or a poodle skirt. Along with the fitted clothes, Melanie has perfectly groomed hair a nd perfectly painted fingernails; these are signs of her emotional state and will change throughout the film.Also in this scene the audience can hear a wolf whistle from a man directed at Melanie, she turns and smiles, telling the audience that she enjoys male attention and is comfortable and confident in the city environment. In the next scene, Melanie is in a bird shop. This is when Mitch is first seen; when Melanie first sees Mitch she immediately becomes flirtatious and thinks that she is in control of what is happening, when really Mitch is in control as he knows exactly who Melanie is while she does not know who he is.After Mitch plays a practical joke on Melanie in the bird shop, Melanie sets out to speak to him again, and when she finds out that he is not staying in his home in the city but in a small town up the coast, Bodega Bay, she sets out on her own little practical joke. This journey will take her out of her comfort zone, the city, and put her in unknown surroundings and ultimately danger. During the drive, Melanie looks very smug but is unaware that she is journeying into danger.The actions of the two love birds in their cage and the speed of the car are deliberately made to look fake as to lull the audience in to a false sense of security and to mask the danger to come, this ties into the genre of deceit that is seen throughout the film. When Melanie reaches Bodega Bay, it is quite obvious that she is out of place; all the town’s citizens are casually dressed which contrasts with Melanie’s immaculate hair and nails and her fitted clothes. Melanie is treated as novelty by the citizens that she encounters.After she plays her practical joke on Mitch at his house, she races him back to Bodega Bay but he beats her and stands waiting for her. The mood is very light hearted as both characters are smiling but the mood changes to become very serious as Melanie is struck by a seagull on the head. This is the first bird attack and the first time, of many, that Mitch is there to rescue her from danger. After the attack Melanie is composed once again but her gloves are blood stained and she does not wear them again, symbolising that her first layer of protection is gone.This first attack is the start of Melanie’s confident and independent exterior being pecked away by the birds. After the attack Melanie goes back to Mitch’s and meets his mother, a very demanding and controlling woman. In these few scenes where they are together Melanie is seen with high angle camera shots, showing that she is weak and powerless in their home, whilst Lydia is seen with low angle camera shots, demonstrating her power and dominance over the family and Melanie.In their next encounter their roles in the household switch: Lydia becoming frail and helpless whereas Melanie is now dominant and in control. The next significant change in Melanie’s character and emotional state is during the bird attack on the petrol station. M elanie shows an act of independence and defiance by taking shelter in a Telephone Box, away from the security of Mitch and other men, but when she tries to get out again she is attacked by the birds, eventually the glass panels of the Telephone box shatter, representing her fragility.High angle shows, once again, that Melanie is weak and powerless. The paint on her fingernails is still intact but her hair is not as groomed as it started out, signifying that her emotional state and independence has been damaged again and she has been punished for her act of defiance. For the second time, Mitch has to come and rescue Melanie from the birds, showing that she is becoming more and more dependable on the security of men, especially Mitch. During the penultimate attack by the birds Melanie’s state of mind changes nce again: she has regained her strength and has taken over the role of mother of the family. This is shown by low angle camera shots and in her actions. When Mitch’ s sister, Cathy, gets sick, it is Melanie, not the mother, that takes her to the kitchen. However, these moments of defiance are short lived, for after the birds appear to have left the house, Melanie hears bird sounds coming from the attic and climbs the stairs, on her own, to see what it is.She hesitates at the door of the attic, there is a close up of her hand and her nails are still intact, and when she does open the door, she does so only to find a flock of birds which attack her mercilessly. This, her last act of independence, ends in disaster and her destruction as an independent woman. For the final time Mitch comes to rescue Melanie from the birds. Melanie’s destruction is symbolised by her looking dishevelled and wrapped up in bandages. Mitch then carries Melanie to the car, demonstrating Melanie’s total dependence on Mitch.Melanie’s destruction is finally symbolised by an extreme close up of her nails, which are completely broken and chipped. The ways in which Melanie changes over the course of The Birds, her frame of mind could be compared to a yo-yo. At the start she was completely independent and self sufficient, but during different parts of the film she either lost some of her independence or gained some. By the end of the film, Melanie ends up being the polar-opposite of what she started out to be. At the end she was totally dependent on Mitch and had lost all independence. Making her the dominant ideology of a woman of the 1950’s.

What Is the Steady-State Theory in Cosmology

Steady-state theory was a theory proposed in 20th-century cosmology to explain evidence that the universe was expanding but still retain the core idea that the universe always looks the same, and is therefore unchanging in practice and has no beginning and no end. This idea has largely been discredited due to astronomical evidence that suggests the universe is, in fact, changing over time. Steady-State Theory Background and Development When Einstein created his theory of general relativity, the early analysis showed that it created a universe that was unstable (expanding or contracting) rather than the static universe that had always been assumed. Einstein also held this assumption about a static universe, so he introduced a term into his general relativity field equations called the cosmological constant. This served the purpose of holding the universe in a static state. However, when Edwin Hubble discovered evidence that distant galaxies were, in fact, expanding away from the Earth in all directions, scientists (including Einstein) realized that the universe didnt seem to be static and the term was removed.​ The steady-state theory was first proposed by Sir James Jeans in the 1920s, but it really got a boost in 1948 when it was reformulated by Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold, and Hermann Bondi. There is a dubious story that they came up with the theory after watching the film Dead of Night, which ends exactly as it began. Hoyle particularly became a major proponent of the theory, especially in opposition to the big bang theory. In fact, in a British radio broadcast, Hoyle coined the term big bang somewhat derisively to explain the opposing theory. In his book Parallel Worlds, physicist Michio Kaku provides one reasonable justification for Hoyles dedication to the steady-state model and opposition to the big bang model: One defect in the [big bang] theory was that Hubble, because of errors in measuring light from distant galaxies, had miscalculated the age of the universe to be 1.8 billion years. Geologists claimed that Earth and the solar system were probably many billions of years old. How could the universe be younger than its planets? In their book Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang, cosmologists Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok are a bit less sympathetic to Hoyles stance and motivations: Hoyle, in particular, found the big bang abhorrent because he was vehemently antireligious and he thought the cosmological picture was distrubingly close to the biblical account. To avoid the bang, he and his collaborators were willing to contemplate the idea that matter and radiation were continually created throughout the universe in just such a way as to keep the density and temperature constant as the universe expands. This steady-state picture was the last stand for advocates of the unchanging universe concept, setting off a three-decade battle with proponents of the big bang model. As these quotes indicate, the major goal of the steady-state theory was to explain the expansion of the universe without having to say that the universe as a whole looks different at different points in time. If the universe at any given point in time looks basically the same, there is no need to assume a beginning or an end. This is generally known as the perfect cosmological principle. The major way that Hoyle (and others) was able to retain this principle was by proposing a situation whereas the universe expanded, new particles were created. Again, as presented by Kaku: In this model, portions of the universe were in fact expanding, but new matter was constantly being created out of nothing, so that the density of the universe remained the same...To Hoyle, it seemed illogical that a fiery cataclysm could appear out of nowhere to send galaxies hurtling in all directions; he preferred the smooth creation of mass out of nothing. In other words, the universe was timeless. It had no end, nor a beginning. It just was. Disproving the Steady-State Theory The evidence against the steady-state theory grew as new astronomical evidence was detected. For example, certain features of distant galaxies (such as quasars and radio galaxies) werent seen in nearer galaxies. This makes sense in the big bang theory, where the distant galaxies actually represent younger galaxies and nearer galaxies are older, but the steady-state theory has no real way to account for this difference. In fact, its precisely the sort of difference that the theory was designed to avoid. The final nail in the coffin of steady-state cosmology, however, came from the discovery of the cosmological microwave background radiation, which had been predicted as part of the big bang theory but had absolutely no reason to exist within the steady-state theory. In 1972, Steven Weinberg said of the evidence opposing steady state cosmology: In a sense, the disagreement is a credit to the model; alone among all cosmologies, the steady state model makes such definite predictions that it can be disproved even with the limited observational evidence at our disposal. Quasi-Steady State Theory There continue to be some scientists who explore the steady-state theory in the form of quasi-steady state theory. It is not widely accepted among scientists and many criticisms of it have been put forth that have not been adequately addressed. Sources Gold, Thomas. Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Charles Scribners Sons, Encyclopedia.com, 2008. Kaku, Michio. Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos. 1st Edition, Doubleday, December 28, 2004. Keim, Brandon. Physicist Neil Turok: Big Bang Wasnt The Beginning. Wired, February 19, 2008. Paul J. Steinhardt. Department of Physics, Princeton University, 2019, Princeton, New Jersey. Steady state theory. New World Encyclopedia, October 21, 2015. Steinhardt, Paul J. Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang. Neil Turok, Fifth or Later Edition edition, Doubleday, May 29, 2007. The Doc. Fred Hoyle. Famous Scientists, 2019.