English IV-Test 1 – Flashcards

The only thing we are born with; has no control...self-centered

Taught by family and society; control mechanism; referee between the Id vs. Ego-middleman

More judgemental, uptight and rigid

carefree/careless; immature; impulsive

In-between the Id and the Superego-tries to compromise between the two making a reasonable decision

20% of Americans (mostly phobias); less than 1% are severely mentally ill

To be broken away from reality

Common (like a flu/cold) and can come on at anytime

Phobias Clinical Depression Anxiety OCD

Things people fear but to the next level

Severe Depression (sleeping/crying all the time)

everyone has a normal amount of anxiety but to the next level

Organization, checking lights (the more sever the mental illness becomes, the more it interferes with life)

(unrelated to normal emotions)-symptoms or experiences that happen together

Hallucination Delusions Thought Disorder

Allows the person to not experience reality as others

Believing in something that is untrue

Muddled thoughts/words (when more then one person does not understand another)

Avoid contact and do not recognize that they are unwell

Sherwood Anderson

Childhood consisted of moving around(small towns); father had a drinking problem which caused financial problems; Big reader; Mother died of Tuberculosis and has not spoken to his father since; Newsboy, cow driver, printer, milk boy, etc.; Went to night school in Chicago

He was married and one day talking to his assistant, he had a nervous breakdown and went missing for 4 days and no one understood him because he was incoherent; eventually was okay--started to say it was an experiment, but the doctors say he had a nervous breakdown and took a break from reality

Wanted to show people that the Big City was not the only place where bad things happened, it also happened in small towns-they were not the safest because there were damaged people everywhere

comically or repulsively ugly/distorted

"Book of the Grotesque", "Hands", "Paper Pills", "Mother", "Philosopher" & "Nobody Knows"

The sketch describes an elderly writer who hires an old carpenter to raise his bed somehow so that as he lies there he can look out the window. The old carpenter tells the writer of his experiences in the Civil War and, as he talks, he begins to cry. The weeping old man is ludicrous, yet he reminds the writer of the many sad people whom he had known during his lifetime. He realizes that all of them are grotesques and he decides to write about them. He explains their grotesqueness by suggesting that each of them seized on one truth and tried to live by it, but the truth which each embraced became a falsehood.

Wing Biddlebaum is not only frustrated but lonely, as are most of the citizens of Winesburg. As the story begins, the old man is seen on his half-decayed veranda late in the afternoon, wishing that George Willard would visit him. Passing along the road nearby are a group of young berry pickers, laughing, shouting, and flirting with one another. Their joy and friendship serve as a counterpoint to Wing Biddlebaum's loneliness. The author then tells us about Wing's past in order to explain why the former teacher is alienated and frightened. These intrusions of the author into the story give the effect of an oral story teller — an effect which Anderson probably learned from his storytelling father. Anderson's manipulation of time — reviewing Wing's former life, then returning to the present suggests a dream, thus making us aware that, to Wing, his life must seem like a nightmare. The fact that George Willard never comes, that in fact nothing really happens in the story, reinforces our awareness of the old man's defeat and disillusion. His life no longer has any climaxes; he is a static, not a developing, character.

the townspeople of Winesburg are rather proud of Wing's nervous hands (— which have picked a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day. Production such as this the town can understand and acclaim.)... but where he came from, he was almost killed because of his hands

In "Hands" as a reporter who goes and talks to Wing a lot

For a short period during his life, Doctor Reefy found someone with whom to share his ideas. A tall, dark girl had come to the middle-aged doctor because she was "in the family way." She had been courted by two young men, one a jeweler who talked of virginity but whom she dreamed had bitten her in lust, the other a youth who talked little but actually did not only bite her but made her pregnant. When the tall, dark girl went to Doctor Reefy for help, she found him pulling the tooth of another patient. She apparently sensed that the doctor was the enemy of bestial lust — symbolized by the image of teeth — and she married him. Anderson compares the doctor to the gnarled apples left on the trees by those who pick fruit to ship to the city. The wife was "like one who had discovered the sweetness of the twisted apples, [and] she could not get her mind fixed again upon the round perfect fruit that is eaten in the city apartments." Doctor Reef's wife, however, lived only a few months after their marriage; again he was alone. His inability to communicate with anyone else is conveyed not only by the paper pills but also by Anderson's description of him sitting all day by a cobweb-covered window in his empty office.

Elizabeth Willard owns the Winesburg hotel, which she inherited from her parents. Her husband, Tom, runs the shabby, unnprofitable hotel and behaves as though he is a very important man. He has a dream that one day he will become a Congressman or even governor. Elizabeth, on the other hand, has faded away and does not like to be seen by people. She feels defeated by life. However, she believes she has a special relationship with her son George, who sometimes comes to sit in her room with her when she is sick. But, they are just awkward with each other. One time, she hears her husband admonishing her son to be bold, and she wants desperately to communicate with George that he should not be too slick but should instead harbor dreams. Elizabeth has big dreams that her son, George, will live the dreams she did not live. She wants him to be able to grope and find a way of expressing himself truly, rather than living a life of surface and convention. However, she is unable to express this to George because their awkwardness intervenes. Instead, she lives caged in her own unfulfilled dreams.

Doctor Parcival is one of the town's three doctors, but he has very few patients. Nonetheless, he is financially comfortable. He likes to visit George Willard at the offices of the Winesburg Eagle to tell the young man about his ideas. He tells stories about his past life, but many times they are contradictory, so George does not know what to believe. He also tries to instruct George to distrust and dislike all other people. When he refuses to come attend to a dead girl, Doctor Parcival thinks the people will lynch him. He tells George that, if he is killed, George should write his book for him: "The idea is very simple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget it. It is this-that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified"

George Willard meets Louise Trunnion at her urging and the two of them have a liaison in the night. At first, she plays coy and asks how he knows she even wants to go with him, which annoys George, as she sent a note inviting him. The note said, "I'm yours if you want me." George is not particularly interested in Louise, but he takes the opportunity that presents itself to him. He walks away from their encounter in a field reassuring himself that no one will know about their sexual contact and so she will not be able to accuse him of anything.

The carpenter- a man who was supposed to fix something for another is sitting crying with his mustache and cigar bobbing up and down

Wing Biddlebaum- his hands are what make his grotesque

Dr. Reefy because of how he carries himself (does not care about his appearance) and because of the truths he would write on pieces of paper and would then crumble them up into his pockets

Elizabeth Willard because of how she carries herself and how she doesn't matter about her appearance

Dr. Parcival because...

George Willard because...

His hands because he doesn't know what to do with them and doesn't want to do the wrong things (because of his past)

Slowly suffocating (figuratively), Depressed (neurosis), Compulsive Behavior (Tick- stuffing his pockets with his thoughts)

Graham Green

This story is narrated by a young boy who is observing his twin brother, Francis, as he expresses his extreme fear of the dark. Francis tries hard to avoid attending a children's party because he knows the plan is to play hide-and-seek in the dark. He pretends to have a cold, tells his parents and his nanny that he does not want to go, but is forced to attend anyway. When the lights are turned out for this game, Francis is literally scared to death. His brother tries to comfort Francis by touching his arm, only to find that was the final unendurable anguish for his petrified sibling. When the lights are turned back on, the adults find Francis dead.

The old man, who is described as fat, frightened, and nervous, seems too ineffectual to be dangerous. His bald forehead — noticed because his nervous hands fiddle about arranging non-existent hair — suggests his loss of strength and virility. Even the description of the former teacher's caressing of his students sounds quite possibly innocent. The picture of Adolph Myers with the boys of his school is similar to the dream which Wing tries to describe to George, a "pastoral golden age" in which clean-limbed young men gathered about the feet of an old man who talked to them. Unfortunately, Wing has not been allowed to realize this dream, so his creative impulse, his longing to mold his students, has become thwarted. Because a half-witted boy imagined unmentionable things, Adolph Myers was driven from a Pennsylvania town in the night. "Keep your hands to yourself," the saloon keeper had roared.

the young reporter who appears in many of the Winesburg tales. Like Wing, George has creative impulses, but at this point, as Wing tells George, "You are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in town here . . . You must begin to dream . . . You must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices." For the time being, however, George is afraid to forget the voices, to be different. He has wondered, for example, about Wing's secret, has realized that there is something wrong in Wing's life, but has decided, "I don't want to know what it is." As the book develops, George will get more involved with other people, will begin to get below the surface of life, and will decide to be different and flee Winesburg so that he can become a writer.

Doctor Reefy is a less pitiful character than Wing because he has known love and companionship for a few months and because, as his name implies, he is a rugged fellow who mocks such sentimentalists as his one friend, the old nurseryman. Nevertheless, Doctor Reefy is a lonely grotesque who is unable to communicate with others. The paper pills suggest the ineffectuality of all the physician's attempts to cure the ills of the world, an ineffectuality which we will glimpse again in "Death," when Reefy reaches out to help Elizabeth Willard, but is unsuccessful. Ineffectual, static, silent-thus Doctor Reefy's life is depicted, and Anderson makes the reader feel this by writing a story in which nothing happens and there is almost no dialogue.

Elizabeth Willard is an unhappy woman of forty-five; once she was a tall, dark, restless young girl who dreamed of joining an acting company and "giving something out of herself to all people." The citizens of Winesburg, however, said she was "stage-struck" and they shook their heads in disapproval when they saw her on dates with traveling men who were staying at her father's hotel. Elizabeth, frustrated and bored, found some release in sexual relations with these men and eventually with Tom Willard, a handsome fellow with a military step and a black mustache. Finally, Elizabeth married Tom, who turned out to be a big talker and a dabbler in village politics, but an ineffectual provider. The hotel, under his management, became increasingly dusty, faded, and run-down.

a handsome fellow with a military step and a black mustache. Finally, Elizabeth married Tom, who turned out to be a big talker and a dabbler in village politics, but an ineffectual provider. The hotel, under his management, became increasingly dusty, faded, and run-down.

The characters sense in George, however, an uncertainty about his own goals. In "Mother," the action, what little there is, begins with Elizabeth's jealous suspicions that George is going to be the kind of man his father wants him to be, a hustling success. George is going to try to escape to a bigger world is encouraging.

One of the strangest of the grotesques in Winesburg. The dirty, middle-aged misanthrope arrived in the Ohio town about five years before the narrative begins and opened a medical practice. During his years in Winesburg, however, he has had few patients, yet he doesn't seem to lack money. Perhaps, as he suggests to young George Willard, Doctor Parcival had been a murderer or a thief; George is never sure whether he should believe the doctor's stories.

They will useless crucify him (lynch) on main street

The doctor's fear for his life causes him to drop his mask of hatred long enough to tell George what he has been trying to say in the book he has been writing: "Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified." This message suggests that all men are really loving and compassionate but are doomed to be misunderstood and, eventually, will be destroyed by society.

A woman who has a reputation in town for sleeping with men...sent a note to George Willard saying "I'm yours if you want"

She seems to have been trying to communicate to George her need not for sex but for love and understanding; however, as in several other of the early stories in the book, George proves insensitive

Driven, however, by some inner compulsion, the youth sneaks through the dark alleys to Louise's house and takes her for a walk. George is obviously awkward and unsure of himself at first, but he gradually becomes more confident, eventually having his way with the girl.

George's first sexual encounter is only physically satisfying; it is really a perfunctory, meaningless act.