Assignments Discussion 14 While there is the main plot of the conflict between Nora and Helmer, there are two other subplots in A Doll House. What are they, and how do the help us understand the main plot? Be specific in details. What is the theme of A Doll House? How is this theme relevant in today’s society? Provide at least two examples from the play that support your answers. Discussion 15 Try to come up with at least three different topics you could use for your final research paper, Essay 4. (Examples: gender inequality, legal rights, friendship.) What process will you use to come up with your subject and your stance on it for your final essay? Will you survey research to find something that interests you about the play? Or will you come up with your topic and then find research to support it? Essay Four While essay four is not due until Week 8, you need to start working on it now. Choose a common theme such as marriage, death, conflict, male/female relationships, reality vs. illusion, freedom/oppression, or justice, and use that theme to analyze the topic A Doll House. Locate at least three academically valid sources to support the main points in your essay. This essay must be formatted using MLA Style. The expected length is approximately five to seven pages. See Essay 4 Guidelines and Rubric. Readings    The Norton Introduction to Literature: Ibsen, A Doll House, p. 784 The Little, Brown Handbook: Database journal article citation, p. 448 (7b). See also pp. 450-452 for information on citation material needed. You will need that for Dropbox Assignment 5. In This Module Video: Library Database Citation  Learning Objectives    Demonstrate the process of argumentative academic writing, including organizational clarity, use of evidence, and revision. Utilize research in argumentative writing about literature. Analyze complex texts using literary concepts and terminology.  Overview This is the week we read and begin studying A Doll House in order to write our final essay, using three secondary sources to help persuade your reader that your analytical perspective is a valid and educated opinion. There is an audio production of the play in this week’s content. Listen to it as you read to see if it helps you understand the play. This is also the week you will get a chance to evaluate the course. A link will be sent to your CougarMail that allows you to access the evaluation. All evaluations are anonymous and I will not get to see any of the results until after grades are turned in. Then I will only see the statistical analysis of the survey and a list of comments. Please try to do the evaluations if possible, we need to hear from you not only about what we might be doing right, but also about any ways we could improve the course or the instruction. You are a partner in developing this ongoing course. Many things we do here are because of suggestions a former student made about what really worked or what he/she had problems with. Sample Research Paper The following short research paper example is from a class which was analyzing a novel. The assignment called for two outside sources and the primary source. (The final paper called for five outside sources and the primary source, so when you have to provide three outside sources and the citation for the play, you have it easier.) However, the format and the citations, both in the text and in the Works Cited page should give you an idea of how to write your final research essay (Essay 4). Student’s name Ms. Keitel Essay 2 ENGL 112 Essay 2: Short Research Essay Beloved: Short Research Paper Analysis Being subjected to rape, beatings, starvation, humiliation, torture, solitude, helplessness and having all that you care for taken, would drive any human being to resort to desperate measures. The dehumanizing effects, slavery cause, are engrained into the pits of a person’s soul. Sethe has lost everyone she cared for in life except for her daughter Denver. Sethe assumes that her husband was killed while trying to escape Sweet Home in Kentucky. Her two boys, Howard and Buglar, ran away, unable to continue to live in a home that is haunted. Baby Suggs dies and leaves Sethe and her daughter completely alone until, Paul D., a man from Sethe’s past as a slave, shows up on her porch. Unable to escape her past, Sethe even begins to lose Paul and Denver when they find out what Sethe had been reduced to attempting and in one instance accomplishing, in order to save her children from a life of slavery. Grief and guilt won’t allow the soul of her deceased child to rest, and Sethe cannot bring herself to let go and learn to live in the present. In the novel, Beloved, by Toni Morrison, Sethe Suggs is incapable of moving forward and living in the present because she allows the nightmares of her past, her own personal remorse, and the inability to accept her own reasoning for committing a most heinous crime, to cripple her. After escaping slavery, the life that Sethe had built for herself and her daughter Denver, at the home of 124 Bluestone in Ohio, is one of isolation and a self-imposed prison sentence where the past is forever engrained in the present. “For the former slaves in the novel, the past is a burden that they desperately and fully try to forget. Yet for Sethe…memories of the past are inescapable” (Jinping 1). She calls the horrors of her former life as a slave, “rememory,” whenever something triggers a past event. Then there are the fleshly scars that reside on Sethe’s back that serve as a reminder of what her life used to be like. Both of these physical and mental scars are inescapable. Morrison had a way of bringing the reality of slavery into her characters, “But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day” (Morrison 70). Slaves didn’t dare openly hope for a different future. In their minds, they tried to get through each day with their head low, drawing little to no attention to themselves. Looking forward to something better and dreaming of what life could be like if they were free was a death sentence in itself to most slaves. The hope and yearning would drive them insane, so it was better to just live with what was instead of what could be. Sethe was committed to living in her own personal hell because she didn’t feel that she deserved anything better and knew better than to hope. Sethe is so consumed with guilt and remorse for having taken the life of her two year old daughter that the soul of her baby clings to her, unable to go to its final resting place. Throughout the book the reader sees the ghost as an integral part of Sethe’s life, “Bit by bit, the reader learns that this baby ghost is the ghost of Sethe’s daughter Beloved, whom she had loved so much that she murdered her in order to protect her from slavery” (Pass 118). When School Teacher caught up with Sethe in Ohio, Sethe knew that her children would suffer for her escape and thought that death was the lesser of the two evils. She wounds her two boys and slices her daughter’s throat with a hacksaw, but is stopped when she tries to slam Denver into the wall. Her reasoning was justified, at that time, in her eyes. At least in death she knew that her babies would be free. The cost that Sethe paid and continued to pay was a high one, “‘…I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much…’” (Morrison 14). Even though Sethe went to jail for her crime, she knew in her heart that no cell would take away the pain, no amount of time could lessen the hurt, and no amount of prayer would bring her baby back to her. She was going to have to live with what she had done. Morrison takes the reader through Sethe’s pain and allows them to see why she simply cannot let go and live. Why should she be allowed to live and enjoy life, when she took another’s? Being driven to commit an act of such atrocious violence leaves a stain on the soul that irreversible. Morrison leads her readers through a horrific journey of a slave who escapes to freedom only to become enslaved by her past crimes, guilt, and remorse. She shows in vivid detail how the haunts of the past can prevent the future from being enjoyed. Sethe clings to her past like a child who clings to her mother’s bosom. Fear of hope, loss of desire, a self-imposed penance, and the inability to forgive and let the past rest, keep the future so far out of reach that past becomes a living, breathing, entity that ties itself to Sethe’s soul. Until that entity can be put to rest, learning to live and enjoy life is inconceivable. Works Cited Jinping, BAO. “On Magic Narrative Technique in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Cross Cultural. Communications 8.3 (2012): 1-7. Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 Sept. 2013. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Random House, 1987. Print. Pass, Olivia. “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Journey through the Pain of Grief.” Journal of Medical Humanities 27.2 (2006): 117-124. Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection. Web. 13 Sept. 2013. ENGL 112: English Composition II Assignments Discussion 14 While there is the main plot of the conflict between Nora and Helmer, there are two other subplots in A Doll House. What are they, and how do the help us understand the main plot? Be specific in details. What is the theme of A Doll House? How is this theme relevant in today’s society? Provide at least two examples from the play that support your answers. Discussion 15 Try to come up with at least three different topics you could use for your final research paper, Essay 4. (Examples: gender inequality, legal rights, friendship.) What process will you use to come up with your subject and your stance on it for your final essay? Will you survey research to find something that interests you about the play? Or will you come up with your topic and then find research to support it? Essay Four While essay four is not due until Week 8, you need to start working on it now. Choose a common theme such as marriage, death, conflict, male/female relationships, reality vs. illusion, freedom/oppression, or justice, and use that theme to analyze the topic A Doll House. Locate at least three academically valid sources to support the main points in your essay. This essay must be formatted using MLA Style. The expected length is approximately five to seven pages. See Essay 4 Guidelines and Rubric.