Style Era

 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize This moving, exquisitely observed memoir will appeal to fans of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Anne Lamott. It follows a young, idealistic neurosurgeon as he tries to determine what makes a life worthwhile in the face of overwhelming obstacles.

The New York Times Book Review, People, NPR, The Washington Post, Slate, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Time Out New York, Publishers Weekly, and BookPage all named it one of the best books of the year. It is also a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in creative nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in inspirational memoir.

On the cusp of finishing ten years of training to become a neurosurgeon at the age of 36, Paul Kalanithi received a stage IV lung cancer diagnosis. He alternated between working as a doctor caring for the terminally ill and being a patient fighting for life. The future he and his wife had envisioned vanished in an instant. When Breath Becomes Air follows Kalanithi’s development from a gullible medical student who was “possessed,” as he put it, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life,” to a Stanford neurosurgeon who works in the brain, the most important location for a person’s identity, and then to a patient and new father who must face his own mortality.

When faced with death, what makes life worthwhile? What do you do when the future flattens out into an endless present and is no longer a ladder toward your aspirations in life? What does it mean to foster a new life as one dies off when you have a child? In this extraordinarily compelling and astutely observed book, Kalanithi addresses some of these issues.

While writing this book, Paul Kalanithi passed away in March 2015, yet his words continue to serve as a mentor and a gift to all of us. In a sense, “I came to realise that facing my own mortality had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “I can’t go on.’ These are the seven words from Samuel Beckett that kept repeating in my thoughts. I’ll continue. A talented writer who also served as a doctor, When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, inspirational look at the difficulty of facing death and the bond between a patient and a doctor.

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Writing in a time still recovering from tyranny and revolution, Bront’s evocation of dungeons, prisoners, and tyranny would not have been a subversive approach for the poem; furthermore, Bront constructs careful imagery that could be interpreted as teetering on tyranny; and finally, Bront’s political purpose must be, to some extent, hidden

From those barren slopes, spring has melted.

Indeed, the spirit that remembers is faithful.

After such a long period of hardship and change!” (Bronte, 1846, lines 9–12)

The speaker of “Cold in the Earth” alludes to an impending change, from which hope against suffering and tyranny can be derived, just as the female captive refuses to give up hope in the face of suffering. In fact, “The Prisoner” has been sourced as an early instalment of the Gondal series, with the speaker being the son of a King in the realm of Gondal. As a result, some element of fantasy seeps into “The Prisoner,” strengthened by

While women found solidarity in their connections with one another, their political approaches significantly differed. From these two poetical readings, one is left with the impression that female Victorian poetry was a multifaceted and diverse political endeavour. Both poets succeeded in depicting their respective political themes by focusing on women, though their regard of the patriarchy was undoubtedly disparate. While Browning adhered to patriarchal views of women and their write. Written by: Name Style

The woman describes the “Invisible; the Unseen… truth” (Bront, 1846, line 49) that manifests itself as a winged soul that is “nearly free” toward the end of the poem (line 51). The poetry is engulfed in freedom, serving as a symbol of courage for the imprisoned women. Even though the captive’s realignment with her senses and rationality, when “the eye begins to see… the brain to think again” (Bront, 1946, lines 55–56), is “agony” (line 54), she finds strength in her perception. She admits she would “lose no sting, would wish no torture less / The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless” (line 58–59), in this sense making it seem as though the captive is empowered by

Guimares (2006) perceived Bronte’s life as an ongoing expression of her “passion for freedom” (pg. 2), implying a contrast between Browning, whose literary expressions adhered to the patriarchy, and Bronte, who wished to express disdain for patriarchal confinement. Indeed, Cecil Day Lewis believed that “the source of her proud recalcitrance, her preoccupation with themes of captivity, was the patriarchal system”.

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Emily Bronte, Figure 5. Bront, Branwell 1833.

If reading a poem in the gothic style by a woman with prison, shackles, and captives surprised modern readers, it could surprise them even more to learn that the captive was a woman. By presenting a female hostage as “soft and mild / as sculptured marble saint” (Bront, 1846, lines 16–17), Bront instantly challenges the idea of the male captor. The female character in this poem is portrayed in a Petrarchan manner as being innocent, pure, and seductive, but her status as a prisoner is trivialised. A prisoner’s justification for being detained is instantly called into question when she is depicted as a woman and in the language of historical figurations of the beautiful, virtues lady. It is obvious that she has political goals for the poem, which reflects the tyranny that Bront perceived in her time, with all of its upheaval and uprisings. With a jail scenario representing the status of women in Victorian England, the representation of a female hostage further reveals a female-centric approach. The female hostage, constrained by patriarchal restrictions, displays a longing for liberation, for the capacity to express both her passion and her reason without patriarchal restraint. The hostage expresses ideas of freedom in the poem, saying that “a soundless peace descends; the fight of agony, and passionate impatience stops” (Bronte, 1846, lines 44–45), alluding to a release from the restrictions of patriarchal societal freedoms placed on women.

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According to Thorne-Murphy, the depiction of rape resolves her doubts about the ability of female poetical ability, sourcing the advocation of female nurture towards these wronged women as the key to healing society’s social wounds. however, while her depiction of rape and prostitution would have been shocking to modern readers, her poetry in this poem is political.

The “desire for freedom” and Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights, her most well-known work, is filled with subversive political topics typically removed from the usual conversation in Victorian England, such as “drunkenness, godlessness, licentiousness [and] myriad forms of delinquency” (Ward, 2008, p. 529). As a result, it would be surprising for her to write about such topics in her poetry. Ian Ward (2008) asserts that there is “no easy separation of the poetic and the political” (p (Eagleton, 2005, pg. 7). Bront was “consumed by a passion for freedom” as a result of the Napoleonic wars, which produced the “social and psychological climate” (Guimares, 2006, p. 2) that had an impact on an entire generation of Victorians. Our comprehension of Bronte’s political interests is clarified by the culmination of these critical viewpoints. From her most famous work to her poems, the environment in which she was raised pushed her writing to connect with a strong attachment for political commentary.

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All of them, whether stained with your blood or not

Nothing at anything to you (Browning, 1890, II. 196 – 198).

In this way, the female body comes under scrutiny, creating tension in the politics that Browning seeks to address. If women, as she so firmly thinks, are intellectually inferior to men and lack first-hand knowledge of modern political matters, how can they justify their artistic endeavours?

The battle between two types of bodies—the wider societal body the poet aspires to reflect and the skewing influence of her own embodied, feminine sensibility—is at the heart of Aurora Leigh’s political poetics, according to the critic (Barrow, 2015, pg. 243).

In keeping with the previously discussed female duty, Aurora tries to save Marian and by doing so, “becomes the embodiment of Barrett Browning’s idealised vision of social amelioration” (Thorne-Murphy, 2005, pg. 242). This tension is heightened by Browning’s desire to become a “true poet-prophet” (Thorne-Murphy, 2005, pg. 242), making it clear that action was needed to eliminate sexual violence and ultimately

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