Collecting Data Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Collecting Data - Essay Example It is not unusual for ethnographers to live in the culture for months or even years. The middle stages of the ethnographic method involve gaining informants, using them to gain yet more informants in a chaining process, and gathering of data in the form of observational transcripts and interview recordings. Data analysis and theory development come at the end, though theories may emerge from cultural immersion and theory-articulation by members of the culture. However, the ethnographic researcher strives to avoid theoretical preconceptions and instead to induce theory from the perspectives of the members of the culture and from observation. The researcher may seek validation of induced theories by going back to members of the culture for their reaction Ethnography is a form of research focusing on the sociology of meaning through close field observation of sociocultural phenomena. Typically, the ethnographer focuses on a community (not necessarily geographic, considering also work, leisure, and other communities), selecting informants who are known to have an overview of the activities of the community. Such informants are asked to identify other informants representative of the community, using chain sampling to obtain a saturation of informants in all empirical areas of investigation. Informants are interviewed multiple times, using information from previous informants to elicit clarification and deeper responses upon re-interview. This process is intended to reveal common cultural understandings related to the phenomena under study. These subjective but collective understandings on a subject (ex., stratification) are often interpreted to be more significant than objective data (ex., income differentials). Ethnography is a qualitative research method that is used by anthropologists to describe a culture. Culture has many definitions but usually consists of origins, values, roles, and material items associated with a particular group of people. Ethnographic research, therefore, attempts to fully describe a variety of aspects and norms of a cultural group to enhance understanding of the people being studied. Historically, anthropologists who performed ethnographic research often would live in the community being investigated. Ethnographic research has focused on various foreign cultures to gain understanding about native people who are isolated from Western civilization. One famous anthropologist who performed this type of research was Margaret Mead. Her classic study of three New Guinea cultures explored those cultures' gender characteristics and roles. By studying a variety of cultural norms, gender characteristics, and roles, this type of research can help scientists categorize nature versus nurture gender characteristics. Many ethnographic studies have documented cultural roles that challenge Western perspectives of innate gender characteristics.(1) In ethnographic studies, the orientation of the researcher is termed etic or emic. An etic orientation is a view from an outsider's perspective. For example, if an ethnographer studied the culture of perioperative nurses and had no perioperative nursing experience, that researcher's interpretations would be from an etic perspective. If a perioperative nurse studied the culture of the OR or the organization of AORN, those interpretations would be from an insider's, or emic, perspective. Ethnographic resea

Biology (medical botany) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Biology (medical botany) - Essay Example Several findings and implications of the same are established in this study. It concluded that an inhibition was exhibited in the migration of the endothelial cells of the human umbilical cord, in vitro, due to the use of both drugs. Subsequently, the researchers noted that the result of the migration as synergistically inhibited was due to the combination of the two drugs; thus, implying that the drugs were synergestically related. In another perspective, the drugs indicated independent action modes given that artesunate, in XTT assay, repressed HUVEC growth, while captopril in XTT array did not in the entire range of the dose. In establishing the quail egg CAN assay, the study established that a significant reduction in the surface area of the vascular chorioallantoic membranes was noted. The artesunate is shown to have an impact on the growth and structure of the blood cells as witnessed in the veins of the eggs that did not turn red. However, the formation of the blood vessels was inhibited by both drugs, significantly, as compared to the DMSO, which was the negative control. In another finding that analysed the branching of the blood vessels in quail CAM assay, measurements made revealed that the branches fractions and lengths in quail eggs treated by both artesunate and captopril significantly differed from the DMSO with the P Consequently, in testing for the synergism between the captopril and artesunate in vivo, the IC50 values for both drugs were determined for single doses. The effect of this was that a substance that was not affected by the drug, its obtained vascular area was to be 50% of the negative control. If lower than 50%, then the substances acted antagonistically, while if higher than 50%, then the substances acted synergistically. In

Gerlinger Hall Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Gerlinger Hall - Assignment Example There has is surrounded by the university street, pioneer cemetery and Gerlinger Annex. The hall was constructed within the university grounds. There is a wide open lawn on the sides of the hall. The topography of the green is fairly flat which makes it an alternative outdoor classroom. The topography is fairly flat and it features a slight crown which is used to allow for sufficient drainage to take place. The Green is set at an estimated four to five feet above the Street Sidewalk of the university. The field’s interior lawn is completely mowed. At the Northeastern edge there are a row of cypress trees. There is a grouping of native conifers at the Southeastern corner of the interior of the field. Other vegetation include wildflowers, bulbs, madrones, and California Incense cedar and Douglas firs. The southeastern edge and Northeastern edge of the field has trees which are met to provide shade to the building. This prevents entry of a lot of heat and cold. During hot weather, the shade blocks the heat from entering the building while it allows warm air to enter the Hall during cold weather. Sun exposure to the Hall is reduced due to the orientation of the building which prevents direct sunlight form the Hall. The Northeastern edge and Southeastern corner have planted trees to provide shade since those areas are prone to sunlight. The materials used in the construction of the Hall reduces the reflected glare and heat from direct sunlight. Furthermore, the Hall has incorporated enough shade into the space. Scalar adjustment mark the significant adjustment linkage between the spaces beyond and the perimeter of the Hall. The edge of the Green was adjusted in the 1969 when the Gymnasium was demolished and replaced with the Gerlinger Annex. There is a concrete path that separates Gerlinger Annex from the lane. The eastern edge is marked by the University Street defined by large conifers. The southern edge has a steep embankment with

Dreaming in Cuban Essay Example for Free

Dreaming in Cuban Essay All summer she has lived in her memories . . .. Her past, she fears, is eclipsing her present. In Celias life, it always has. Celia is caught in the folds of time. Her central memory is that of Gustavo Sierra de Armas, the married Spaniard with whom Celia, when she was a very young department store clerk in Havana, had an intense love affair that was truncated by his unannounced departure. For twenty-five years, until the triumph of the revolution, Celia writes to Gustavo on the eleventh day of each month, keeping the un-mailed letters in a satin lined box. I watch the sun rise, burning its collection of memories, she writes to Gustavo and later, Memory is a skilled seducer who hover around the mid-century of life recall the rumors of multiple seductions by the dictator at the presidential palace. For Celia, these rumors become present reality, with Celia as one of the seduced. He does not age, nor does she. In Celias reveries, memory is most often sensualized and is always infused and injected with imagination. Memory is scripted, the script becoming more real than fact. As Celias daughter Felicia will tell her son Ivanito, Imagination, like memory, can transform lies to truths . . . . The matriarch of the novels dreamers, Celia seems engaged in an eternal wait that is never concluded, never satisfied. Her life, like her time, is arrested, moving then in long, elliptical swirls like patterns drawn on the sand by her beloved sea, whose waters envelop her again and again at critical junctures, cleansing and caressing her, then depositing her once again on shore, amid the folds of time. Three generations of Cuban women dominate this marvelously told story of a family divided by politics and the Castro revolution in Cuba. Celia del Pino is the effective head of the family. She is a loyal follower of Castro who watches the beaches near her small home to protect from a surprise attack from the assumed enemies of the regime. Her daughter Felicia also remains in Cuba, but has no interest in politics and has recurring bouts of insanity but finally dies when she succumbs to a fanatical version of Cuban Santeria religion. Her sister Lourdes immigrates to the United States and exalts in her own version of the American dream becoming a successful owner of a small bakery chain. Lourdes is as bitterly anti-Castro as her mother is pro. Finally we have Pilar, daughter of Lourdes and born the very year that Castro took power. Raised in Brooklyn, but with strong feelings of her Cuban roots, Pillar is a punk artist and later musician. She is caught with a foot in both words, nostalgic for Cuba and her grandmother, but fully rooted in the cultural scene of New York City. There are other members of the del Pino family who play lesser roles and Celia’s late husband, Jorge, plays the most curious role, a bit of magic realism as he spends several years in conversation with Lourdes after he has died. Only gradually does he fade away leaving Lourdes in a position where she can finally pay a visit to her aging and dying mother in Cuba. Dreaming in Cuban is told in segments related by numerous narrative consciousnesses, usually in the third person, from time planes that move backward and forward but follow a general linear chronological direction. What we learn of Lourdes comes primarily from the third-person narrative segments devoted to her and, secondarily, from the reflections of her daughter and her mother in the sequences narrated by or devoted to them. Lourdes has passed into exile, like so many of her contemporaries in 1961, with her husband Rufino Puente and their two-year-old daughter, Pilar. Lourdes has tried to force roots into the northern soil of Brooklyn, and genuinely believes that she has done so. In fact, when they leave Miami in a secondhand Chevy, unable to bear the endless brooding over their wealth, the competition for dishwasher jobs of Rufinos family, which has been ostentatiously prominent in Havana society, it is Lourdes who insists that they move ever northward, in search of the cold. New York City, finally, is cold enough. As enterprising and dynamic as Maria de los Angeles Mina Lopez in Roberto Fernandezs much praised 1988 novel Raining Backwards, Lourdes has founded the Yankee Doodle Bakery, and in time opens a second one. A fighter and a survivor, she has prospered. Lourdes takes pride in her love of order, her practicality. A take charge person who sees right and wrong in uncomplicatedly absolute terms, Lourdes becomes a volunteer auxiliary policewoman on a neighborhood beat, slapping her nightstick over and over into her palm before she goes out on patrol. Always estranged from her distant mother, Celia, who has been sent away to Havana by her own mother, never to see her again, Lourdes feels her parental affinity is with her father, Jorge del Pino, who railed over the years in Cuba at what he termed tropical squalor and who comes to New York to die of cancer. In Cristina Garcias 1992 novel Dreaming in Cuban, Cuba is a pivotal presence. The work examines, through a wealth of female and male characters, with emphasis upon the matrilineal chain, the intense experience of Cuban ness. The island country of Cuba is portrayed from within and without, and the distance from it is measured through the fictive evocation of exile, exile once removed, and inner exile. Different views of Cuba both inspire and result from divergent exiles. I have chosen to approach the topic of Cuba as text and context in the novel through an analysis of three female characters: Lourdes del Pino Puente, a Cuban exile living in Brooklyn; her daughter Pilar, age 13 when the novel opens; and Lourdess mother, Celia del Pino, who has by choice indee insistence remained behind in Cuba, in her seaside home. In Cuba, Lourdes sister Felicia feels this unleapable distance even from her adored son Ivanito, with whom she has a powerful spiritual bond. What is he saying? his mother wonders about him. Each word is a code she must decipher, a foreign language, a streak of gunshot. Even with her boy, to whom she is more closely bound than to any other being save her mother, Felicia is unwillingly but undeniably alone. Between Ivanito and his older twin sistersstiff, unbending adherents to the regimethere is also estrangement based on language as vital posture, the sum and expression of ones stance in the world she inhabits. He will never speak his sisters language, account for his movements like a cow with a dull bell. The novels title, Dreaming in Cuban, suggests an idiom of belonging, a collective, ever imperfect antidote to isolation and estrangement. What Celia terms the morphology of survival† must always take into account the grammar of this culture specific language, Cuban. Lourdes believes herself impervious to any such considerations. Yet the sight of a lone elm set in concrete causes her to wonder if this individual is Dutch elm disease set the last of the dying species. Is it a metaphor for her own exile and separation? There are other signs as well. The New York City rivers along which Lourdes walks and patrols flow gray, absorbing the light, usually unable to return it as reflection, their color and coldness evocative of metal. Breezes from the sluggish river seem to inscribe [Lourdes] skin with metal tips. Gray is also the color of ash. Felicias third husband, falling onto the wires of a carnival ride in Cuba, turns to ash and blows northward, where he had wanted to go. For Lourdess mother, gray is also the color of memory: Memory cannot be confined . . .. Its slate gray, the color of undeveloped film. That memory has been free to follow Lourdes northward, and that she would permit it to do so is a thought she would surely deny. In her daughter Pilars memories, her mothers toucans and cockatoos, released when the revolutionaries took over the Puente hacienda, also flew north in confusiona confusion, which Lourdes emphatically rejects; she abhors all ambiguity. Yet the northern clime has inspired in her inordinate hungers. The first is an erotic appetite for Rufino, which leads her husband to install a bell in his workshop so as to be always available to her and which finally leaves him spent and weary, and the second is a concomitant craving for pecan sticky buns, which brings about a weight gain of 118 pounds. In Rufino, Lourdes is reaching for something beyond him, something he cannot give her; she may well seek in this physical union a reintegration she cannot attain, a reconnection with her remembered life left behind, with the Cuba she knew. The sticky buns, with their impossible forbidden sweetness, may be the closest Lourdes can come in exile to the sensorial bombardment, richly evoked in the pages of Dreaming in Cuban, of her island home. In Cuba, Lourdes sister Felicia feels this unleapable distance even from her adored son Ivanito, with whom she has a powerful spiritual bond. What is he saying? his mother wonders about him. Each word is a code she must decipher, a foreign language, a streak of gunshot. Even with her boy, to whom she is more closely bound than to any other being save her mother, Felicia is unwillingly but undeniably alone. Between Ivanito and his older twin sistersstiff, unbending adherents to the regimethere is also estrangement based on language as vital posture, the sum and expression of ones stance in the world she inhabits. He will never speak his sisters language, account for his movements like a cow with a dull bell. The novels title, Dreaming in Cuban, suggests an idiom of belonging, a collective, ever imperfect antidote to isolation and estrangement. What Celia terms the morphology of survival† must always take into account the grammar of this culture specific language, Cuban. Lourdes believes herself impervious to any such considerations. Yet the sight of a lone elm set in concrete causes her to wonder if this individual is Dutch elm disease set the last of the dying species. Is it a metaphor for her own exile and separation? There are other signs as well. The New York City rivers along which Lourdes walks and patrols flow gray, absorbing the light, usually unable to return it as reflection, their color and coldness evocative of metal. Breezes from the sluggish river seem to inscribe [Lourdes] skin with metal tips. Gray is also the color of ash. Felicias third husband, falling onto the wires of a carnival ride in Cuba, turns to ash and blows northward, where he had wanted to go. For Lourdess mother, gray is also the color of memory: Memory cannot be confined . . .. Its slate gray, the color of undeveloped film. That memory has been free to follow Lourdes northward, and that she would permit it to do so is a thought she would surely deny. In her daughter This is Cristina Garcia’s first novel. She was born in Havana, Cuba in 1958 but grew up in New York City. She attended Barnard College and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. She has been a correspondent for Time magazine and lives in Los Angeles with her husband Scott Brown. Works Cited 1. DREAMING IN CUBAN, By Cristina Garcia, 245 pages New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. ISBN # 0-345-38143-2

Project Development in XILINX ISE 10.1

Project Development in XILINX ISE 10.1 Chapter 4 VHDL INTRODUCTION A design engineer in electronic industry uses hardware description language to keep pace with the productivity of the competitors. With VHSIC (Very High Speed Integrated Circuits) Hardware Description Language (VHDL) we can quickly describe and synthesize circuits of several thousand gates. In addition VHDL provides the capabilities described as follows: Power and flexibility: VHDL has powerful language constructs with which to write succinct code description of complex control logic. It also has multiple levels of design description for controlling design implementation. It supports design libraries and creation of reusable components. It provides Design hierarchies to create modular designs. It is one language fort design and simulation. Device –Independent design: VHDL permits to create a design without having to first choose a device foe implementation. With one design description, we can target many device architectures. Without being familiar with it, we can optimize our design for resource or performance. It permits multiple style of design description. Portability: VHDL portability permits to simulate the same design description that we have synthesized. Simulating a large design description before synthesizing can save considerable time. As VHDL is a standard, design description can be taken from one simulator to another, one synthesis tool to another; one platform to another-means description can be used in multiple projects. Benchmarking capabilities: Device–independent design and portability allows benchmarking a design using different device architectures and different synthesis tool. We can take a complete design description and synthesize it, create logic for it, evaluate the results and finally choose the device-a Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) or a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that fits our requirements. ASIC Migration: The efficiency that VHDL generates, allows our product to hit the market quickly if it has been synthesized on a CPLD or FPGA. When production value reaches appropriate levels, VHDL facilitates the development of Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). Sometimes, the exact code used with the Programmable Logic Device (PLD) can be used with the ASIC and because VHDL is a well-defined language, we can be assured that out ASIC vendor will deliver a device with expected functionality. 4.1 VHDL DESCRIPTION In the search of a standard design and documentation for the Very High Speed Integrated Circuits (VHSIC) program, the United States Department of Defense (DOD) in 1981sponsored a workshop on Hardware Description Languages (HDL) at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In 1983, the DOD established requirements for a standard VHSIC Hardware Description Language VHDL, its environment and its software was awarded to IBM, Texas Instruments and Intermetrics corporations. VHDL 2.0 was released only after the project was begun. The language was significantly improved correcting the shortcoming of the earlier versions; VHDL 6.0 was released in 1984. VHDL 1078/1164 formally became the IEEE standard Hardware Description Language in 1987. A VHDL design is defined as an ‘entity declaration’ and as an associated ‘architecture body’. The declaration specifies its interface and is used by architecture bodies of design entities at upper levels of hierarchy. The architecture body describes the operation of a design entity by specifying its interconnection with other design entities –‘structural description,’ by its behaviour –‘behavioural description’, or by a mixture of both. The VHDL language groups, sub programs or design entities by use of packages. For customizing generic descriptions of design entities, configurations are used. VHDL also supports libraries and contains constructs for accessing packages, design entities or configurations from various libraries. 4.2 INTRODUCTION TO XILINX ISE 10.1: Create a New Project Create a new ISE project which will target the FPGA device on the Spartan-3 Startup Kit demo board. To create a new project: Select File > New Project The New Project Wizard appears. Type tutorial in the Project Name field. Enter or browse to a location (directory path) for the new project. A tutorial subdirectory is  created automatically. Verify that HDL is selected from the Top-Level Source Type list. Click Next to move to the device properties page. Fill in the properties in the table as shown below: Product Category: All Family: Spartan3 Device: XC3S200 Package: FT256 Speed Grade: -4 Top-Level Source Type: HDL Synthesis Tool: XST (VHDL/Verilog) Simulator: ISE Simulator (VHDL/Verilog) Preferred Language: Verilog (or VHDL) Verify that Enable Enhanced Design Summary is selected. Leave the default values in the remaining fields. When the table is complete, your project properties will look like the following: 7. Click Next to proceed to the Create New Source window in the New Project Wizard. At the end of the next section, your new project will be complete. Create an HDL Source In this section, you will create the top-level HDL file for your design. Determine the language that you wish to use for the tutorial. Then, continue either to the â€Å"Creating a VHDL Source† section below, or skip to the â€Å"Creating a Verilog Source† section. Creating a VHDL Source Create a VHDL source file for the project as follows: Click the New Source button in the New Project Wizard. Select VHDL Module as the source type. Type in the file name counter. Verify that the Add to project checkbox is selected. Click Next. Declare the ports for the counter design by filling in the port information as shown below: 7. Click Next, then Finish in the New Source Wizard Summary dialog box to complete the  new source file template. 8. Click Next, then Next, then Finish. The source file containing the entity/architecture pair displays in the Workspace, and the counter displays in the Source tab, as shown below: Checking the Syntax of the New Counter Module When the source files are complete, check the syntax of the design to find errors and typos. Verify that Implementation is selected from the drop-down list in the Sources window. Select the counter design source in the Sources window to display the related processes in  the Processes window. Click the â€Å"+† next to the Synthesize-XST process to expand the process group. Double-click the Check Syntax process. Note: You must correct any errors found in your source files. You can check for errors in the Console tab of the Transcript window. If you continue without valid syntax, you will not be able to simulate or synthesize your design. 5. Close the HDL file. Design Simulation Verifying Functionality using Behavioral Simulation Create a test bench waveform containing input stimulus you can use to verify the functionality of the counter module. The test bench waveform is a graphical view of a test bench. Create the test bench waveform as follows: 1. Select the counter HDL file in the Sources window. 2. Create a new test bench source by selecting Project → New Source. 3. In the New Source Wizard, select Test Bench Wave Form as the source type, and type Counter_tbw in the File Name field. 4. Click Next. 5. The Associated Source page shows that you are associating the test bench waveform with the source file counter. Click Next. 6. The Summary page shows that the source will be added to the project, and it displays the source directory, type, and name. Click Finish. 7. You need to set the clock frequency, setup time and output delay times in the Initialize. Timing dialog box before the test bench waveform editing window opens. The requirements for this design are the following: The counter must operate correctly with an input clock frequency = 25 MHz. The DIRECTION input will be valid 10 ns before the rising edge of CLOCK. The output (COUNT_OUT) must be valid 10 ns after the rising edge of CLOCK. The design requirements correspond with the values below. Fill in the fields in the Initialize Timing dialog box with the following information: Clock High Time: 20 ns. Clock Low Time: 20 ns. Input Setup Time: 10 ns. Output Valid Delay: 10 ns. Offset: 0 ns. Global signal: GSR(FPGA). Note: When GSR(FPGA) is enabled, 100 ns. is added to the Offset value automatically. 8. Click Finish to complete the timing initialization. 9. The blue shaded areas that precede the rising edge of the CLOCK correspond to the Input Setup Time in the Initialize Timing dialog box. Toggle the DIRECTION port to define the input stimulus. Note: For more accurate alignment, you can use the Zoom In and Zoom Out toolbar  buttons. 10. Save the waveform. 11. In the Sources window, select the Behavioral Simulation view to see that the test bench waveform file is automatically added to your project. 12. Close the test bench waveform. Simulating Design Functionality Verify that the counter design functions as you expect by performing behavior simulation  as follows: 1. Verify that Behavioral Simulation and counter_tbw are selected in the Sources  window. 2. In the Processes tab, click the â€Å"+† to expand the Xilinx ISE Simulator process and  double-click the Simulate Behavioral Model process. The ISE Simulator opens and runs the simulation to the end of the test bench. 3. To view your simulation results, select the Simulation tab and zoom in on the transitions. Note: You can ignore any rows that start with TX. 4. Verify that the counter is counting up and down as expected. 5. Close the simulation view. If you are prompted with the following message, â€Å"You have an  active simulation open. Are you sure you want to close it?† click Yes to continue. You have now completed simulation of your design using the ISE Simulator.

Dionysus :: essays research papers

Dionysus   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Dionysus was the most widely worshipped and popular god in ancient Greece. It's not difficult to see why; he was their god of wine, merriment, ritual dance, warm moisture, and later, civilization. He was often depicted as a handsome young man, dressed in fawnskin, and carrying a goblet and an ivy- covered staff.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Some myths hold that Dionysus was the son of Zeus--the king of the god-- and Persephone--queen of the underworld--but most myths state that he is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman named Semel. This woman Semele was not any mortal, though. She was a princess, and a beautiful one at that. Zeus was notorious for being rather prolific, and when his wife, the goddess Hera heard that he had gone off and mated with a mortal, she became quite upset. Hera, in an attempt to exact her revenge, appeared to Semele and told her to ask Zeus to appear to her in his divine form. When Zeus obliged, Semele was immediately consumed in flames, for no mortal can look upon a god in his natural state. However, Zeus saved the unborn Dionysus by sewing him up in his thigh, thus incubating him.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  What happened next is different in every story. Some myths say he lived with a king and queen loyal to Zeus until Hera discovered him, and, in a jealous rage, warped their brains. In this version of the story, Dionysus was turned into a goat by his father in an attempt to hide him from Hera; from then on he had small horns on his head.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  After he was safe, he went to live with the nymphs, who taught him to make wine. Hera eventually found him again, and this time she also warped his brain. The nymphs rejected him, and he went to live with the satyrs, who were men with goat legs and horns, and their leader Silenus. Dionysus traveled with the satyrs, who disgusted everyone they encountered with their rude, drunken behavior.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Silenus is usually portrayed as a fat drunken man who rides on an ass. He was once captured by King Midas. When Dionysus intervened, Midas freed Silenus in exchange for the power to turn all he touched into gold. Dionysus and his band eventually encountered the maenads. The maenads were a group of wild, warlike creatures. They were horribly vicious, and unfortunately, they were also incredibly stupid. They started quite a few unsuccessful wars against kingdoms in Africa.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  When Zeus finally found Dionysus again, he returned his mind to normal. However, Dionysus refused to give up his unruly traveling companions.

William Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream Essay -- Shakespeare M

William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream A Midsummer Night’s Dream could have easily been a light-hearted, whimsical comedy. Complete with a magic forest and a kingdom of fairies, it is an iconic setting for amorous escapades and scenes of lovers. But Shakespeare’s writing is never so shallow; through this romantic comedy, Shakespeare postulates an extremely cynical view of love. A Midsummer Night’s Dream becomes a commentary on the mystery of love, and lovers in general emerge shamed. Especially in the episodes among the four young Athenians, the lover is painted as a fickle creature, always changing his or her mind, and love as a passing phenomenon. Love is not an unfathomable, kind emotion, but it is ironically cruel, and by the end of the play, the concept of true love is tinged with doubt. The lover is unreliable in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is first seen in Demetrius’s treatment of Helena. As the play opens, Demetrius is already in love with Hermia, but Helena tells us that she has once been his love: For ere Demetrius look’d on Hermia’s eyne, He hail’d down oaths that he was only mine; And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt, So he dissolv’d, and show’rs of oaths did melt (1.1.242- 245). Demetrius’s oaths lose their meaning, and Helena is left with a demeaning love. However, Demetrius is not alone in his mutability; Lysander, too, quickly replaces one love with another. Though Lysander is somewhat redeemed through the use of the love potion, the fact remains that his love changes. Early in the play he says to Hermia, â€Å"[M]y heart to yours is knit, / so that but one heart we can make of it† (2.2.47-48), but later he reviles his supp... ...e deeper and more resounding than the conflicts that are resolved. Is it possible for Demetrius and Helena to live happily ever after though the love binding them is synthetic? Can Lysander and Hermia ever have a trusting relationship, knowing the fickleness of love? A Midsummer Night’s Dream has potential to be a cheerful play, but it has too many sharp edges and hard scenes to be so. The concept of love is quite convincingly questioned. Here, love is not faithful, kind, or true; it can be lost and manufactured, and is alarmingly harsh. The play ends happily, with the young people in their respective couples, but the bitter undercurrents are too strong to ignore. Works Cited Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Jerome Beaty et. al. 8th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002. 1614-1670.