Black Hawk is talking of his experience of being beaten by warfare of the white man against his people and him being imprisoned. He suggests that is the only way to try to right the wrongs the white man has visited against him ie by resisting the white man's expansion into his territories. He considers the white man to be deceitful and only friendly in order to find a way to dupe the Indian. In fact Black Hawk would probably be very happy to see how the First Nations peoples have multiplied in recent years and obtained higher education and learned how to battle the white society in the courts and with road blocks and demonstrations etc and obtain some important land claims like the Tsilqhotin one in British Columbia, Canada.
In the Middle Ages, most people lived in villages and worked as agricultural laborers, or peasants. Every village had a “lord,” and peasants worked on his land. Much of what they produced went to the lord and his family. What little food was leftover went to support the peasants’ families. In return for their labor, the lord offered them protection. A peasant’s day usually began before sunrise and involved long hours of backbreaking work, which included plowing the land, planting seeds, and cutting the crops for harvesting. The working life of a peasant in the Middle Ages was usually demanded and exhausting.
1. Explain Mary Shelley’s use of a motif in Frankenstein and provide at least two examples of this motif from the text.
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Example 1: Passive Women Frankenstein is strikingly devoid of strong female characters. The novel is littered with passive women who suffer calmly and then expire: Caroline Beaufort is a self-sacrificing mother who dies taking care of her adopted daughter.
Example 2: Abortion
<span>The motif of abortion recurs as both Victor and the monster express their sense of the monster’s hideousness. About first seeing his creation, Victor says: “When I thought of him, I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly made.” The monster feels a similar disgust for himself: “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.”
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2. What does Frankenstein suggest about duality in life? What examples from the text can you give that relate to this theme?
<span>The Creature's duality is his ability to show love and to yearn for people who love him (as in his mountain retreat, where he fell in love with the family he helped), and his humanity. The flip side of that is his hatred for who he is and his desire to destroy his creator, Dr Victor Frankenstein when he wouldn't make another monster for his companionship. </span>
