In Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier describes the epic journey home of wounded Confederate soldier Inman from Petersburg to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Inman’s physical voyage home is paralleled by the mental journey made by his sweetheart, Ada, in her transformation from ‘city girl’ into ‘mountain woman’. The story is woven around the experiences of Inman and Ada trying to rebuild their lives from the desperation and disaster of the war, all the while trying to find a way to see each other again — whilst they are so far apart. It also blends the horrors of war into their current lives, and the corruption that has scarred them forever. Inman and Ada’s respective ordeals help develop the themes of war, homeland, women and children which this essay aims to reveal. The motivation behind Inman’s desertion, when he “set his foot on the sill and stepped out of the window”, is not an issue that Frazier ever invites his readers to question.
Having been surrounded by the dying, having witnessed the horrors of the first industrialized war which pitted countryman against countryman through the eyes of Inman, one feels deep sympathy. The horrifying battle scenes further add to the sense of the impermanence of escape offered by the war: “The fighting was in the way of a dream, one where you foes are ranked against you countless and mighty. And you are weak. And yet they fall and keep falling until they are crushed.” Frazier’s somber cataloging of the horrors of war creates enormous sympathy for his protagonist’s desertion, making it eminently justifiable. Inman’s disinterest in the issues of the war serves to show the lie of the common soldier’s involvement in the war. Frazier would posit that it is the job of the common soldier just to die, and in the most inhuman way possible: ‘Inman could hear the firing, but also the slaps of balls into meat.
The Essay on Analyzing the Central Theme of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain is a tragic yet a very profound story of love, searching, and intuition which happens in an environment terrorized by war in 1864 (Buchanan). The story is set on the troubled plains and mountains of nineteenth century America where Inman, the main character, decided to leave the battlefield as he yearned and searched for his lover. In a nutshell, the story basically revolves around a ...
A man near Inman grew so excited, or perhaps so weary, that he forgot to pull the ramrod from his barrel. He fired it off and it struck a Federal in the chest. The man fell backward, and the rod stood from his body and quavered about with the last of his breathing as if he had been pierced by an unfletched arrow.’ Inman’s return home to a deeply changed place where he no longer has a role is indicative of the common fate of soldiers. What he has seen and done marks him out so distinctively from the rest of the population that he becomes an outlier both to the military and to the society he used to belong to.
There is a deep irony that Frazier chooses to kill his hero at the conclusion of his journey, after surviving so many great dangers, and yet he must die for he “had seen so many men shot in recent years that it seemed as normal to be shot as not.” Inman’s death leaves the impression that the war left him irreconcilable with his homeland, if not with himself. Inman has an enormously strong sense of pining for his home place: “After a time, though, Inman found that he had left the book and was simply performing topography of his home in his head. Cold Mountain, all its ridges and coves and watercourses, Pigeon River, Little East Falls, Sorrell Coves, Deep Gap, Five Scald Ridge. He knew their names and said them to himself like the words of like the words and spells of incantations to ward off the things one fears about most.” Inman’s idealization of his homeland is clear in this passage. However, given his experiences, while that home place may retain its physical beauty, it cannot ever remain in its idealized form. What one fears about most is his removal from the world either from death or by becoming an outsider which Inman became a victim of: “She thought that Inman had been alone too long, an outlier.” In the traditional masculine role of household management, Frazier has categorically illustrated that Inman is not required.
The Term Paper on The Effects Of Uncle Toms Cabin On The Womans Place At Home
Today, the majority of American women earn a wage outside the home, regardless of marital status, age, or race. Career Girls and Working Moms have become an accepted part of the American culture and economy. Behind our cultures acceptance of women at work outside the home is a long and complex history. Opinions about the kind of work women should do, and the meaning of that work to individual ...
The women, Ada and Ruby, are entirely self-sufficient, and his role has been relegated to that of merely a begetter of children, which is subtly suggested in the epilogue. Inman serves no purpose in his home place, despite his discussion with Ada, replete with effusive imagery of how “they would grow old together measuring time by the life spans of a succession of speckled bird dogs.” Inman’s death serves to establish Cold Mountain as Ada’s new home place. It is only in this death that Ada breaks completely with her old self. As the novel closes, the image is of a self-sufficient Ada, no longer needing a man to make her home: “She had been up on the ridge alone cutting trees in the spot where she had marked the sun setting the day before.
The log chain had kinked, and she had been trying to work loose the disordered links when the fingertip clean as snagging a tomato sucker.” At the opening of the novel, the women are polarized. The spoilt and unrealistic Ada, “in need of help” must, through Ruby’s guidance, develop into the ‘strong mountain woman’. She has to develop in light of her realization that “I am living in a new world where these are the fruits of looking even for eggs” after her defeat by the rooster. Teaching Ada to live as a subsistence farmer, to barter, Ruby then learns little by little not to be such a strongly independent figure, culminating when “he [the boy from Georgia] became her husband.” The relationship is represented in this way in the terms of their hairdressing competition where “the loser was to perform all the night work while the winner rocked on the porch and watched the sky darken and count the stars as they appeared.” The final scene of the novel is evidence to the symbiotic process of her education, where Ada’s transformation to a self-sufficient woman can be seen as complete. Frazier puts into this mixture the image of the Goat Woman, so much of an independent and self-sufficient figure that she no longer requires any human company for she can ‘pull whatever green is in season. Trap birds.
The Essay on Christmas Carol Women And Child
Queen Victoria ascended to the British throne twenty seven days after her eighteenth birthday in 1837 and brought about an age in English history known as the Victorian Era. Sir Arthur Helps, a friend of Charles Dickens once told Queen Victoria that Charles Dickens would ultimately "hereafter be closely associated with the Victorian era." (The World of Charles Dickens 105) Charles Dickens does not ...
There’s a world of food growing volunteer if you know where to look. And there’s a little town about half a day’s walk north. I go barter off cheese for taters, meal, lard and the like. Brew simples from plants and sell them.” Frazier may have intended to envisage what Ruby and Ada at the end of the novel might have become, or a lifestyle that would allow Inman to continue to live despite his own separation from society. All in all, her presence alone stands as a testament to self-sufficiency of the women in the novel.
The importance of children in the novel is shown clearly in the epilogue, where Inman’s daughter is alive, living in the homeland of her parents. The notion of children as laboring assets is present: “Ruby worked them hard and played them hard,” but there is a dichotomy with the behavior of Stob rod in his ‘raising’ of Ruby. There is a sense that through the literary knowledge of Ada, and the land knowledge of Ruby, that the children will be raised as products of a reasonably balanced education, avoiding becoming the polarized caricatures which their mothers had been before their assimilation of each others characteristics. In the light of the horrors of the Civil War, and of Inman’s death after having journeyed home, it is also spiritually important for the novel that something of worth is seen as coming from all the hardship.
There is nothing which could possibly equate with the magnitude of the birth of a child, offering hope where Inman’s wasteful death had seemed to banish it. The Odyssey, closely alluded to in Cold Mountain, imposes a multitude of trial and tribulations on Odysseus and Penelope. Inman takes on the role as the modern American hero who is irreversibly changed by the circumstances of the war, enduring ‘rainy days’ and waves of hardship to return to his sole hope-giver, Ada. The individual experiences of the young couple liken to peeling an orange; each peel unveils images of the horrors of war, the romance with one homeland, the women’s strength and of the importance of children, all of which construct the themes that soundly define the novel. BiblographyThis paper aims to discuss the themes in the story ‘Cold Mountain’, that is revealed through Inman and Ada’s respective ordeals.
The Essay on Children Life Poem War
Since the dawn of time, human beings have been in a constant struggle to survive. Whether you are a man or women, black or white, rich or poor, the hardships of life have seemed to bind us together in a very cruel world. Many poets write about poverty, envy, and the outcome of war which are just a few of the many battles people fight everyday. Poems such as 'Women Work'; , 'Richard Corey'; , and ' ...
