Middle March

 This is a charming vignette of Saint Theresa of Avila as a little girl, holding her brother by the hand, going out into the country side looking for martyrdom, illustrating the “passionate, ideal nature [that demands] an epic life.” Such a girl who has a “rapturous consciousness of life beyond self” could hardly be content with a normal woman’s life. She is the type of many such women today who yearn for an expanded life but are not helped by the “tangled circumstance” of society. This tragic sort of woman in the modern world has no channel for her life force, but only a “vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood.” She is a swan among ducks and finds no fellowship.
Analysis
Eliot’s famous Prelude to Middlemarch could be the outcry of the Victorian woman, or women of any age, who have no outlet for their talents or direction for their spiritual lives. They are like the child Theresa, who nevertheless, even in a man’s world, grew up to reform a religious order. Eliot sets up an epic question: what sort of heroism is possible in the modern world, especially for women? Her main character, Dorothea Brooke, is such a modern St. Theresa.

Oliver Twist

                                                                                                 Charles Dickens

 In Oliver Twist, Oliver is born in a poor house. He's later sold to an undertaker, from whom he runs away. Oliver then has a series of adventures with the Artful Dodger, the criminal mastermind Fagin, and a woman who turns out to be his aunt.

• Oliver spends part of his childhood in a workhouse for the poor, where one day he goes up to a cook and says his famous lines, "Please, sir, may I have some more?"
  
• After he meets the Artful Dodger and the evil Fagin, he unwittingly joins their gang and becomes a pickpocket.
  
• Oliver is arrested, reprieved, kidnapped, and forced to break into the house of a woman who turns out to be his aunt. He inherits a decent sum of money and thereafter lives a respectable life.

Mourning Become Electra

                                                                      Eugene O'Neill

 The story is a retelling of the Oresteia by Aeschylus. The characters parallel characters from the ancient Greek play. For example, Agamemnon from the Oresteia becomes General Ezra Mannon. Clytemnestra becomes Christine, Orestes becomes Orin, Electra becomes Lavinia, Aegisthus becomes Adam Brant, etc. As a Greek tragedy made modern, the play features murder, adultery, incestuous love and revenge, and even a group of townspeople who function as a kind of Greek chorus. Though fate alone guides characters' actions in Greek tragedies, O'Neill's characters have motivations grounded in 1930s-era psychological theory as well. The play can easily be read from a Freudian perspective, paying attention to various characters' Oedipus complexes and Electra complexes.

Mourning Becomes Electra is divided into three plays with themes that correspond to the Oresteia trilogy. Much like Aeschylus' plays Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides, these three plays by O'Neil are titled Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted. However, these plays are normally not produced individually, but only as part of the larger trilogy. Each of these plays contains four to five acts, with only the first act of The Haunted being divided into actual scenes, and so Mourning Becomes Electra is extraordinarily lengthy for a drama. In production, it is often cut down. Also, because of the large cast size, it is not performed as often as some of O'Neill's other major plays.

The old man and the sea

                                                                  Ernest Hemingway

In The Old Man and the Sea, an aging Cuban fisherman struggles to make his living. He hasn’t caught anything for 84 days and has lost his apprentice Manolin. He finally catches an enormous marlin, but sharks gradually eat it as he attempts to bring it back to shore.

• An aging Cuban fisherman has lost his beloved young apprentice Manolin as a result, though the unhappy Manolin continues to bring Santiago food and bait.
  
• On his 85th consecutive day without catching anything, Santiago takes his boat far out into the Gulf Stream, where he finds good omens and hooks a marlin so large that it begins to pull his boat.
  
• Santiago struggles with the marlin for two days, during which time he comes to respect and admire the great fish despite his own injuries and exhaustion.
  
• On the third day, Santiago manages to harpoon the marlin—the largest he has ever seen—and secure it to the side of his boat. It will fetch an enormous price.
  
• On the return journey, sharks begin to circle, and though Santiago fights off several, his great marlin is reduced to bones by the time he returns to the harbor. Manolin cares for him, and they make plans to fish together soon.
  

The Scarlet Letter

                                                         Nathaniel Hawthorne

 The year is 1642. Boston is a Puritan settlement, and one of its citizens, Hester Prynne, is led from the prison to the scaffold to stand in judgment before the town magistrates. In her arms, she carries her infant daughter Pearl, whose birth has sparked this inquiry. On the scaffold, Hester refuses to reveal the name of the child's father. As punishment, Hester is forced to wear the scarlet letter A that marks her as an adulteress.

• Hester's long-lost husband, whom she believed to have been killed by the Native Americans, returns to Boston. No one but Hester recognizes him because he has taken the assumed name of Dr. Roger Chillingworth. He forces her to keep his identity a secret as he conducts an investigation into the identity of Pearl's father.
• Hester lives with Pearl at the edge of town while Chillingworth moves in with the beloved Reverend Dimmesdale. Recognizing Dimmesdale as Hester’s one-time lover, Chillingworth torments the guilt-stricken man for years, keeping him alive out of spite.
• Finally, Dimmesdale climbs the scaffold and reveals the letter A that he has been carving into his chest. He confesses in front of everyone, then dies of his wounds in Hester's arms. Chillingworth dies shortly thereafter, having exacted his revenge. Hester leaves Boston, only to return years later and live the rest of her days under the mark of the scarlet letter.

Home Burial

 The poem presents a few moments of charged dialogue in a strained relationship between a rural husband and wife who have lost a child. The woman is distraught after catching sight of the child’s grave through the window—and more so when her husband doesn’t immediately recognize the cause of her distress. She tries to leave the house; he importunes her to stay, for once, and share her grief with him—to give him a chance. He doesn’t understand what it is he does that offends her or why she should grieve outwardly so long. She resents him deeply for his composure, what she sees as his hard-heartedness. She vents some of her anger and frustration, and he receives it, but the distance between them remains. She opens the door to leave, as he calls after her.

Design

 The poem begins with a simple setup—the first three lines introduce us to the main characters. We have a big white spider on a white flower, poised to eat a white moth. The speaker sees this bizarre little albino meeting as some weird witches' brew, as all three are brought together for some awful reason.
That observation leads the speaker to a series of questions: Why is this flower white, when it is usually blue? What brought the spider to that particular flower? What made the moth decide to flutter by right then?
Frost concludes that if it were "design" that brought these three together, it must be some pretty dark design. In other words, it's not a comforting thought to think that God went out of his way just to make sure this moth got eaten. But that's the crucial "if" of the last line: if design does govern these small things. (What if—gulp—there's no design at all, and everything in life is just totally random occurrences?) The reader is left with just as many questions as Frost. This short poem takes a simple little thought and pushes us all the way to questioning the very nature of creation and life as we know it.