the enlightenment dbq essay

Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Enlightenment — Enlightenment Dbq

Enlightenment Dbq

• Categories: Enlightenment Progress Reason

About this sample

Words: 538 |

Published: Mar 19, 2024

Words: 538 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Introduction:, i. the quest for reason:, ii. the triumph of individualism:, iii. the pursuit of progress:, iv. the enlightenment's impact on society:, conclusion:.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr. Heisenberg

Verified writer

• Expert in: Philosophy Science Life

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

1 pages / 441 words

2 pages / 764 words

2 pages / 739 words

1 pages / 389 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was a period of intelligence and growth. During the Enligtenment, people started to believe that all men were free people. The declaration of rights of Man states “men are born free and are equal in rights.” [...]

The Declaration of Independence stands as a testament to the enduring principles and values upon which the United States was founded. At its core, this historical document reflects the profound impact of the Enlightenment period [...]

The Enlightenment and Romanticism were two important intellectual movements that emerged in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. Despite their differences in ideologies and goals, both movements aimed to challenge the [...]

The Enlightenment era, also known as the Age of Reason, was a period of intellectual and cultural growth that spanned from the late 17th century to the early 19th century. During this time, there was a renewed interest in [...]

The Enlightenment which also known as The Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 18th Century. The Enlightenment or the Century of Philosophy, [...]

The spirit of the Age of Enlightenment is embodied in our texts with examples of reason, equality for all, and rationality. Moliere’s Tartuffe and The Love Suicides at Amijima by Chikamatsu Mon’ Zaemon both show these [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Advertisement

Supported by

In Drizzly England, a Tale of Sex, God and Celestial Bodies

In the latest novel from the “Essex Serpent” author Sarah Perry, astronomy and religion collide with unrequited romance under gray British skies.

• Share full article

By David Leavitt

David Leavitt is the author, most recently, of the novel “Shelter in Place.” He is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Florida.

• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

ENLIGHTENMENT, by Sarah Perry

No country takes as much pride in its own dismal climate as England. In “Enlightenment,” Sarah Perry’s aggressively English new novel, the word “weather” appears 50 times. Twenty-two times, including in the opening sentence, the weather is “bad.” Once it is “stormy,” once “unsettled,” once “disrespectful,” once “troubled” and once “English” (“the nothingness of English weather”).

On the other hand, the weather is “good” only five times, “fine” once, “mild” once and once “good for hunting.” Its sunny title notwithstanding, “Enlightenment” has an unremitting cloud cover hanging over it that seems to be as much generated as suffered by its protagonists, like the storm cloud that follows poor Joe Btfsplk all through Al Capp’s comic strip “Li’l Abner.” Yet who is the author of these private discontents? Is it God? Is it other people? Or is it the sufferers themselves?

“Enlightenment” is an abundant novel, not easy to summarize. Set in Perry’s native Essex (“the drab colors of the Essex soil,” “the sullen Essex clay”), it involves a plenitude of characters, most of them affiliated with Bethesda, a strict Baptist church in the fictional town of Aldleigh, and has two major plots that are loosely threaded together. In the first of these, Thomas Hart, a secretly gay author of little-read novels and local-color newspaper columns, enters into an improbable friendship with Grace Macaulay, the almost feral daughter of Bethesda’s pastor. In the second, a 19th-century Romanian astronomer named Maria Vaduva discovers a comet.

As “Enlightenment” moves, in decade-long leaps, from 1997 to 2007 and finally on to 2017, Thomas finds himself becoming increasingly obsessed with Maria, whom he believes to be the “Lowlands ghost” of local legend, and who has left behind a trail of evidentiary breadcrumbs that have a maddening habit of disappearing, being stolen or catching on fire. Soon Grace becomes caught up in Thomas’s pursuit of the enigmatic Maria, as do James Bower, the affable museum curator with whom Thomas has fallen hopelessly in love, and Nathan (he is given no last name), the weed-smoking maladroit with whom Grace has fallen hopelessly in love.

It goes without saying that neither of these loves is requited; in Thomas’s case it’s because James is straight (improbably, it takes Thomas 10 years to discover that he has a wife), and in Grace’s it’s because Thomas, ostensibly for her own good, has contrived to separate her from Nathan.

Betrayal is, to borrow a phrase from Muriel Spark, a “big theme” in “Enlightenment,” which also has a lot to say about God, goodness and celestial bodies. It’s told from a celestial height by an orotund if unnamed narrator, who moves fluidly among the points of view of at least half a dozen characters (including a fox), intermittently addresses Thomas by name (“Look then, Thomas Hart: the car not 10 yards from the station, windscreen smeared with the distorting rain…”) and even puts Grace on trial in a court of morals that brings to mind the heavenly tribunal before which David Niven must plead in the 1946 film “A Matter of Life and Death.”

For me, the most affecting figure in “Enlightenment” is Thomas Hart. (Perry almost always refers to him by his full name.) Beset by a desire for other men that he feels can never be reconciled with his faith, Thomas survives “by dividing his nature from his soul; so he left his nature in London on the station platform, and picked up his soul in Aldleigh as if it were left luggage.” Of partners and gay friends, he has had no shortage, though many of them, by 1997, have died of AIDS: “the dispensing chemist, horn player, failed architect, teacher of Romance languages, plasterer, bad cyclist, schoolboy, exhausted proprietor of a Wanstead cafe, all in the end wanting a pillow between the knees for comfort lying down, and a small view of birds.”

Yet to his own surprise, it is in Aldleigh where he encounters James, the great love of his life who remains, for most of his own life, oblivious to the passion he has inspired in Thomas, whom he regards purely as a chum and fellow researcher.

That story, as it happens, provides the germ for Thomas’s fourth novel, “The Horse and Rider” (“dedicated for J.B.: His Book ”), which brings him, at 58, unexpected literary acclaim, and impels him to spend the next decade working on a follow-up that he doubts he will ever finish.

In a metafictional flourish, Perry cracks but does not quite break the fourth wall by having Thomas give this unfinished novel the same first line that she gives her own — “Monday: late winter, bad weather” — and jot in his notebook three possible titles: “On the Motion of Bodies in Orbit,” “Enlightenment” and “The Baptists.”

Which, if any, will he choose? If asked, I’d plump for “The Baptists,” a leaner title for a leaner novel — Muriel Spark lean. To quote the very British Basil Fawlty, “Too much of a good thing always leaves one wanting less, I always find.”

ENLIGHTENMENT | By Sarah Perry | Mariner Books | 384 pp. | $28

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

New Orleans is a thriving hub for festivals, music and Creole cuisine. The novelist Maurice Carlos Ruffin shared books that capture the city’s many cultural influences .

Joseph O’Neill’s fiction incorporates his real-world interests in ways that can surprise even him. His latest novel, “Godwin,” is about an adrift hero searching for a soccer superstar .

Keila Shaheen’s self-published best seller book, “The Shadow Work Journal,” shows how radically book sales and marketing have been changed by TikTok .

John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Nonny Hogrogian, illustrator of children’s folk tales and fables, dies at 92

Ms. Hogrogian often explored her Armenian heritage for stories and inspiration.

Nonny Hogrogian, an artist and book illustrator whose sturdy woodcut images and dreamy watercolor washes have entranced children since the 1950s in stories that included folk tales from her Armenian heritage, died May 9 at a hospital in Holyoke, Mass. She was 92.

The cause was cancer, said her husband, David Kherdian, a poet and writer.

Ms. Hogrogian (pronounced ho-GROH-gee-an) was widely credited with helping widen the cultural breadth of children’s literature. She celebrated Armenian stories and experiences, including food, festivals and musical instruments, at a time when the genre in the U.S. marketplace had less ethnic diversity.

Yet her career, spanning more than 60 books, also helped retell traditional fables from other countries including a 19th-century German story about a kindly man and a pear tree in 1969’s “Sir Ribbeck of Ribbeck of Havelland” and a Scottish folk song recast into verse in “Always Room for One More” (1965), about a poor villager with unlimited hospitality for strangers.

The book , written by Sorche Nic Leodhas (a pen name of author Leclaire Alger ), was awarded the Caldecott Medal , one of the highest honors in children’s literature, whose winners include classics such as “Where the Wild Things Are,” by Maurice Sendak in 1964, and “Make Way for Ducklings,” by Robert McCloskey in 1942.

To evoke the earthy colors and village life in the Scottish Highlands, Ms. Hogrogian decided to experiment beyond the black-and-white boldness of woodcuts. She crafted a landscape of translucent pastels and villagers rendered in lively lines and crosshatch shading.

“Woodcuts, long my favorite medium, were too strong for the gentle folk in the heather,” she said. “So I pulled out my watercolors and chalks, some ink and a pen, and before long, in an almost effortless way, the drawings seemed to flow.”

In 1972, Ms. Hogrogian received the Caldecott Medal a second time, for “One Fine Day,” her 1971 story inspired by an Armenian folk tale about a fox’s quest to have his tail restored after it was cut off by an old woman. “In the beginning, I was telling all Armenian stories that my grandmother had told me,” Ms. Hogrogian recalled in a 2016 interview. “That was pretty simple for me.”

Her husband, also of Armenian background, became a frequent collaborator on books exploring their shared heritage. In “The Golden Bracelet” (1998), written by Kherdian, she crafted intricate scenes of feudal Armenian life in the retelling of a folk tale about a peasant girl who demands that her suitor, a prince, learn a useful skill before she will marry him.

She took on other projects of stories that were already part of the children’s canon, including adaptations of “Cinderella” in 1981 and “The Glass Mountain” in 1985. She received a Caldecott Honor, given to distinguished runners-up, for “ The Contest” (1976), another Armenian folk tale in which two thieves compete for the hand of a woman.

Despite her acclaim, Ms. Hogrogian noted that she was her own harshest critic.

“I am always dissatisfied with my work,” she wrote in a biographical essay, “always left with the feeling that I must try harder the next time.”

‘Prove them wrong’

May Hogrogian was born on May 7, 1932, in the Bronx to parents who had fled the Armenian genocide — the Ottoman Empire’s campaign of slaughter and displacement against ethnic Armenians during World War I.

Her father was a photoengraver, and her mother did seamstress work and other jobs from home. An uncle gave her the lifelong nickname “Nonny” when she was a child.

Nonny’s parents painted and sketched in their spare time. She decided to seek a coveted spot at New York’s renown High School of Music & Art. She gathered some of her drawings for the interview and test.

“When I arrived, a shock set in,” she wrote in “Finding My Name,” a 2004 autobiography. “I was the only one there with a skimpy envelope of doodles and drawings. All the other young people had large black portfolios with prescribed artwork in them. They had obviously been coached and had properly prepared for their exam.”

Stress overwhelmed her during a drawing assignment, and she did not earn a place in the school. “There was a growing outrage from their saying that this was a test of talent,” she wrote. “I know I had talent. I would prove them wrong.”

Ms. Hogrogian studied fine arts at Hunter College in Manhattan, graduating in 1953. She took a job designing book jackets at William Morrow and, in 1958, became a production assistant in children’s books at the publishing house Thomas Y. Crowell. There, she illustrated her first children’s book , “King of the Kerry Fair” (1962), written by Nicolette Meredith.

In the early 1970s, she agreed to illustrate a book of poems, “Homage to Adana,” by Kherdian. They later met at a literary event and were married in 1971.

The couple moved frequently around the United States, including spending seven years in rural Oregon at a compound with other followers of the late George Ivanovich Gurdjieff , a self-proclaimed enlightenment mystic born in what is now Armenia and who died in 1949. (Ms. Hogrogian’s 2002 children’s book , “The Tiger of Turkestan,” uses a rebellious tiger as an analogy for Gurdjieff’s life story.)

Ms. Hogrogian and her husband moved to Armenia after the 2016 U.S. presidential election and returned to the United States after Ms. Hogrogian sustained a back injury. They had no children. Kherdian was her only close survivor.

Ms. Hogrogian never forgot the sting of rejection from the High School of Music & Art. In speeches and interviews, she often encouraged aspiring artists and others to trust in their own dreams.

“Do it. You just have to push your way in,” Hogrogian said. “There’s always going to be people who tell you that you have no talent.”