As Vast as the Ocean

[WARNING: there are a lot of spoilers for “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde if you were thinking of reading it — which you should because it kinda eats]       Victorian England, what a time to be alive. I wouldn’t know, of course, seeing that I’m only 17 years old, not 117 years old. But that might be a good thing, seeing how the famous tale of “Alice in Wonderland” was made to condemn Victorian England’s education system that I probably would’ve been a victim of. But it wasn’t only Lewis Carroll that had something to say about good ol’ England; Oscar Wilde uses satire to criticize Victorian England’s hedonism in his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”      Aesop’s Tales may have used animals for allegories, but Wilde uses people instead. Lord Henry’s influence on Dorian Gray is representative of society’s vice corrupting the innocence of youth. Henry sees power in influence, describing that “to influence a person is to give him one’s own sou...

     My sunflower was the best toy in the world. Honestly, I don’t even know if it was a sunflower or not, but that’s what I called it, and I loved it. She had red silk triangular petals framing a yellow smiley face, with a dragonfly, a ladybug, and my favorite, a bumblebee, tied on strings around her face. One of my grandma’s old lady friends gave it to me as a baby, and even into my elementary school years I’d never gotten over it. I needed to sleep? Give her sunflower, let her play with the silky petals until she falls asleep. I needed to be motivated to do something? Steal sunflower and only give it back after I did it. I needed to be quiet at church? Let her trace the embroidered smiley face until she falls asleep on the pews. When I woke up, you would almost always see my tiny figure with mussed hair walking out of my shared room and one hand dragging Sunflower on the ground behind me.        Sunflower was always there for me.. until she was...

I am an eight-year-old girl, and at the moment, I’d like to be anything else. Getting lectured by my aunt for grazing my sister while play-fighting is anything but pleasant, but even at that time, I’m left wondering why my male cousins are getting let off the hook yet again for beating each other to a pulp. In that moment, and many others like it, I am reminded again of the oddly universal truth: boys will be boys. But how long can this go on until they become men? In today’s society, it seems that the answer is never, seeing how even after nearly a decade, nothing has changed between my male cousins and me. They get away with their games, and we are punished for our crimes. The term “boy” by definition is “a male child,” but it seems that the term is growing more and more synonymous with “blameless,” boys’ actions, large or small, being dismissed simply because it was assumed that they would figure things out on their own, and it was natural behavior for boys to act out of place. But ...