Analysis
The attitude which is presented by the short story is clearly anti-utopian: although there might have been a formerly honest and upright intention, namely to create a better world by avoiding everything which is unnatural and thus harmful to the environment, it is shown that everything which is driven into an extreme is negative. Another issue actualised in the short story is the appearance of the hidden side of the human nature when the controlling power vanishes.
Every political or social group which forces other people to suppress their own human needs, even if they are luxuries, destroys an important part of humankind. And since human beings are a part of this nature, which shall be preserved in the story, a restriction of human behaviour can also be interpreted as a violation of nature. A reduction to a more thoughtful and ecological behaviour towards this world would be an agreeable aim, but in a moderate and respectful way, which grants nature and human beings the possibility to bloom.
The origin of the title is probably the 1891 painting by Giovanni Segantini in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
Read more about this topic: The Punishment Of Luxury
Famous quotes containing the word analysis:
“Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)