Statement of purpose Personal Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 12

Of purpose - Personal Statement Example I believe a meaningful life should be all about aiming high and working hard to reach that high. Purdue University is the best university that help one realize the full potential in health and human sciences. One of the unique qualities of Purdue University is that it has accreditation to offer programs in health and human sciences and guarantees a nationally recognized degree to any person undertaking a program in this university. Secondly, the university is committed to excellence though creating, disseminating and applying knowledge in the areas of the programs offered. Thirdly, the university opens its doors to the locals, national and international citizens through providing healthy and safe working and learning conditions to the students, teachers, workers and the community in general. The university has several interdisciplinary programs, which include radiology, occupational health science, environmental health science, environmental and occupational toxicology, and medical laboratory sciences. Purdue University has academic research and training facilities that will assist in pursuing my degree. Such facilities include state of the art programs that help in preparing students to become great leaders. In addition, there are research and development programs that aids in improving the understanding of the particular area of study. The faculty that interests me in Purdue University is the faculty of occupational and environmental toxicology. The program involves the study of the adverse effects of toxic substances on people, animals, and the ecosystem. The research projects in this faculty include the research on the environmental causes of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and tremors, research on cellular toxicities caused by radiation and research on fetal origin of adult diseases due to early exposure to chemicals such as pesticides. In

Police Administration Essay Example for Free

Police Administration Essay In the general concern of police administration, strategic program evaluation is indeed important for the effectiveness of their service and function in the society. Through the thorough evaluation and analysis of their administration and programs, the police organization can understand their processes and strategies in which they can notice their challenges, pitfalls, and problems thus ensuring measures to further develop their performance and service. Another is that through evaluation, the police administration can likewise determine their strengths and advantages, which they can incorporate in their organizational development and further performance plan. Indeed, with the knowledge determined in the administration and program evaluation, the police organization can find effective solutions and strategies for the realization of further development in their function as public servants. However, for the effectiveness of the program evaluation, certain measures must be implemented to achieve the desired results and information accuracy. In this aspect, most evaluations of the police organization programs are conducted by outsiders from the said institutions who mainly represent the public sector which are the primary target of the said program. There are three reasons for this arrangement namely as inclined with humanitarian concern, neutrality view, and the awareness campaign for the fundamental characteristics of the program. Indeed, the dialogue of program evaluation by outsiders counteracting the police institutions is arranged mainly for the intention of achieving effective influence and positive results from the program for the benefit of its target namely the public sector. The arrangement placing outsiders as the evaluators of the programs and strategies of the police organizations is established based on three reasons inclined towards the effectiveness of the police function concern. The first involves humanitarian concern wherein the outside evaluation will be conducted on the perspective of its target sector and the realization of its effects on the public. In the process of outside evaluation, the examiners can thoroughly consider whether the said police program, strategy, or action will be either advantageous or detrimental to their concern. With them conducting the evaluation as the party representing the public interest, they can significantly determined if there are any abusive characteristics or grounds in the program which would be contradictory to the function and responsibility of the police department. Another reason for the said evaluation arrangement is the neutrality pursuit wherein both parties namely the police force and the public sector desire a transparent and unbiased view on the examination. Having an outside party conduct the program evaluation will result to a process free from the political nature and pressure existing inside the police organization. With this arrangement, any bias qualities inside the program can be reduced or even eliminated as both contrasting parties have reviewed and commented on the nature of the said program. The third reason for the said arrangement in police program evaluation lies in the awareness campaign and interest of the police organization. In this concern, the police group must acknowledge the presence and relevance of the public sector representation in terms of information dissemination and awareness. Manifested in the outside party evaluation, a party representing the public must be allowed to investigate and acquire knowledge regarding the program of the police organization. Having been informed of the program’s nature and characteristics, the said party can aid the public in understanding the purpose and relevance of that program thus, gaining the trust, support, and participation of the public sector. Indeed, doing the arrangement of outside party evaluation can effectively aid the interest of the program of manifesting the function of the police organization and benefit the need of the public sector. In the pursuit of achieving effectiveness in the action and performance of the police organization, programs embodying the function of the organization are created as part of their action. In the concern of achieving the beneficial interest from the police performance, the arrangement establishing outside parties to evaluate and examine the performance program of the police organization is created. This approach is developed mainly based on the reasons of humanitarian concern, transparency in the organization’s activities, and the interest of the public for awareness in the presence and activities of the police organization. In general, the development of the said arrangement as part of the procedural activity of the police organization is for the effectiveness of their function and duty of protecting the welfare of the public and promoting peace in the society.

Effects Of The One Child Policy In China Sociology Essay

Effects Of The One Child Policy In China Sociology Essay As the most populous country in the world, the Peoples Republic of China has been adopting the One-Child Policy since 1979 in order to improve the problem of overpopulation which is seen as an obstacle of the growth and development of the country. While the Chinese Government emphasizes its achievements of population control in China, the controversial policy has been widely criticized for its negative influences. This paper presents the One-Child Policys effects on the position of women. Womens position in this paper is basically defined by womens rights, freedom, respectability and social status .I will first briefly introduce the policy, then analyze both the positive and negative impacts with relevant data and statistics, and lastly come to a conclusion. The Policy and Population Growth Introduced in 1978 and implemented since 1979, the One-Child Policy is a family planning policy adopted by the Chinese Government in order to improve Chinas over-rapid population as to prevent its unfavourable effects on economic and social development of the country.(Information Office of the State Council Of the Peoples Republic of China 1995) The policy restricts married urban Chinese couples from having more than one child by imposing monetary penalties on families with extra children yet exemptions are allowed for couples who belong to ethnic minorities, live in rural area or do not have any siblings.(BBC News 2000) The One-Child Policy is considered successful in terms of its control on Chinas population growth as the birth rate in the county has been greatly decreasing since the introduction of the policy. (see Figure 1) Compared with 1970, in 1994 the birth rate dropped from 33.43 per thousand to 17.7 per thousand; the natural growth rate, from 25.83 per thousand to 11.21 per thousand; and the total fertility rate of women, from 5.81 to around 2à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦According to statistics supplied by the United Nations, Chinas population growth rate has already been markedly lower than the average level of other developing countries. (Information Office of the State Council Of the Peoples Republic of China 1995) Figure 1. Changes in the total fertility rate in China Source: National Population and Family Planning Commission of China (2006) Violation of Womens Reproductive Rights Despite its success in population control, the One-Child Policy gives rise to criticisms among which one lies in its violation of womens reproductive rights. Reproductive rights are a subset of human rights first recognized at the United Nations International Conference on Human Rights in Teheran on 13th May 1986. According to the 16th article of the Proclamation of Teheran, Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children. Dixon-Mueller (1993: 12) suggests that reproductive rights can be defined as three types: 1. the freedom to decide how many children to have and when (or whether) to have them; 2. the right to have the information and means to regulate ones fertility; 3. the right to control ones own body. Reproductive freedom is the core of individual self-determination. The One-Child Policy does not only violate womens rights by limiting the number of their children but also leads to forced abortions in the country. Under the enforced policy, every 2.4 seconds there is a woman undergoing a forced abortion in China and this makes a total of about 35,000 abortions per day. (Phillips 2010: 1) Abortion is legal in China and as reported in China Daily in 2009, 13 millions of abortions are performed in China every year, which largely exceeds those performed in other countries such as the United States and Canada. (see Figure 2). There is a direct relationship between the One-Child Policy and Chines abortion rate. PostenYaukey (1992: 290) point out that the abortion rate in China increased by nearly 50% between 1978 and 1979 when the policy started being implemented. It is widely known that abortions can cause women health problems, not to mention its negative impacts on emotional and mental health. Ms. Reggie Littlejohn, president of Womens Rights Without Frontiers, criticized that The one child policy causes more violence toward women and girls than any other policy on the face of the earth. (Jiang 2009) Figure2. Abortion statistics in China, U.S.A., U.K., Canada and Australia Source: Jiang (2009) Unwanted Daughters and Sex-Selective Abortions A saying among peasants in China goes like this:The birth of a boy is welcomed with shouts of joy and firecrackers, but when a girl is born, the neighbours say nothing(WestleyChoe 2007: 2) In spite of Chinas modernization over the past decades, it is still common for Chinese parents to prefer sons to daughters. (Wang 1999: 197) Such a preference indirectly leads to sex-selective abortions as female fetuses are usually considered less precious than male ones, especially if the couples are allowed to have only one child. With fetal screening technologies such as ultrasound, amniocentesis and chorionic villi sampling, the sex of unborn fetuses can be recognized before their birth. Such technologies and available abortions result in the possibility that couples selectively abort female fetuses in the hope of having a son instead.(WestleyChoe 2007: 3) Beside sex-selective abortions, Chinas infant mortality rate is another thing to look into. Generally the mortality of male infants is expected to be greater than that of female ones as male infants are biologically weaker than female infants.(Li, 2007: 2) This assumption is also proved by the worlds infant mortality rate by sex.(See Table 1) However, as shown in Table 2, China goes in the reverse direction. It is believed that this unusual tendency is caused by female infanticides and daughter abandonments resulting from the son preference. Table 1. Worlds infant mortality rate by sex 1980-2010 Source: United Nations Population Division (2010) Table 2. Chinas infant mortality rate by sex 1980-2010 Source: United Nations Population Division (2010) Gender Imbalance Blessing or Curse? Together with the increasing female infant mortality, there is a rising trend of the sex ratio in China since the implement of the One-Child Policy.(See Figure 3) It is estimated by the State Population and Family Planning Commission that there will be 30 million more Chinese man than Chinese women in 2020. (BBC News 2007) Because of the supply-and-demand law that supply decreases t and demand remains unchanged then the value of supply increase, some people assume that if there are less women in China their values and social status should naturally rise. However, this law would make sense only if the demand of women was high. Poon(2008) points out that when women become the minority in a male-preponderant society like China, China may face a period of unprecedented male aggression, which would likely render women as victims and womens status even more precarious and vulnerable to subjugation. Figure 3. Rising sex ratio and excess female infant mortality in China Source: Sun (2005) Womens Empowerment The Mistaken Focus It is always emphasized by the Chinese Government that the One-Child Policy helps promoting womens empowerment and improving womens position as they are freed from heavy burdens brought about by having many children(National Population and Family Planning Commission of China 2006). This claim contains two causal relations: 1) Because of the One-Child Policy women have fewer children. 2) Women have fewer children so they can spend more time on their career. Both of them make sense in a large extent, but is the One-Child Policy a must to control the number of womens children? Probably no. Despite that Hong Kong is a special administrative region of the PRC, the One-Child Policy is never implemented in the city, where the social position of women is relatively high. As shown in Figure 4, the fertility rate of Hong Kong kept dropping even and was even lower than that of China. Of course one can argue that there are various factors contributing to Hong Kongs low fertility rate, yet one can also question whether the One-Child Policy is the only factor causing the decline in fertility rate and the rise of womens position. Figure 4. Fertility rates from 1960-2005 in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and East Asia Pacific Source: The United Families International (2010) The Single Child Generation The One-Child Policy does not only aim to decrease the birthrate but also to improve the quality of the new generation, the future pillars of China. It is commonly believed that having single daughters will raise the position of women as their parents provide them with better and more concentrated resources such as education and materials. It may be true in some ways, but Greenhalgh(2007.) points out that the One-Child Policy has produced the most materially and educationally privileged generation of young people in Chinese history who are spoiled and egocentric. Having been the focus of attention from the family throughout their growing-up years, these children are more dependent on others and easily hurt psychologically.(China Daily 2005) The new single-child generation in China has already concerning Chinese from the older generation. Do better resources necessarily create a better generation? If it does not, how can we expect a decline in qualities of children (both male and fema le) will result in better positions of women? Conclusion The One-Child Policy was claimed to be a short-term measure when it was first introduced in China.(Hesketh, Li Zhu 2005) Now that the policy has already been implemented for three decades, its negative consequences eventually appear and have aroused worries from the society. The policy negatively affects womens position as it violate womens rights and enhances the existing favoritism towards male children and it is not coming to an end yet. According to Zhao Baige, deputy director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China, although it is said that the policy has been slowly being relaxed ,Chinas family-planning policy will remain unchanged until at least 2015. (Kumar 2010) (1631 words)

How Bathsheba Everdene Has Changed in the Novel Far From The Madding Cr

How Bathsheba Everdene Has Changed in the Novel Far From The Madding Crowd "Bathsheba Everdene is a changed woman by the end of this novel". By referring closely to events in the text, show to what extent you agree with this statement. In this essay I am going to be deciding to what extent that I think Bathsheba Everdene has changed in the novel 'Far From The Madding Crowd'. I will compare the two sides and reach my conclusion. I think that in the novel, in some ways Bathsheba has changed. When we first meet Bathsheba she is going to live with her aunt, and is probably dependant upon her. Then, Bathsheba inherits a farm and money. This occurrence would give Bathsheba more independence and freedom, so in that way she has changed from the start of the novel. When Bathsheba's sheep get into a field of clover, the only person who can help her is Gabriel Oak. At first Bathsheba refuses to ask Gabriel for help as they have had a row but then she does. Gabriel replies "beggars mustn't be choosers". We know that Bathsheba is a very proud, independent woman and doesn't like to ask for help, but here she swallows her pride and sends a note reading, "Do not desert me Gabriel". This must have been quite a hard thing for a stubborn person to do, and I think that earlier on in the book, Bathsheba wouldn't have been able to do such a thing. This therefore shows that Bathsheba is now more grown up and able to see the bigger picture of life. At the start of the novel, Bathsheba is very young and innocent. When Gabriel Oak proposes to Bathsheba the first time, Bathsheba says "I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband" However, at both times when Bathsheba is mar... ...ne because she is jealous that he doesn't look at her at the fair, she wants what she can't have, so when he proposes to her, she doesn't know how to let him down gently. But the second time she isn't straightforward because she doesn't want to hurt his feelings. So although she is indecisive, she does seem to develop feelings for Farmer Boldwood, as she doesn't want to hurt him in the end. After reading this novel I have decided that Bathsheba is a changed woman to some degree, but underneath she is still the same stubborn, vain girl. I think the changes that have occurred are due to her growing up and becoming a woman and I think that she has learned from her mistakes and from the experiences she has dealt with. I think any changes that have happened to Bathsheba have happened for the better as she is noticing her faults and is better because of it.

The Influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau Essay -- essays research papers

Eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau influenced many French revolutionaries with his ideas. In the time of the Enlightenment, people believed that humankind could progress and improve through the use of reason and science. One of them was French artist Jacques-Louis David, who was official artist to the French revolution (p158, Blk 3). Just as Rousseau had used his publications to reflect on his ideas, David had used art as a media to reflect the ideas and values of the society in the eighteenth century. In this essay, we will be examining the influence of Rousseau’s views on the relationship between the state and the individual in David’s painting â€Å"The Oath of the Horatii†. Rousseau’s publication, The Social Contract, states that â€Å"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains†. His belief is that everyone is equal and nobody has authority over anyone else. This was the source of the revolutionaries’ ideas (p96 Blk 3). In order to be free while ‘living in society’, Rousseau’s solution is that the individual adopts the general will. This view is also reflected in David’s painting â€Å"The Oath of the Horatii†. David’s Neoclassical style was austere and reflected on reason and the clear moral principles of Rousseau’s ideas. â€Å"The Oath of the Horatii† depicts the presenting of arms from Horatius to his sons. This demonstrates an act of patriotism as one of the brothers and the sister was related by marriage to the enemy Curiatii. He draws on the classical story by the ancient historian Livy, to reflect patriotism and selflessness. The story would have been familiar to the educated contemporaries of David, and this kind of knowledge was important to the Enlightenment (p166, Blk 3). The particular point where the brothers choose between the country and their personal desires deliberately sets people thinking about the message of patriotism. It is a representation of a kind of patriotic heroism or duty in which the best interests of society are put before those of the individual (p177, Blk 3). The brothers in choosing to go into battle, has chosen political duty over fa mily allegiance. This reflects Rousseau’s views that the individual puts aside their particular wills and adopts the general will in the interest of the state. The act of selflessness reflects Rousseau’s views of the general will. According to Rousseau, the general will is that wh... ...look on the women. This reflects Rousseau’s view that women should be passive and weak, while men should be active and strong (p96, Blk 3). David’s use of clear bold lines and the austere background seems to reflect simplicity. There is a minimum of distraction in the painting. David even removed the bases on the columns for greater simplicity (TV12). This reflects frugality in an age where luxury is being frowned upon (p.174, Blk 3). Rousseau also believes that it is wrong when people are driven by their own desires. From examining The Oath of the Horatii, it is clear that an art piece can be shaped by the ideas and values of the society and Rousseau’s views had a significant influence in the painting. Rousseau expressed his views in his publications and David had used art as a vehicle for expressing his views in visual form. No of words : 1199 Biliography Open University. Block 3: History, Classicism and Revolution. Milton Keynes: OU Press 1997 An Introduction to the Humanities. Resource Book 2. Milton Keynes: OU Press, 1997 An Introduction to the Humanities. Illustration Book TV12 – Art: A Question of Style The Open University CD5 – AC2334 Part 2 The Open University

Family Story Essay

Jayla had a difficult childhood that kept her busy. She was an African American girl living with a working class family. She had problems with her family which even increased when her parents refused to buy her vegetarian meals. She just didn’t like the taste of meat. She had a child at 16 and was forced to raise the child on her own. It was an untimely pregnancy like 88% of teen births in the US. When she was 14, she thought she had found the love of her life in a classmate of hers named Jaylin. She thought that he would help he forget about the troubled relationship with her parents which she had formerly tried by using alcohol. These risk factors increased the chance that she would get engaged in early sex. The relationship was not as great as she had thought. It showed the exchange theory when her boyfriend paid less costs in the relationship and got more rewards which was the opposite for Jayla. This caused her to have dependency issues with him. One of the rewards for Jaylin was sex. Jayla had sex because of a threat to end the relationship because she grew so attached to him that she would rather have sex than have him leave her. They only used barriers like condoms to protect her against pregnancy. She didn’t have as much of a problem with having it after a while because she was told by her parents if she was going to have sex to use protection which is common for most parents. Their attitudes demonstrated the permissiveness with affection category of Ira Reiss’ four categories. In August Jaya gave birth to her daughter who she named Rain because the rain was the only thing that seemed to calm her down after a long fight with her parents. This made Rain a part of the 39. % of unmarried births in the US. After Rain was born, it didn’t get much easier for Jayla. Her mother had forced her to take care of the child on her own without any help from other family. She was forced to drop out of high school to take care of Rain. Shortly after giving birth, Jaylin left because he said it was too much work for him to be a father. This left Jayla devastated and made her one of the 9. 9 million single mothers in the US. She faced responsibility overload trying to have enough money to pay for Rain’s needs as a child. She also had to contend with emotional overload because she didn’t have enough time to focus on her own needs. She dealt with task overload because she had to do the work of two parents almost by herself. She started going to church with Rain which is where she lost her dependency issues and it helped her refrain from sexual activity. This also made her mind more expressive which is the norm for females. Aiden’s childhood was also troubled. He was an only child who lived with a fairly wealthy family. His parents focused more on their work than they did on him. Also the family was moving constantly from place to place because of his father’s job. Aiden never had enough time to make close friendships with people because of this frequent moving around. Both of these factors caused him to develop emotional loneliness which is fewer intimate relationships than desired. This loneliness made him focus on people and their reactions which interested him. His mind mainly focused on logic and reasoning which is the average for males. When he went to college he started his studies in sociology to continue his interest in the interactions between people. This loneliness went away during college when he started going to church and interacted with fellow Christians. This church was where he met Jayla. When Jayla and Aiden met, they both could feel a connection between them. It helped their growing relationship that they were both androgynous which means they take on both feminine and masculine traits. This is because it increased their intimacy with more love, affection, and attachment to one another. They got married two and a half years after they started dating. This early marriage is quite rare nowadays. Their gender roles in the family skewed some from traditional views. Both of them helped raised the children, worked for a living, and took care of the trailer. The fact that both of the parents worked made it unlike a monolithic family. Jayla wanted to extend the family early because she wanted to have children while she had healthy eggs and have more energy to keep up with them. Her fertility was better because she was a vegetarian so it increased by eating proteins from plants and not animals. Eleven months after they were married Jayla gave birth to her second child, a baby boy named Kyle. Their relationship didn’t come without its share of problems. A while into their relationship they noticed people border patrolling against them. People were treating them like they were abnormal just because they were an interracial couple. Their relationship seemed even more abnormal because it was a white man with a black woman. Later on, Aiden was arrested for assault on Jayla’s supervisor for sexually harassing her. Her supervisor was not charged with anything because harassment is in the eye of the beholder and co-workers saw no harm in what the supervisor was doing. They just believed that Aiden was overreacting. Even worse, he lost his job as a researcher at a local university because of that. Fortunately, Jayla had completed her GED a month before this happened and was starting a full-time job to replace her part-time one. While Aiden was looking for a job, the systems theory started showing in the family. The family could not go eat out as much, everyone had to eat less expensive food, be careful how many resources they used, and buy fewer luxuries. Early in their marriage while Kyle was still very young Jayla and Aiden had intimacy problems because they forgot that they were partners before they were parents. (Pierce) They had gotten so caught up in taking care of their children that they lost sight of their own relationship with one another. They overcame this obstacle after a while. Despite their problems, Jayla and Aiden grew even closer together. They lived in what Levinger described as a full-shell marriage that was fulfilling and strong. They showed the symbolic interaction theory by being able to interpret each other’s verbal and non-verbal symbols to one another. For example, they knew when each other was â€Å"in the mood† by Aiden wanting to go to bed early and Jayla twisting her hair around her finger and constantly looking at Aiden with a smile. They would have the occasional argument, but it never became anything serious. Their arguments were never seen as a problem because it is a myth that a happily married couple doesn’t have conflict. They indulged in what they didn’t have in common as much as what they had in common. They were both surprised by how different their dreams were. Aiden’s dreams were more like action films while Jayla’s focused more on love and family. It made for very interesting conversations in their day-to-day lives. Raising children and getting older posed some adventures of its own. Both children were raised in the normal behaviors for their sex. Rain was given dolls to play with including baby dolls allowed her to pretend to be a mother. Kyle, on the other hand, was encouraged to play outside and his scrapes and bruises were not treated like a big deal which toughened him up. Conflict from within the family expanded with grandchildren because, as Durkheim says, it had become more heterogeneous. The family became more of a group of diverse individuals. Jayla was disappointed that Rain had a child before getting married which is a risk factor for a child born to a teen mother. Jayla was relieved that the father stayed with her and eventually married her. As they got even older, Aiden had to start using Viagra because his refractory period was getting to be too long that he could not have sex with Jayla as frequently as they both wanted. Though they both had their share of problems, they had a very long and successful marriage. Both of them lived well into their eighties, happy and in love.

The Black Cat

â€Å"The Black Cat† by Edgar Allan Poe is one of Poe’s greatest literary works that embodies his signature themes of death, violence, and darkness. Poe’s main character begins his narration of his horrible wrongdoings regarding them as a â€Å"series of mere household events† (Poe 705). However, this is where Poe’s satire and irony begins and the story progresses to show the deranged mindset of this character as he tries to justify his actions. As the main character proceeds to rationalize his crime, Poe is able to convey a sense of irony through his use of foreshadowing, metaphors and symbolism. Irony begins within the narrator’s introduction to his confession by telling the reader that he will tell his story but â€Å"without comment† (Poe 705). Within this same ironic tone, the narrator continues to humanize his actions and plea for justification but predicts that what he has already done has destroyed him. Poe describes how â€Å"these events have terrified–have tortured–have destroyed† him (Poe 705). Poe adds an ironic tone to the story by telling it through the narrator’s perspective. The narrator is a demented individual and the average reader cannot relate to the evil that has erupted inside him. As he begins to rationalize, there is a vast difference between the narrator and the reader leading to the irony that the man feels that this was all a normal series of misfortune. Literary critic, Richard Badenhausen, explains Poe’s decision for telling the story from the narrator’s point-of-view, â€Å"Despite pledging to tell his tale â€Å"without comment,† the narrator is constantly qualifying, correcting, and explaining, in the hope that the audience will see events from his perspective. Although he ironically announces in the opening sentence that he â€Å"neither expect[s] nor solicit[s] belief† the narrator is obsessively concerned with both activities: he hopes for understanding from his listeners and energetically pursues approval by employing the various manipulative tools of the storyteller† (Badenhausen 487). Finally, Poe also thickens the suspense of the story with the early foreshadowing that the main character feels that he may harm his wife writing, â€Å"At length, I even offered her personal violence† (Poe 706 ). The greatest metaphor throughout this tale is the black cat. While the narrator’s wife has been known to refer to the dark-haired feline as a â€Å"witch in disguise†, the metaphor for Poe is that the cat is not only a superstitious monster but it is also a metaphor for being the narrator’s own personal demon (Poe 706). The recurring events with the black cats in the story portray that they are metaphors for the narrator’s own problems that haunt him. As the series of events continue throughout the story, the cat becomes a visual element in the scene for the narrator’s recurring violence and finally brings him to the point of his insanity. Moreover, it has been argued that the cat is a metaphor for the narrator’s wife. Critics claim that the following passage raises suspicion that the killing of the first cat was actually the murder of his own wife. Poe writes: Norton Anthology American Literature. 7th. 1. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. , 2008. 705-711. Print. Critics who support this notion feel that the â€Å"reversal is substitution in wife for cat and cat for wife† and that the narrator had clearly projected his feelings for his wife onto the cat (Amper 475). Literary critic, Susan Amper, commented on this metaphor-theory, â€Å"It is not merely that the wife was always the intended victim; she was the original, in fact the only victim. Moreover, this inference provides a much more compelling reason for the narrator's substitution of cat for wife or rather twin reasons, for his pretense that he has only killed his cat serves both to ease his own sense of guilt, and to shield him from prosecution for murder (Amper 475). This theory also supports the irony that the wife’s body was decomposed after merely three-days and leaves the reader with one of Poe’s signature suspenseful, disturbing endings. The final writing element that Poe uses throughout this short story is symbolism. Readers are introduced to one of the story’s main characters, Pluto, the black cat, who supposedly provokes the narrator into committing his heinous acts of violence but is merely symbolic for the narrator’s imbedded hatred and evil. Not only is this feline symbolic for evil because of superstitions regarding black cats, the cat’s name has a deeper symbolic meaning. According to Roman Mythology, Pluto is name of the god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. This symbolic name not only represents the narrator’s cruel intentions but also provides a sense of foreshadowing. After the first black cat is slain, a second black cat appears and is unwelcomed by the narrator. According to Professor Ann Bliss from the University of California, â€Å"looks remarkably like the original except in one respect: it is marked with a patch of white that, for the narrator, increasingly comes to resemble a gallows—reminding the narrator of his violence toward the first cat and foreshadowing acts of violence to come† (Bliss 97). The white color of the patch with the offsetting black fur is also symbolic to the good and evil confliction within the narrator. Finally, the second black cat leads to the narrator allegedly murdering his wife accidently. In conclusion, Poe’s literary masterpiece, â€Å"The Black Cat† is a suspenseful story filled with irony and hidden messages and themes. Although this is a short-story, Poe skillfully provides the reader with enough evidence to make conclusions about the motive, sequence of events, and the narrator’s denial of apparent mental disorder and alcoholism that plagues him.