The European Conference on Arts & Humanities 2016
Official Conference Proceedings

The European Conference on Arts & Humanities 2016
Official Conference Proceedings

The European Conference on Arts & Humanities 2016
Official Conference Proceedings

Literature is a powerful medium for examining justice, judgment, and society’s
treatment of humankind. “Does justice have a dark side?” Many pieces of literature
show the dark side of man’s justice, such as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which
presents a young woman being punished as an outcast while her guilty male partner
remains free. Other pieces, however, show mankind’s fight for justice as the
necessary protection of human rights and a guaranteed respect for all races, as in
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. A literary analysis of the metaphorical short
story “Caged,” with the author listed as merely anonymous, answers “Yes” to the
question of whether or not justice has a dark side. While this story exposes the
societal enslavement of women, it also examines the power of friendship. “Caged” is
a story that might be set in Colonial America, when society at the time was
powerfully patriarchal. But that might not be the author’s true purpose in writing. In
this story, the main character Charity endures the judgment of her peers and the horror
of being kept in a cage, both literally and figuratively. “Caged” works best when
viewed as a metaphorical lesson for all the ages, a lesson in how society misjudges
one another and yet the strength of real love conquers what hurt we often heap upon
other human beings in the name of justice.
Keywords: Women, Society, Judgment, Literature, Power, Love, Friendship,
Patriarchal, Freedom

Janet Crosier