Perception of Power essays

Perception of Power essays There is a remarkable difference in the way people raised with power and those raised without power are perceived. This difference provides striking tension between these two classes of people. This tension is illustrated in both Frederick Douglasss speech What to the slave is the Fourth of July? in Negotiating Difference, and The House of the Seven Gables. In The House of Seven Gables, it is implied that Clifford killed one of his fellow Pyncheons. However, due to his family having high stature and his cousin being a judge, he was simply sentenced to life imprisonment rather than death. The young man was tried and convicted of the crime; but either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some lurking doubt in the breast of the executive, or, lastlyan argument of greater weight in a republic than it could have been under a monarchythe high respectability and political influence of the criminals connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from death to perpetual imprisonment. (7G, 26) Clifford ends up getting out of prison after spending thirty years locked away. The readers are not directly told that he was in jail; we must simply gather from the information given that the said young man in the quote is, in fact, Clifford. Without the connections that Clifford had, being a young man of opportunity, he would have undoubtably been either sentenced to death or life in prison. How he came to be released after merely thirty years is to anyones guess, but it is assumed that his so-called connections found a way for his early release. When Colonel Pyncheon died, he left a great fortune to his heirs. He also left somewhat of a legacy about a portion of land in Maine called Waldo County, where supposedly the Indians had sold him land. However, the documentation of this prophecy was nowhere to be found. His son had little of the power and ability he...