The knight’s tale, an alliterative romance and one of the better-known Arthurian stories, and the wife’s tale, the best-known of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, give insight into the specific roles of women in the late Middle Ages. The two tales want the reader to determine and recognize that the women are mostly portrayed as manipulative seductresses. Many times a woman is blamed for a man’s fall from goodness to evil. Other times, the plots include women who meet the expectations of what some during the times believed women should be—more reflective to the bible, loyal to their husbands, pure, sweet, and helpless. In the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Lady Bertilak, the main female character and the most important characters in this medieval poem, is prompted by her husband to discover if Sir Gawain is pure or not.
Despite being written during patriarchal Jacobean society, the protagonist is a female, which is was highly unusual in those days. Of course this protagonist is Lady Macbeth. Throughout the play, through Lady Macbeth's actions we are forced to believe that she is evil. In contrast, the novel John Steinbeck tells a story of dreams, hopes and loneliness. We are introduced to a majorly significant and complex character, named Curley’s wife.
Three decades later, The Awakening became a classic of the American literature and the important context of feminist criticism because of its opinion in the ways that women are treated, the traditionally feminist concerns, the aspiration for love, artistry, etc. In The Awakening, Chopin adopts the point of view of the narrator about the thinking, actions, emotion and feeling of the main character and some minor characters. The reader can see the internal conflict of Edna between being the mother-woman and being an artist, between her family responsibility and her passion with Robert. “Chopin interjects her own voice into the narrative to tell the reader that Edna discovering her “relations as an individual to the world within and about her”” (Green). She shows what happening inside Edna’s thinking,
Jane Austen’s novels, specifically Northanger Abbey, have key undertones of modernity. Namely, the heroine struggles with this modernity as a passage of their bildungsroman. These struggles with modernity are relatable and help to Austen’s success throughout the 19th, 20th and now 21st century. Catherine Morland, heroine of Northanger Abbey, confronts the influence of Gothic fiction which is widely available for the female audience and she opposes the political unrest during that period; the threat of riots and war of the age. Gothic fiction became socially acceptable around the time Austen was writing Northanger.
However, I felt that it was irrelevant when the author said, “Although many female writers claim to be the ‘Queen of Crime Fiction”…” I believe this phrase could be eliminated. To simply state, “As Queen of Crime Fiction, it is Agatha Christie whom all others are measured”, the introduction would have been more powerful. The thesis was stated in the last line of the introduction; “Even many years after her death, readers appreciate Agatha Christie’s novels because of her strong characters, her interesting settings, and her strong morality”. It was a good framework for the entire essay. The most important ideas in the essay were her use of strong characters, interesting settings, and strong morality.
Further, the 1996 film The Portrait of a lady (Portrait) about a woman’s desperate choice between her autonomous, love-driven spirit and the demands of social convention encapsulates these paradigms and the struggle of women in expressing themselves. In the Victorian context, common in the literature of many was the veneer of morality that shadowed the voluptuous inner feelings of people at the time. Browning’s ‘Meeting’ is clearly indicative of the shattering of this patina and the notion of strong desire that could not be suppressed. The use of succinct sentences, “A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch” helps to create a sense of excitement in the reader and reveal
Guadalupe Ramirez Professor Colette Morrow English 442 11 May 2105 The Condemnation of Widows in Elizabethan England and in Hamlet “He that woos a maid, must fain lie and flatter. But he that woos a widow, must down with his breeches and at her.” (Foyster) Hamlet explores a very interesting and complex topic in regard to women and marriage: the widow. The Elizabethan age was somewhat unique in regard to the woman. While it still held true that women often had little choice in their spouse, the Protestant Reformation afforded women a soul and therefore moral agency. As a result, women were allowed more freedom in the Elizabethan age than in previous eras.
Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market: The female body and its different meanings. Goblin Market is Christina Rossetti's most famous work, well-loved by the critics and subject of different interpetrations.The poem, written in 1859 is the ideal field for contrasting perspectives: the woman body can be seen as a conduit to God and at the same time like herald of female sexuality in Gothic fiction. Stressed by Rossetti's good use of language, both perceptions are widely accepted even if one should consider them completely divergent. As Humphries says in his “The uncertainty of Goblin Market”: 'Rossetti's writing repeatedly pivots upon contradictions and obscurity'[1]. The composition is about two sisters 'one who falls and the other who saves'[2].
They clearly have an extremely passionate relationship and Shakespeare portrays that Lady Macbeth is willing to do whatever it takes to assist her husband. You could argue that the idea of potential power, or moving up the social hierarchy, goes to Lady Macbeth’s head and that her motivation for helping Macbeth is rather selfish-she alone wants the power. It could also be argued that the ‘fatal’, ‘gall’, ‘murdering’, ‘mischief’, ‘night’, and ‘Hell’ also support the previous point. The audience never actually meet the ‘real’ Lady Macbeth without the influence of the witches. As there is such a huge supernatural element to this scene and it is so carefully attached to Lady Macbeth in this scene, it makes me question how the Elizabethan audience would have reacted to her character.
The Wife of Bath: Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Ke$ha? What do all women want? Well I think the easier question is, what don’t women want? Now ask a guy to go and figure out what is that women want, and you may as well be sending them on a journey through hell; and that’s basically what the Knight was put through in Chaucer’s, The Wife of Bath. When the Knight finally does find out what it is that women want, he is told that it’s power over the husbands, that’s a pretty feminist statement for a time when women were still considered property.