Naguib Mahfouz made the reader understand the suffering of the women in our society. He tried to show us the tragic position that the young girl had in the short story "The Answer Is No". Also he succeeded in analyzing the psychology of the young girl, and how she could overcome the trap that the man put her in. The short story is entitled "The Answer Is No" because the young girl revolted against the male-dominated society, her weakness, and also to the future love and the past that she had by saying "NO". When she was raped, she didn't understand what had happened to her, and she was shocked and every inch of her body was trembling.
Different from other women, who obey men and follow orders, Shelley represents Safie as a rebellious female figure in an attempt to convey her hostility toward sexism. Safie’s strength is shown when she disregards her father and escape to join Felix instead. Because of Safie’s mutinous characteristic, Safie is able to criticize a male dominant society where women’s rights are often neglected. Furthermore, Shelley argues that confinement is nauseating because it is a form of oppression toward women. Victor’s two years of alienation between himself and society during his process of creating the monster parallel the period of a woman’s confinement before labor.
Another disturbing revelation about her childhood was that Aileen had sexual relations at a young age, but with her brother Keith. One man who testified in court admitted that he lost his virginity to her, but right after he brother Keith was done having sex with Aileen. This disturbing issue revealed that there was a high probability that Aileen was molested by her closest relatives, and was psychologically reduced to a whore at a very young age. The social trait theory proves that her environment was not only unsupportive but also very dangerous at her once tender age. She was rejected, exposed, and abused to the point where it was a norm.
The act of rape itself is brutal, repulsive, and can leave one scared for the rest of their life. A rapist takes their victims feeling of protection and dignity. When such a cruel act like this occurs and results in a child, it is not an act of love, or even negligence, but rather, that act of violence made flesh. If a woman decides to keep that child, she will always be torn between the love of a mother for her child and the remembrance of the man who brutalized her. Women who are alcoholics and/or drug addicts become pregnant as well.
The courts now acknowledge evidence of the “battered woman syndrome” in order to prove increasing effects of abuse. At first glance it appeared that for a female to use violence as an act of defense would be an empowering action, such as an abused woman who murders her abuser. Further examination of this notion reveals that females who murder their abusers are functioning under the same male-dominated system that promotes violence. As a result, the act of murder can’t be feminist because feminism aspires to end patriarchal
The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” details the struggle that women continue to face through male dominance and domestic violence by way of psychological abuse. Her story is centered on the detail of a woman’s captivity by her husband in order to improve her mental well being. The woman’s thoughts, emotions and imagination all play a vital role in discovering what is causing her state of mental incompetence. Occurring in the late 1800’s, the women’s suffrage movement had not yet occurred. Women were still viewed as being inferior to men and did not have a voice to air their concerns or displeasure.
This power structure is kept strong by making failures out of oneself and taking away any independence the women may have including the wives. The handmaids are raped and forced into childbirth and the wives are equally imprisoned because they are married to the masterminds of such a hideous society. I cannot imagine living is a society where my choice to have a child is stolen from me. Society that will punish with death or torture if I decide to rebel against child birth. Birth is a gift given to a woman’s body from GOD.
Celie is a woman who from the young age of 14 was raped, had to children by her daddy, and lost her mother. Nobody in the world loves Celie but her sister Nettie. To Celie’s dismay Nettie has to run away after being nearly raped by her father, and Celie’s new husband known as Mr.____. Mr.____ continuously beats and emotionally abuses Celie through the story. Celie begins to fall in love with Shug Avery Mr.____'s mistress who is known as the towns whore while this happens Mr._____'s eldest son Harpo falls in love with Sofia.
It wallpaper traps the narrator as she comes to identify with, and later become, the woman in the wallpaper. Her own identity is stripped away by society and is forced to bend to what society wishes the perfect “woman” to be. It acts as a domestic sphere that society had been trying to stuff women, regardless if they fit, into. The wallpaper that traps women and strangles them when they crawl about trying to find a way out is the same as the society that punishes women who wish to escape the domestic sphere and develop as a person with a distinct personality and identity. This mold that the wallpaper and society is trying to force the women living behind its bars to fit into (strangling off the parts that stick out) is what drives women like the narrator into wishing for escape from the prison.
Gwen Harwood chooses to represent social institutions in a negative light because often in Gwen Harwood’s poems, women are portrayed as victims of the social circumstances of the 1950s and in the past as well. But Harwood sometimes chooses to take a different view and instead has the women either fight against the male dominant character, choosing to be more than just the mans possession or be an independent women who has ambitions and determination to be successful and not necessarily just be a mother. By placing the man as the dominant sex that provides for the family, and the women as the housewives and mothers, she gives the reader a view of how people were in the 1950s, and then adds a twist of the women dismissing this accepted behavior to express her opinion of such issues. Gwen Harwood’s work frequently focuses on woman being demoralised by society’s practices that reduce her to a lesser being. A common worldwide value that Harwood rejects as the normality in life with her poems.