Female Characters in Shakespeare’s comedy and Tragedy Female Character in “The Tempest” The Tempest has only one visible female character in Miranda. Other women, such as Caliban's mother Sycorax, Miranda's mother, and Alonso's daughter Claribel, are only mentioned. Because of the small role women play in the story in comparison to other Shakespeare plays, The Tempest has not attracted much feminist criticism. Miranda is typically viewed as being completely deprived of freedom by her father
Shakespeares portrayal of female characters in the play Hamlet mirrors the way in which women were perceived in his day. The actions of the characters Ophelia and Queen Gertrude are often heavily swayed by the words of the male characters. In the play, the male characters think of the women as archetypes, who do not make choices for themselves, and thus the female characters behave as though they are helplessly caught up in the plot and unable to change their situation’s. Hamlets lover, Ophelia
Vulnerability of Female Characters The traumatic transition between the apartheid and the post apartheid period is presented in Lewis Desoto’s A Blade of Grass and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. During this period, the black Africans were beginning to assert themselves and seize power from the Caucasian minority. As a result of this shift in power, the female protagonists, Marit in A Blade of Grass and Lucy in Disgrace, experience a loss. In addition, many Caucasians including the female protagonists in
Subversive Female Characters In Alison Lurie’s “Folktale Liberation” she claims that the true folktales are subversive meaning that women and the middle class have power, they are original and clever. In the film “Grease” the main female character Sandy is exactly what Lurie would view as being beautiful, smart, and precisely the character a man would centralize as his female role. Lurie proves that the old folktales orally told to children in the past by women are much more powerful than those
The Portrayal of Female Characters in Tolkien’s Epic Series When reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s most popular work, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the lack of female characters can be noticed throughout the storyline. Having said that however, throughout the three books, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and the Return of the King, there are a number of female characters that go against the stereotypical role of women and subvert the norm of submission to a patriarchal authority. In the three
Brian Fantana Professor Smith AIID 207-04 12 December 2012 The patriarchal control over the sociocultural concept of female subservience present within Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace—a means through which the reader can indulge in the entrancing accounts of the controversial 1843 murder investigation of the Canadian maid, Grace Marks—instigated an unequal distribution of influence between genders in the favor of men, inhibiting the ability of
tied down by the conventions of her time and the society she is living in. Virginia Woolf’s quote, although referring to a certain situation, which can, however, also be extended to other aspects of life, shows in my opinion clearly her desire for female independence and freedom. This is probably the reason why she became one of the leading figures of the Women’s Movement during the so-called ‘second wave’ of liberation in the 1970s in which Woolf was re-discovered as a feminist writer and early advocate
THE ROLES OF FEMALE CHARACTERS IN DETECTIVE FICTIONS In the works of early detective fiction the roles of the characters has a more masculine nature, both “A Scandal in Bohemia” and The Maltese Falcon introduced memorable female characters Irene Adler and Brigid O’Shaughnessy. The aspect of male detective fiction is the femme fatale, a women of great beauty who is integral to the plot and who will cause or create danger for the protagonist. A femme fatale is defined as an alluring
November 2013 Nathaniel Hawthorn’s Female Characters Women have always played a huge role in men’s lives. Although the problems today in couples are not the same as hundreds of years ago, they have always occurred. One thing women will always have in common is complication in relationships. Nathaniel Hawthorne has a way of demonstrating these complications through short stories. Although there are not many female characters in Hawthorns short stories, the female that are present play a very important
The Commander is quite a complex character, as he can be seen as a man unable to decide between two worlds. On one hand, he was one of the founders of Gilead and is a pivotal figure in the regime, and yet he still enjoys and yearns for the pleasures of the old society he managed to break. This results in varied presentations of the Commander throughout the novel. You could say that the Commander has made his bed and he must lie in it, as he has helped create this society. He shows various signs