She shows how women can only be categorised as either an angel or a whore. It shows the way that women can only be judged at the time. She also frequently alludes to the “bad” women in literature to show how women could only be categorised in those binary opposites like Lady Macbeth or Eve. She uses rhetorical devices to explain how bad women are needed to disrupt the static order which is Patriarchy. Atwood also shows her opposition to the extreme feminism that existed in her time where feminism was influencing the creation of literature at the time.
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.
A Literary Analysis of Julia Alvarez’s Novel ¡Yo! The character of Yolanda Garcia, also called as Yo, in Julia Alvarez’s novel has a lot of different facets to her. She can be analyzed either as a woman, or as a role model. Yo wrote a fictional novel that makes the characters out of the people who knows her and people she knows. As a result, those people found themselves a little expose and decided to tell their own side story about her.
Description In Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey, Lillian Eileen Doherty shows us that the attitude of Odysseus, as well as of the Odyssey, is highly ambivalent toward women. Odysseus rewards supportive female characters by treating them as privileged members of the audience for his own tales. At the same time, dangerous female narrators--who threaten to disrupt or revise the hero's story--are discredited by the narrative framework in which their stories appear. Siren Songs synthesizes audience-oriented and narratological approaches, and examines the relationships among three kinds of audiences: internal, implied, and actual. The author prefaces her own reading of the Odyssey with an analysis of the issues posed by the earlier feminist readings on which she builds.
Though, when actually examined, the females portrayed in both literary works do show signs of bravery and rebellious spirit, which represents the actual mind of authors, they are still oppressed by the patriarchal society to a large extent. In Frankenstein, superficially, most female characters are portrayed as “heaven-sent” angels (Shelley, 34). The soul of them is like “a shrine-dedicated lamp” and they are “the living spirits of love to soften and attract” (38), which are fully consistent with the image of women in people’s minds in mainstream society in the 19th century (Sunstein, 4). Nonetheless, the weaknesses of them, which are used by the author to criticize the unfairness of the society, cannot be neglected. The two main female characters in Frankenstein: Caroline and Elizabeth are carefully analyzed in this essay, and from Frankenstein’s narration of them, we can see the author’s deep thinking and criticism about the unfairness of society.
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.
These caused the post modern versions of her stories to adopt dualisms of combining sexual desires with naivety and give alternative interpretations that perhaps the male characters suffered victimisation instead. Within “The Bloody Chamber”, based on the fairy tale of Blue Beard, the dualism Carter builds is evident in the young girls’ character. Firstly, the fairytale depictions portray the girl as innocent, weak and naive with the use of lexis such as “girlhood”, “bony hips, my nervous pianist’s fingers” and “I thought I must truly love him” – therefore conforming to the gender constructs of gothic literature. Nonetheless, Carter’s use of sexually explicit language such as “young girl’s pointed breasts” and “now teasingly caressed me, egregious, insinuating, nudging between my thighs” provides the character with a sexually adventurous nature, and as a result the story moves away from the usual depictions of women and thus gothic conventions. Carter’s use of the narrative in first person gives a foresight into the girl’s mind, therefore suggesting due to the hyperbolic and romanticising language of “that magic place” when describing her wedding night that she is not entirely victimised by the male character but by
As an example two influential short stories will be discussed in depth in order to shed light into the lives of the two authors and their stories. The short stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) and Angela Carter (1940–1992) both sideway the same idea; the confinement of women in particular roles and positions in both personal and professional lives, posed on them by patriarchal figures. Toril Moi quotes in her examination of feministic criticism, Sexual/Textual Politics (2002), Elaine Showalter’s idea that “women writers should not be studied as a distinct group on the assumption that they write alike, or even display stylistic resemblances distinctively feminine” (Moi, 2002: 49), which comes across when reading the two stories which are stylistically already very different. It might be so that a feminist reader of both times (there’s some 80 years difference between the two stories) did not only want to see her own experiences mirrored in fiction, but strived to identify with strong, impressive female characters (Moi, 2002: 46), and looked for role-models that would instil positive sense of feminine identity by portraying women as self-actualising strong identities who were not dependent on men (Moi, 2002, 46). The two stories bring out two female characters, very different by position and character; the other a new mother, scared and confused of her own role, and the other a young newly-wed girl, still a child, being fouled by a much older man, mainly as a mark of his authority over women in general.
For example, the word “butterface”, which means overall the woman is attractive “but her face”. Today’s media is barraging women with images of what they are supposed to look like. Examples like these lead women to feel incomplete and inferior because she can never be perfect and completely secure in her
These different opinions are present in the personalities of the women characters’ personalities and their actions. This theme is present in both pieces of literature. In The Crucible by Arthur Miller, Arthur Miller creates the character of Abigail Williams. His creation of Abigail Williams “reinforces stereotypes of femme fatales” (Schissel). By doing this