This essay will argue that In both texts motherhood and marriage is shown to be a hindrance to both women’s careers and their female identity. The theme of marriage in The Bell Jar and Top Girls Is shown to demolish the female identity of the women. In The Bell Jar Plath uses Buddy as a symbolic figure to show how even the “clean” men of that time were only out for one
(http://www.zelo.com/firstnames/) It's a bit ironic compared to the Alison in the story, considering she has been having an affair with a man that her husband is renting a room to. The name Alison being given to this character is a cover up of who she truly is; just as she is tricking her husband, she is also tricking readers into thinking she is an honest, noble person. Her name goes to better exemplify how everything about Alison is not what it appears to be. Alison’s relationships with others are very complex. Alison and her husband do not have the typical loving marriage; he is many years her senior and she is basically a trophy wife to him.
Annie feels as though her mother is not trust worthy: “ Why, I wonder, didn’t I see the hypocrite in my mother when, over the years, she said that she loved me and could hardly live with out me, while at the same time proposing and arranging separation after separation, including this one. […](Kincaid 89) Annie thinks her mother wants her completely gone from her life. She does not trust that her mother truly loves her and will miss her. She believes that since her mother is the one who set up this separation, she is not as truthful and loving as Annie once believed. Similarly, Lairds sister also felt her mother was not trustworthy: “ My mother I felt was not to be trusted.”(Munro 50) Lairds sister was unwillingly forced by her mother, to stay in the house all day and fill countless jars with various fruits, instead of being outside in the fields with her father doing the work she loved.
The universal truth behind this story is that the innate differences between men and women coupled with lack of communication will cause a marriage to stagnate and become an uneasy compromise. Insensitive and inconsiderate of his wife's feelings, Michael openly admits his attraction to other women. Frances wants to know his true feelings and he gives them to her cold, "I got all this stuff accumulated in me because I've been thinking about it for ten years and now you've asked for it and here it is." (7) He does not acknowledge his wife's despair; he knows he is wrong and yet he feels righteous because so far it has only been a physical attraction. Michael blithely dismisses his wife's pleas for reassurance.
Racism is such an touchy subject. What initially started off as a simple conversation between lovers escalated and greatly affected the couple's relationship. Another, In conclusion, the Husband All and All, the most obvious attributes that nd the Husband share are stubbornness and inconsideration towards others ideologies. For instance, every-time another character brought up a valid point they shot it down, wouldn't conform,and stuck to their own ideas. This is displayed throughout the story It its clear that they are both afraid of change Bailey didn’t want to somewhere new and the husband didn't believe in interracial relationships.
From the first few lines of conversation between the Bennets, Austen shows the reader that theirs is not a happy marriage, nor a marriage of equality. Their marriage was based on a need for money and social status not a marriage reached through love or even any such feeling towards one another. As well as it not being a loving relationship, Mr and Mrs Bennet have completely different personalities. Mr Bennet seems to be an intellectual man who likes to sit quietly and read, whereas Mrs Bennet gives the impression of being slightly eccentric and focuses solely on getting her daughters married. Austen tells us that Mr Bennet was “a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic, humour, reserve and caprice”, where Mrs Bennet is “a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper”.
Miss Austen’s body of work is rife with flawed parent-child relationships. For our Heroines, marriage was the only escape. In this essay I will review the parent figures in Persuasion, Emma, and Pride and Prejudice. Anne and Emma are motherless, and while both girls are burdened by ineffective juvenile fathers, their households couldn’t differ more. Manheimer believes that although ‘standard rhetoric’ would render a motherless child vulnerable, “nineteenth century novels resound with the success of orphans” (533), and though this could be true for Emma Woodhouse it was certainly not beneficial to Anne Elliot.
Virginia Woolf was a person that went through tough times and suffered break downs within her own insanity which were probably caused by her family life. Her Mother Father and Sister all dying within a short space of time, she claimed to be haunted by voices often masculine which would explain her constant attack of the Victorian male culture and imperialistic traits. What Virginia Woolf does so well is convey everyday reality into a form that is unreachable by so many authors. To The Lighthouse is a text in which in all honesty nothing much happens, but the way in which she describes this nothingness is genius and often somewhat offensive to some subcultures. For example her portrayal of Mr Ramsay who relies on his intellectual ability and Edwardian views.
Both women are contrasting representations of Hedda. From the opening of the play her [Hedda’s] relationship with Aunt Julie is a strained one. Hedda views Aunt Julie as a symbol of what she herself loathes and could at the same time could quite easily become. Aunt Julie epitomises the idea of the domestic, dutiful woman with no true purpose of her own. She instead finds her purpose through the lives of the male characters and the arguably mediocre success that Tessman has had.
However both authors also use methods to counter act this view such as the use of imperative verbs in regards to the women giving orders. Women are portrayed as having a lack of knowledge in both novels. In ‘Pride and Prejudice’ this is often shown through the character of Mrs Bennet, who struggles to understand her husband. Mrs Bennet’s character is described through Jane Austen’s authorial intervention, who describes her mind as ‘less difficult develop’ and explicates how even ‘three-and twenty years had been insufficient to make [Mrs Bennet] understand’ her husband’s character. Here, Austen as the omniscient narrator is directly manipulating the reader to perceive that a man’s judgment and intelligence is greater than that of a woman’s and also sets the readers up to distrust the character judgement of Mrs Bennet throughout the novel.