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.
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. But as feminist as that may seem, is the Wife of Bath really a depiction of early feminism, or a crazy lady? While some might see the Wife as a feminist, she really is just an over-controlling woman, in her 6 times being married, reprimanding her husband
Agrippina the Younger was the third wife of Claudius and the mother of Nero. Ancient writers have perceived her as a manipulative woman, controlling her husband and doing anything to place her son Nero upon the Imperial throne. Agrippina has gone down as one of the most powerful and most ruthless women in history. However modern historians have reviewed the images of Agrippina, free from the sexual bias of the Ancient writers. The histrorian James Romm portrayed Agrippina as a woman who was simply trying to escape the restrictions imposed on her by society.
Naomi Wolf a contemporary writer at the forefront of feminist thought wrote this beautiful paragraph in her book Vagina: A New Biography, which I believe encapsulates jouissance and its struggle in our modern culture – Looking back at the landscape in all its mystery and softness, I felt a kind of smudge in my vision – which had been there for my entire conscious adult life – lift for a moment, and suddenly things sparkled. The dark, obscuring smudge, I realized in a flash, was the shame and disrespect that we assign to the feminine , and it does not just converge on the vagina, though that is its archetypal centre; it washes over the whole world, with a darkness or wrongness that colours our perception of it, and our relationship to it. How extraordinary everything looked when for a flash, an instant, it was lifted.
The European Witch Craze started roughly during conclusion of the 15th century and peaked during the first half of the seventeenth century. When it came down to it women were accused as being witches in Salem more than men and a lot of women confessed. Maybe women were being accused because of the Puritans attitudes towards women, sin, and the devil. There could be many reasons why women were accused of being witches than men. It could have been their appearance, the time, or the gender roles.
With the different personalities of the characters that tell their tale on the trip in The Canterbury Tales; the Wife of Bath has a particular nature of true femininity and power which seems to be only evident when she is married. In the beginning of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer opens with what is known as the General Prologue which takes a closer look at the wife and explains her characteristics. This prologue is filled with many people that are seen throughout the tales. Each character in the prologue is described with different traits. The Wife of Bath is described very specifically in a way that it is almost appalling.
Feminism, organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests, was a central theme in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” roles (Merriam-Webster). In the days of King Arthur, friars commonly raped women and caused them dishonor, rejecting respect for their roles. In that particular society, knights were regarded as chivalrous, righteous, and valiant individuals. It would be out of the ordinary and of course punishable for one to rape a woman. However, this is the case in The Wife of Bath’s Tale in which a young and lusty knight rapes a woman and has to pursue the answer to the Queen’s question of what women really desire.
LThe Gender Agenda “Prior to this generation, in every society ever known, the power of women has been strictly limited, which is why societies have prospered” - J.P McDermott Lady Macbeth and Julia Gillard are from two completely different time periods, yet they share something that is unmistakable. The quest for something that can never be theirs. “Unsex me here!” Lady Macbeth called out to the metaphysical forces, trying to cast away her femininity. Already, in Act 1, Sc 5 of the play of Macbeth, you can see that she's quite the controversial character. In the Elizabethan time period, women were seen as merely creatures to serve the needs and wants of men, to take care of the children and duties that go under similar categories.
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.
Similes are the most common figures of speech used in the novel; ‘…a hat which curved around her face like a materialising halo’. This light imagery is often associated with an almost religious experience as people are seen with halos like Arthur’s mother in chapters 12 and 13 and specifically in this quote, Lucy’s imagining of her mother in chapter 7. Although the language of the novel can come across as quite compelling to the audience, the overwrought lyrical prose can be quite tiring. The plot of the novel is obviously fictional with Lucy seeing her life as a series of photographs tortured into forced images by Jones, which can be hard for the HSC students to relate