1. “Both ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and ‘The Bloody Chamber’ deal with the perennial feminist theme of the confinement of women in particular rooms, chambers, houses and roles”. Discuss. This is essay attempt to discuss the role of the women in literature, both about the protagonists and the authors of the stories. 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.
Lastly the actual phrases represent a feminist perspective, all phrases are extracts from some of the most renowned feminists to date, these include Harwood has written the poem under the pseudonym of Walter Lehman This suggests that Harwood had a considerable political temperament as well as an ability to poke fun or mock the social constraints of her time. Her point was about editors' prejudice against women poets, thus emphasizing her intelligence at the time, and the frustrations she must have felt within her context. In “Triste, Triste”, Harwood explores the tensions between the creative spirit and the limitations of the temporal. The concept of the artists’ imagination as a separate entity, able to transcend the
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
Compare the ways controlling characters are used in Les Grands Seigneurs and My Last Duchess Dorothy Molloy and Robert Browning, the poets of Les Grands Seigneurs and My Last Duchess respectively, both create a significant and controlling character in their poems; using similar techniques and themes to illustrate the power and dominance to portray a specific message. Firstly, both Malloy and Browning frequently embed the personal pronoun ‘my’ into their controlling characters narrative. For example, the controlling character in Les Grands Seigneurs quotes ‘men were my buttresses’ in the opening line, whilst similarly, in the opening line of My Last Duchess, ‘that’s my last duchess painted on the wall’. This use of ‘my’ enables both characters to develop a sense of possession over their loved ones to the readers immediately; thus allowing their retelling of love to their audiences to be easier. This sense of control is only further strengthened by another technique used by both poets, the regular inclusion of caesuras.
Throughout The Odyssey, written by Homer, the treatment of women plays a key role in the overall outcome of the story and is a central issue presented in this poem. In many scenarios it is evident that men are treated with superiority to women. During the era that this story was written, men played the dominant role. Society was organized, directed, and controlled by men, and it was accepted that women occupied a subservient and inferior position. Questia states, “Despite their vital role in Ancient Greek and Roman society, women were not considered full citizens and in most instances required a guardian – their fathers, and later husbands – to represent them” (“Women in Ancient Greece and Rome”).
Sylvia Plath was a poet and author who deeply and thoughtfully engaged with the period in which she lived, which was rapidly evolving and developing. This is clear in her poems “Morning Song” and “The Applicant” as well as her novel, The Bell Jar. Plath passionately challenged many social expectations, such as the expectations placed upon females as well as pressures on men – the expectations of “the perfect life”. She also challenged consumerism. Because of the way that she engaged with and challenged the changing reality of her period, her contribution to the literary world is valued most highly.
This theme has been examined through poetry by Dorothy Livesay, Robert Browning, and Adrienne Rich, who all adapt different attitudes towards this subject. However, all poets do touch on one important aspect in all of the poems. Women's roles in society are heavily influenced by outside pressures. To begin with, Dorothy Livesay examines women's roles in her poem, “The Three Emilys”. Through the voice of the speaker, Livesay complains that she feels society has pressured her into a domestic life.
In presenting her heroine's path to poetic and personal maturity, Ms. Browning not only explored the Victorian relation between gender and genre, but she also created a female literary tradition that alluded to her predecessors. Her work draws upon novels written by women, such as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), where the female protagonist's status as an orphan with a cruel aunt, proposal by St. John River, and Rochester's blindness appearing in both pieces. Another contribution to female tradition is the use of gynocentric, rather than andocentric, imagery. Barrett Browning's poem substitutes female, rather than male, types from the Old Testament, and even when describing men, uses female mythical figures for her analogies. These images and comparisons, that are driven by the poem's most serious concerns, represent an important imaginative achievement in themselves for the time.
There is much debate surrounding the ideology of women within Alfred Tennyson’s poetry. Tennyson’s work has been said to reflect his era in that women were considered inferior to men and presented as victims of a male world; female characters of nineteenth-century literature were often given weak and distant feminine voices which ultimately come to play in Mariana. However, it is also possible to speculate Tennyson’s poetry as enforcing a sense of female empowerment, demonstrating women as being proactive and heroic especially in Godiva. An example of Tennyson demonstrating women as victims of a male world is in his poem The Lady of Shalott. Tennyson presents the eponymous female character as, imprisoned in “four grey walls and four grey towers”, typically masculine images.
She is the epitome of a feminist. Through her writing, she was able to give a voice to women that felt trapped in their marriages and in society. The fact that she was able to draw from her own experiences to mold her characters made her works even stronger. Both “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour” liberate women from the constraints of society and marriage, while simultaneously drawing from Chopin’s own life. Work Cited Chopin, Kate.