In the play A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams the character Blanche Dubois shows the characteristics of a tragic hero. In the play, Blanche is tested by suffering, forcing her to face the consequences of her actions. Blanche has many tragic flaws that can be shown through symbolism and themes throughout the play. Aristotle states that the protagonist must be of noble character - defined not by birth but rather moral choice. Aristotle also felt the best type of a tragic hero will fall somewhere between the two extremes - “... a person who is neither perfect in virtue and justice, nor one who falls into misfortune through vice and depravity, but rather, one who succumbs through some miscalculation.” According to Aristotle the characteristics of a tragic hero are to provoke sad emotions, such as pity or fear, from the audience.
Born Thomas Williams, Tennessee Williams wrote the Pulitzer prize winning play, “A Streetcar Named Desire” in which he was able to portray social realism in New Orleans through a woman who desires to be young again. Unable to accept her true fate, Blanche Dubois set the main theme in, “A Streetcar Named Desire”. Constantly lying about her age, forcing her sexuality, and her inability to overcome reality are all attempts to make herself appear more desirable to young men. Ultimately, Blanche does these things because she believes that the opposite of death is desire and that is how she will stay alive. Almost demanding to be desirable, she ultimately created her own spiritual death.
Personal happiness and social obligation are always on the opposing end of the spectrum. They can also be one in the same. Literatures written over time express social obligation over personal happiness or personal happiness over social obligation, such works include “The Love Suicides of Amijima” by Chikamatsu Monzaemon and an excerpt from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A vindication of the rights of woman”. These two stories are distinctly different in which they show more favoritism towards. Monzaemon’s play has a perpetual sadness issued by the fact that personal happiness caused the downfall of many characters.
As with all the poems in the World’s Wife, Duffy follows the form of a dramatic monologue and through the first stanza draws attention to the history of male domination and female suppression by listing famously victimized women and revealing in Mrs. Beast’s tone, bitter resentment. Mrs. Beast rejects any wish associated with the male-oriented society reflecting Duffy’s rejection of society’s pre-occupation with victimized women and keeping them silenced. Carol Ann Duffy is considered to be one of the most admirable poets because she creates existing poetry in a form that uses biblical, historical, mythical, fictional figures, whose voice have not previously been heard. This is relevant for the portrayal of the male-oriented society because famous figures like Beauty and the Beast have been mentioned in
Euripides forwards Medea’s revenge through her use of Rhetoric in her dialogue. Rhetoric is language used intended to persuade or influence another person’s decisions or ideology. Medea’s use of Rhetoric conveys her cunning and deceitful nature in the play: she appeals to the ethical standpoint of the all-female Chorus, she appeals to the emotion of Creon to persuade him and Aegeus for her own advantage. Jason’s use of Rhetoric against Medea is exposed by her argument on the ethics of marriage that he has tarnished. Medea uses Ethos, the persuasion through ethical arguments, to appeal to the female Chorus who live in a patriarchal land.
The play “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell is largely based on stereotypes. The most prevalent one explores the difference between gender roles. Glaspell exerts the repression of women in the 1900s. During that time, women were highly looked down upon by men, and were only seen as the housekeepers and child bearers. This example is displayed throughout the play with the men, however, the women in this play prove that the stereotypes of gender roles held against them are completely wrong, which is shown through the characters, set design, and symbolism.
Claude McKay structures his poem around the argument of his bittersweet relationship with America. McKay hints at the negative aspects of America while proclaiming that the unfavorable features of America are what gives him life to survive in the country. In the poem, McKay uses elements of personification, imagery, metaphors, and his choice of diction to illustrate to the audience his love-hate relationship with America. Personification is the most prominent feature of the poem, as it is used to depict America as a female. Personification is often used in literary works to animate inanimate objects by giving them human traits to help readers connect with the inanimate object.
Schlink’s narrative uses techniques to enhance the reader’s sympathy for flawed characters through using motifs and symbolism to show Hanna’s vulnerability of illiteracy, characterisation, and imagery to raise feelings of sympathy for Michael, as to how he was mistreated throughout the novel. Narration, tone and juxtaposition were also used to evoke feelings of sympathy for both Hannah and Michael after the tragedy of Hanna ending her own life. Although the narrative is constructed to only see the firsthand perspectives of the protagonists, this induces the reader’s empathy as it allows them to clearly see the thoughts and feelings of the characters. Schlink has used a variety of these literary techniques to appeal to the reader’s sympathy and allows the reader to understand the complexity and the way in which power and authority in certain situations can corrupt a
It proves its genuine precocity to allow the reader to know about the heroine’s ordeals, feelings of frustration as well as about her victimization within the oppressive patriarchal society. It displays women’s struggles to conceal the politics of gender roles of their epoch and to protest against the Law of the Father. In her discussion of Gothic tropes, Anne Williams reveals that Female Gothic falls under the rubric of a marginalised genre while identifying the critical reception of the gothic in the pre-romantic era with the categorization of women as peripherized subjects, admitting that this literary form has been “congenial” to them and pleasantly suited to their lower social position (Fleenor The Female Gothic 8). In one sense, this may have been a reaction to exclusion from the male-dominated ‘higher arts’ of poetic and philosophical discourse: the natural desire to express oneself finding a new and perhaps more congenial form from only gradually found critical respectability (The Gothic Tradition
CONCLUSION The aim through the dissertation is the study of the question of female characters in Thomas Hardy’s creativity and to consider the reasons behind his renunciation of novel writing and his choice of verse at a late age, though being well admired and more read as a novelist than as a poet. It is meant to reveal how Hardy dealt with “the woman question” in his poetry and whether he kept on defending, sympathizing and representing women especially the ‘fallen’ ones as being pure, innocent, wronged and victims of society and its double standards. In a word, the aim of the dissertation is to shed light on women and the position they held in the works of Thomas Hardy. The study was carried out under a feminist perspective. We have relied on radical feminists’ ideas, mainly those that are expressed in The Second Sex on behalf of women by the radical feminist Simone de Beauvoir whose attitudes especially towards the ‘fallen’ women are suitable to fulfill the above stated task.