Dark Women In George Eliot's The Mill On The Floss

The Awakening is a book written by Kate Chopin and it is quite a journey. Being just over a hundred pages in length, this novel gives an adequate picture of the protagonist Edna Pontellier, who consistently challenges the roles that society has placed on her. In her own words, she says “I would give my life for my children, but I wouldn’t give myself ” (45). This not only foreshadows her ultimate fate, but it also shows the readers that Edna is not willing to suppress her passions and desires for anybody. It appears that Chopin is making the argument in her book that Edna’s form of resistance, while admirable, comes at a price.

Sources of Edna’s suicide It is unarguable that during the 19th century women were restricted from freedom and having a mind of their own. Women were always expected to live according to society’s rules. An author, who some may consider a feminist, named Kate Chopin wrote a novel titled The awakening that capture the struggle of women and expectations put on them by society. The novel features a married woman named Edna who is in search of selfhood, independence, empowerment, and freedom but would soon realize that self-happiness would not come easy when you depend on others and your expectations of life. Kate Chopin chose an ambiguous ending for her novel which was Edna committing suicide lead many to create theories as to why she committed

Nicole Schaefer Mr. Becker American Literature October 29, 2014 Two Women for Two Different Worlds In the novel the crucible, Elizabeth, wife of John Proctor, and Abigail Williams, mistress of John Proctor are two main roles. Elizabeth, a woman who is loyal and true, or manipulative and ruthless liar, Abigail. She pretends to see spirits and commands the other girls to pretend as well. Elizabeth is the victim of Abigail’s heartless actions and affair. These two women are almost complete opposites.

Later in scene, Lady Macbeth states that if she had made such a promise as Macbeth did to her, she would “dash the brains out” of her own child as “it was smiling in her fail”. However Lady Macbeth makes it absolutely clear that if he is brave enough, it is impossible to fail. These quotes show how Lady Macbeth is controlling her husband and she proves herself be the most responsible of Duncan’s death. Some people may say that three witches are the most responsible of the death of Duncan. Macbeth never considered murdering king Duncan until he saw the prophecies of the witches.

Edith Wharton was not a typical woman, so it is safe to assume she would not produce typical work. Symbolisms role within the story plays the largest role in bringing forth her understanding of the fever but is backed up by her vivid characters and her play on ironic dialogue. She shows how an ending such as “Barbara” can become not only a play on words, but bring forth the diverse meanings, illness, hiding behind social norms put on women throughout times in

Sylvia Plath “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” (“The 15 Best Sylvia Plath Quotations” www.matchbookmag.com. Matchbook Magazine, 2011-2016). Sylvia was born in a time where women were limited on the things they could do in their lifetime. Using her own experiences with mental breakdowns and attempted suicide, Sylvia Plath portrayed her struggles in her semi autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, which was criticized for its graphic and depressing nature yet helped helped others with similar struggles.

The late 1800s contested traditional American ideals and with the ending of the Civil War came recognition of previous social injustices. Imagine growing up in a family where all of your female role models were widows. Kate Chopin was raised in a unique situation that opened her eyes to the unsatisfactory condition of women at the time, prompting her to examine and unintentionally create the Feminist movement. Although this is Chopin’s recognition point, it should be noted that while writing she only considered herself as a modern writer who never doubted the potential strength of women. The Awakening took heavy criticism at the time but later served as motivation for a new generation of women who aspired to create their own social condition

Dickens traces the private lives of a group of individuals caught in the cataclysm of the French Revolution. But what we bear in mind about this group is the centrality of women in the narrative. The characters around whom the action revolves are both Paris and London women who provide the moral climate of the group or family throughout the narrative. The women in the novel, provide men with an emotional foundation that causes the men to act for or react against what the women represent. Lucie Manette and Madame Defrage are the central female characters who ultimately put the revolutionary France and Victorian England against each other.

While on the other hand Susan Rawlings in To Room Nineteen saw suicide as her only outlet to her lack of freedom in her marriage. “Some declared the institution of marriage to be a form of slavery and thus recommended its abolition”(Somers 263). Self confidence and the outcome of standing up for yourself are the main connecting themes, Mrs. Rawlings fails to stand up towards her degrading social role, while Maya in Still I rise exceeds and flourishes in wearing the pants in her

Yet, Radcliffe’s precocity to feminise the genre is not limited to her treatment and coverage of women’s sufferings and fears. Susan Becker further explained that her “earl[iest] twists in the feminisation of the Gothic, namely [is] in the reduction of the villain, otherwise subject of the action, to a mere function in the female subject’s transcendence of ‘her proper sphere’: the home” (“Postmodern Feminine Horror” 79-80). Striving to liberate them, Radcliffe’s narratives took the shape of suspenseful mysterious narrative of Romantic journey in which the ‘travelling’ heroine-centered narrative “who moves, who acts, who copes with vicissitude,” escaped, even temporarily, from the patriarchal confining house (qtd. in Hanson 37). Radcliffe writings opened floodgates for her female successors to write within that tradition.

Kate Chopin shows this dismissal bit by bit, yet the idea of parenthood is real subject all through the novel (Chopin & Knights, 2000). Edna is battling against the societal and characteristic structures of parenthood that drive her to be characterized by her title as wife of Leonce Pontellier and mother of Raoul and Etienne Pontellier, rather than being her own, self-characterized person. Through Chopin 's attention on two other female characters, Adele Ratignolle and Mademoiselle

Through the weaving together of these voices Brennan is able to analyze Sosua from a transnational scale and chooses to draw from the tradition of ethnography in shaping her work. As George Marcus and Michael Fischer have demonstrated ethnography must be treated as a “form of representational literature”, wherein the anthropologist must “move forward by writing in the ironic mode” (Marcus & Fischer 443). In light of this information Brennan attempts to avoid literary plotting and rhetorics of romance, tragedy, and comedy by constantly reminding the viewer that “very few women ever make it out of poverty”, only some women “break even” and that some may be “worse off after coming to Sosua” (Brennan 20, 56,

Further, it was Dido’s obsessive love for Aeneas that lead to the crumbling of her new empire, as, trying hard to escape from the love she dared not tell… work hung suspended (Virgil Book IV: 87-89). Dido, defined by Virgil with ignorance and goodness of heart (Virgil Book IV: 280-283), reflected the Roman perspective of women at the time, simultaneously providing a comparison to Cleopatra and stripping her of her agency as a political power. While it was not Cleopatra’s political love affair that led to the decline of the Egyptian empire, but a range of various other mitigating factors, to