Gender Roles In Gothic Literature

But despite this, there were also dark sides to the beauty: the classes, lack of women’s rights and working children. All these topics are conversed by the two famous authors Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. After reading “Persuasion” by Jane Austen, and watching two versions of “Mansfield Park” as well as “David Copperfield” and “Hysteria”, I have now decided that this essay will mainly be about equal rights between the genders and the differences between the working class and the aristocrats. In the text I will also mention socioeconomical issues and social science. My main focus will be women, how they lived, and survived, in the sexist society during the Regency era.

Through Tally, the Uglies trilogy invites readers to think about how, in YA dystopian fiction, female characters face internal struggles that are mirrored by the external challenges they face. This is important because the target audience

I believe that the critical lens that provides modern society with the most compelling view of literature is Feminist Criticism because it analyzes distrust and disloyalty among relationships, women being treated as possessions and shows the representation of powerful women. Modern society would analyze literature using a feminist perspective because most literature analyzes the relationship between genders and the powerful influence and meaning it has to the readers life. Othello is a great play to analyze with many different types of literature criticisms, but Feminist Criticism analyzes the plot and the main characters situation most. It is still so common to see many of the points presented in the book till this day, men believing that they are stronger than women and treating them as inferior. Even so women are trying to make their voice be heard and demonstrating everyday the vital impact they have in society.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, fits into a feminist lens as the text is greatly affected by the way the characters from the book are expected to act. Each character’s role correlates with their gender, and how a person of their gender is supposed to behave during the late 1800s. Women were treated unequal to men, and because of this, husbands were very oppressive to their wives as evidenced by the way Leonce treats Edna. The characters in this book are expected to submit and act according to their gender roles; in other words, males being dominant and females being subordinate. In the beginning of the text, this is the way Edna behaves; however, she transforms throughout the book and becomes a very different person as she breaks away from society’s

The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper anthropomorphizes the floral elements of the yellow wallpaper, wherein wallpaper is typically a feminine floral decoration on wall interiors. These elements signify the scrutiny Victorian society makes of lives of its womenfolk, particularly of women who are creative and insubordinate to their spouses. The protagonist is one such woman; her writing denounces her imaginative character and the surreptitious persistence of her writing denounces her matrimonial and feminine disobedience which were considered radical in her contemporary society. Gilman expresses the suppression felt by women from societal scrutiny to be one of “strangling”, through the narrator, who in one instance describes the wallpaper pattern like so: “it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads… the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!” Her anthropomorphizing of the pattern of the wallpaper adopts a grimmer facet when she writes that “when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide.” It is also significant to note that the narrator describes the pattern as suicidal because it again emphasizes the narrator’s desperate, almost suicidal, need to flee the imprisonment of the nursery and from the oppressive, male-dominant society that the room and its wallpaper represent. Asides of the pattern, there are many probable connotations of the yellow colour of the wallpaper, for instance with jaundiced illness, and also the rigid oppression of masculine sun.

In Victorian society, women had the choice between two roles: the pure woman or the fallen woman. Bram Stoker plays with these anxieties revolving around female sexuality – he follows the gothic tradition of innocent damsel in distress against looming evil. The narrative structure Stoker imploys to the text through intertextuality reveals multiple point of view distinguishing a duality in Lucy - her true self and 'thing'. In order to cope with Lucy’s worsening condition, the male authoritative figures of the text assign a duality present in Lucy to make sense of her shifting from “pure woman” to “fallen woman”. Stoker exhibits in the structure of the multi-faceted narrative how certain characters are unable to cope with the duality present

Historical Feminism Criticism Throughout Titus Andronicus we find two leading female characters, Tamora the Queen of the Goths turned Empress of Rome and Lavinia the victim of a rape symbolic of the current chaos the country is in. Through the use of a feminist along with a slight historical analysis, I will explore the importance of these character in relation to the story and to the lead character, Titus. In Douglas E. Greens “Interpreting ‘Her Martyr’d Signs’: Gender And Tragedy in Titus Andronicus.” Green 's gender analysis of Titus Andronicus, which focus on the overshadowed female protagonist. Throughout the play characters, actions and spectacles seem to be absorbed into Titus’ character including Lavinia. He states that whenever the two of them share a scene Titus seems to steal the spotlight from her and consequently downplaying her misfortunes.

Gender Separation in “Jury of Her Peers” Susan Glaspell was a woman author that developed a different genre of writing for women in her time period. She was a feminist that broke the silence that women had in the early 1900s, giving an insight into how women thought and were treated. Glaspell wasn’t what was thought to be the typical woman of her time, and she tested the idea of how a woman must act through her writings and achievements. “Her plays, stories, and novels explore universal themes that continue to be vital and challenging to readers and scholars today: themes of American identity, individuality vs. social conformity, the idealism of youth, the compromises of marriage, the disillusionments and hopes of aging” (“About Susan Glaspell.”).

This reductive literary tradition of portraying women as inherently crazy by authors is well explored in the book The Madwomen in the Attic: The Women Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. In their tome of literary criticism, Gilbert and Gubar delve deeply through a feminist rereading of many celebrated 19th century literary works by female (and male) authors and quickly came to see the challenges these female writers encountered and the mechanisms they used as to navigate the confines of such tropes out of the scholarly and literary tools left from their male writer

The Reality of Edna’s Awakening Kate Chopin’s The Awakening was a dramatic novella that was based on society and how Edna was treated, love and independence of finding her true self. The author inputs the theme in a numerous amount of literary devices that include round character, irony and a metaphor to exaggerate the theme. This shows how Edna has two sides to herself; the one that tries to fit into society and another side that the public can see as a swell mother. First of all, Edna wanted to break her place in society as she was part of the “mother- woman” status. Chopin used round character to describe Edna’s dramatic change throughout the novel as she has the “ability to publicly flirt” and go with other men, even though she was originally

Barbara Leah Harman is the writer behind an analysis on Gaskell’s work that investigates the portrayal of women’s public life in Victorian England. This concept is analysed as it relates to both the historical record as well as the literary record in accordance with several works including North and South. As Harman writes in the beginning of the abstract of her thesis, “In Victorian England, female publicity seems nearly always to have been bad publicity” (Harman 1). Later on in her thesis, Harman develops this point by writing “[Gaskell] investigates both ends of the public/private spectrum: it explores the significance of female public appearance...”. One can identify that the main point that Harman is trying to prove in her essay is this: Participation in public life compromises the clarity of a woman’s position as neutral or disinterested analyst and observer, someone to whom man can turn when he seeks to be guided by “abstract principles of right and wrong.” In the footnotes, the last bit of the thesis is derived from Sarah Lewis’ Women’s Mission.