ipl-logo

How Lady Gregory Defies Gender Expectations

1345 Words6 Pages

How Lady Gregory Defies Gender Expectations
The role of the theatre during the Irish Literary Revival was central to Irish cultural nationalism and the political dynamics at the start of the 20th century. As a playwright and a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory created the backbone of the group that drove Irish cultural identity towards a more nationalist outlook. Yet as an Irish nationalist, her participation in political causes was often muted - not because of her political views, but because of her gender. Though Lady Gregory played a large part in the literary revival during the Irish nationalist movement, she was wary of rekindling a past that was built upon the oppression of women. Using the play Grania, Lady Gregory explores …show more content…

In the article, Lady Gregory’s Grania: A Feminist Voice, author Maureen Waters discusses Lady Gregory’s early life and its impact on writing Grania and other works. Lady Gregory negatively characterizes her childhood years as silent, cold, and bound with strict religious discipline. To recover from a life that was often suffocated by others, she “created the means to insert herself into history” (Waters 24), and therefore explores concepts of self definition and representation. Through the multiple drafts of Lady Gregory’s Grania, Lady Gregory develops the concept of the eponymous female character, Grania. In Lady Gregory’s earlier drafts, Grania is protrayed the conventional innocent female, who is dependent on males, and who wants to remain in a secure environment. However, Gregory began to focus on Grania 's “...precise recognition of the common root of jealousy and egotism that unites Finn and Diarmuid.” (Waters 14). Grania’s epiphany reflects Lady Gregory’s personal response against the cliches regarding femininity. This recognition, is a key element in Grania’s transformation in the final version as a heroine. Later in the play, Waters suggests that Grania becomes an authority figure. Stunned

Show More
Related

  • Gender Roles In The House On Mango Street By Sandra Cisneros

    243 Words  | 1 Pages

    In The House on Mango Street, written by Sandra Cisneros, the main character, Esperanza, begins a silent fight against gender roles. As a woman, she is expected to be quiet and polite. Esperanza, a passionate young girl, desires to be stronger than that. Esperanza is young, but she already sees what she is meant to be in life.

    Read More

  • The Birth Mark Analysis Essay

    523 Words  | 3 Pages

    Hawthorne’s use of mirrors reflects on the beauty of Georgiana. While she stares at her reflection in the polished metal plate she is too concerned with how the

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In The Canterbury Tales

    1395 Words  | 6 Pages

    Gender Roles: Interpreting The Opposite Sex In today’s society men and women are often expected to perform different tasks, and occupy different roles based on their sex. Within different cultures, the view of how women and men should act and interact varies with political and religious influences, as well as personal influences. Geoffrey Chaucer suggests that people’s ability to understand the opposite sex is divided because of the stereotypes set in society for the opposite genders. Women are more likely to work as secretaries, and men are likely expected to work as managers and executives in the working field.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

    1691 Words  | 7 Pages

    In Charlotte Brontë 's, Jane Eyre, we see a reversal of gender roles for both Mr. Rochester and Jane. In multiple scenes of the book the two switch back and forth from their “natural” roles, which ends up benefiting the two. In the story, Mr. Rochester, the big burly owner of Thornfield, occasionally drops his natural patriarchal role to become a feminine character. Jane also does this as she takes on a more masculine role from time to time, and drops her feminine complacency. While usually both characters dropping their gender-specific roles could turn out bad, in this story, dropping the stereotypical gender roles by blurring them leads to happiness by the end of the story.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In A Thousand Splendid Suns

    878 Words  | 4 Pages

    Equality of genders is a basic human right that all should posses. However, in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, the reader explores Afghanistan’s true nature of extreme gender inequality towards women and how it affects all the characters within the novel. The novel explores how within a marriage, women have unequal rights, undergo major amounts of physical abuse, and are emotionally and mentally tormented by their very own supposedly beloved husbands. A marriage is defined as a union of two people as partners in a personal relationship.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

    374 Words  | 2 Pages

    Term gender role is described as a set of social norms of what types of behaviors are generally considered acceptable, appropriate or desirable for a person based on their sex ussualy centered around opposing conceptions of femininity and masculinity. Gender roles traditionally were often divided into distinct feminine and masculine gender roles, until especially the twentieth century when these roles diversified into many different acceptable male or female roles in modernized countries throughout the world. Gender roles are closely linked with gender stereotypes.

    Read More

  • Portrayal Of Women In The Great Gatsby

    2439 Words  | 10 Pages

    F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, is full of themes of wealth, love, and tragedy. Also during the time this book was written, women’s suffrage had begun, so women were taking their first steps towards equality with men. The three main women characters in the novel: Daisy Buchanan, Myrtle Wilson, and Jordan Baker, all have things in common but can be vastly different; they reflect the view of women in the early 20th century. The Great Gatsby portrays the characters Daisy, Myrtle, and Jordan as stereotypes of women during the 1920s, seen in their behavior, beliefs, and their ultimate fate.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In The Play Trifles

    1001 Words  | 5 Pages

    Trifles the Challenge The play, Trifles, places both men and women in sharp contrast to one another in relationship to their roles and social position in the society. While men occupy the important positions such as the Sherriff and the county attorney, women are basically attributed to no more than playing domestic roles. Indeed, even in the investigation of Mr. Wright’s murder, men are playing the core role of investigators while women are simply left in the kitchen to play the minor of collecting things requested by Mrs. Wrights. The social stereotypes of men playing important roles than women in the society is set and advanced by the setting of the play.

    Read More

  • Gender Differences In Susan Glaspell's Trifles

    1795 Words  | 8 Pages

    Section 1: Introduction Susan Glaspell’s Trifles is a play about the effect of gender differences on perceptions of duty, law, and justice. The play Trifles was a murder mystery that got investigated by the County Attorney (George Henderson), the Sheriff (Henry Peters) along with his wife (Mrs. Peters), and a neighbor farmer (Lewis Hale) with his wife (Mrs. Hale). The story took place in an isolated farm house that was miles from the rest of the community in the Midwest. The victim of this murder mystery was John Wright as he was found dead with a rope around this neck.

    Read More

  • The Cult Of True Womanhood Analysis

    2199 Words  | 9 Pages

    She has been brainwashed by the patriarchal society of her time to worship the man, her husband, and perform her duties and daily rituals as a means to please him. Welter outlines several characteristics that constitute the perfect or true woman; however, the most crucial and detrimental so-called “virtues” exhibited by Gilman`s the narrator are her submissiveness and domesticity. Although the artistic narrator clearly has her own desires to be free and write as she pleases, her desire to satisfy the patriarchal construct of the household by attending

    Read More

  • Feminism In The Great Gatsby And Their Eyes Were Watching God

    1844 Words  | 8 Pages

    Eras are remembered by wars, civil rights, legislation, and popular culture. In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, the role of women in society are significant motifs. Little Women was written and set in the 1860’s at the same time as the development of the women's rights movement within the United States. The Great Gatsby and Their Eyes Were Watching God are both set in the 1920s when women gained the right to vote and therefore women's rights should have evolved from those featured in Little Women. The goal of this essay is to attempt to determine if literature arising simultaneously to the feminist movement parallels laws passed.

    Read More

  • A Critical Analysis Of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca

    826 Words  | 4 Pages

    Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca has captivated audiences since its initial release in 1938. Upon its initial publication, the novel did not receive the kind of critical acclaim one might expect from a novel with the commercial success at the time of its first publication and with such lasting influence. Sally Beauman writes in the afterword to the novel that while “some critics acknowledged the book’s haunting power and its vice-like narrative grip, but — perhaps misled by the book’s presentation, or prejudiced by the gender of the author — they delved no deeper” (Beauman 431). The novel was not merely overlooked, however. With the novel following the “the archetypal scenario for all those mildly thrilling romantic encounters between a scowling Byronic hero (who owns a gloomy mansion) and a trembling heroine (who can’t quite figure out the mansion’s floorplan)” (Gilbert and Gubar 337), it was and often continues to be seen as a rewriting of Jane Eyre into a more modern timeframe.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In The Glass Menagerie

    891 Words  | 4 Pages

    Trophies are not always made of gold, or even placed on a high pedestal. That’s right, housewives can be trophies as well (at least, that’s what men thought during the early 20th century). Unless they wore an apron, had food in hand, and maintained an hourglass figure, society forced women to believe that this was the only way the could be housewives, and deserved to be married to a husband. Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie featured Amanda Wingfield, a housewife that is unfortunately a victim of societal pressures.

    Read More

  • Gender In A Doll's House By Henrik Ibsen

    1283 Words  | 6 Pages

    Gender representation is a theme in which is common when focusing on the form and content of both Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godott. Even though they are represented in different manners they both highlight the gender norms during the time period they were written. Within Beckett’s writings masculinity is prominent, centralizing the powerful and protruding gender focal point. Whereas Ibsen includes the female perspective and allows the readers to become aware of the gender representation as such.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Synge's In The Shadow Of The Glen

    4869 Words  | 20 Pages

    Such revivalists hardly knew the peasants they tried to present in their work so that they could construct them as per the idealization, inside the noble realm of poverty and suffering. Dublin audience did not know exactly – and did not want to know the real Irish. So that they created in their minds an idealized version of Irish peasant which was promoted by the plays of the Irish National Theatre Society, such as W. B. Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), or Douglas Hyde’s Irish-language plays. As a result of this blind idealization, Synge’s works were attacked for the actual presentation of Irish folks as they are. Breaking the very expectation of the Dublin audience about the portrayal of characters, his characters did not fit to the idealized ones.

    Read More

More about How Lady Gregory Defies Gender Expectations

Open Document