In Gothic fiction we find different kinds of women, which embody the views of society towards women in the late nineteenth-century in England and Ireland. Thus we find strong, innocent and pure women like in Stoker’s Dracula, but also dangerous and powerful ones as we can see in Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”. However, we also could talk about some novels in which the role of women has disappeared completely, as we can appreciate in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of women in these texts, paying special attention to Stoker’s novel, and to draw an overview of how they were represented in the society of the nineteenth-century. Freeman claims in his essay “E.
“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.” ― Ezra Pound A maiden with a heart filled with hope for love, shaped and twisted into a egotistical persona of her own waking. She is doomed to tragic prospects, created by her own raging expectations of romance. The maiden is Emma Bovary, whose mind is as similar of a slave to fantasy as she is to her feminine milieu. Her ideals not only harming her own mind, but also negatively affect those around her. Emma Bovary is a victim of provincialism, an occurrence where ones exposure to fiction, or otherwise, corrupts their views on life, leaving them ignorant.
With any book, article, propaganda, etc. the hero and villain are always apparent and either praised or criticized with everything they do. Many authors write with this perspective or intent to make the writing more intriguing and to develop the reader’s opinions on how they feel towards the characters. However, there are several authors that choose a different route. Charles Dickens, an author with many award winning novels and plays from the 19th century, used a different approach when creating his characters for his writings.
The Woman in White is one of the earliest works of detective fiction with a narrative from multiple characters. Wilkie Collins was known as the best Victorian fiction writer and has combined suspense and sensation in one novel. Despite many reviews from the critics, readers loved the horror and sensation and it still holds the ability to thrill people. It was first serialised in Charles Dickens journal and became a huge success in sensational fiction. Its themes of murder, jealousy and its horrific plots interested the readers.
Moreover, they see her as some type of monster or a pathetic excuse for a person. When in actuality she is just someone who may be struggling with a mental illness, or one that was created for her. Kaysen has to deal with the stigma that exists within the outside world for the rest of her life because of her premature institutionalization by her doctor. This was a way for her family to use the medical system against Susanna and throw her into a hospital to try to turn her into a woman that they approve
Charlotte Gilman’s short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, (1899) is a text that describes how suppression of women and their confinement in domestic sphere leads to descend into insanity for escape. The story is written as diary entries of the protagonist, who is living with her husband in an old mansion for the summer. The protagonist, who remains unnamed, is suffering from post-partum depression after the birth of her child and is on ‘rest’ cure by her physician husband. In this paper, I will try to prove that ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ acts as a subversive text by portraying the protagonist’s “descent into madness” as a result of the suppression that women faced in Victorian period. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ depicts the restrains that were imposed
She knits a register of all the oppressors belonging to the ancien régime, dooming them to destruction. Her knitting is an unalterable chronicle, a grim history which records the past in a mysterious female language that only she and her sister-knitters can decipher. It forms an analogue for omniscient narration in the novel, contrasting with Dickens 's apparently more fluid and sympathetic handling of history. The knitted register produces a shock in its implicit linkage of images and emotions normally opposed in Victorian middle-class
The name Gothic refers to the emulating Gothic architecture, in which many of these stories take place. This extreme form of romanticism was very popular in England and Germany. The basic plot created many other staple Gothic generic traits, including a mystery and an ancestral curse and as well as countless trappings such as hidden passages. Walpole published the first edition disguised as a medieval romance from Italy. When Walpole admitted to his authorship in the second edition, its originally favorable reception by literary reviewers changed into rejection.
Austen's characters show the boredom that results from this nothingness. Her heroines are making a “cult or passivity, fainting and languishing dramatically on sofas, defining their virtues and beauty in terms of their physical weakness and their susceptibility to overwhelming passions”8. Austen shows in parodically way how feminine finds definition in society. Her sartire “love and freindhip” shows girls, which are only capalbe of loving a man and are so focused on “catching” the man, that they are incapable of authentic feelings. In her Juvenilia she described with over the top scenearios the boredome of women so bored that they throw themselves into adventures.
The majority of these novels portray the psychological sufferings of frustrated housewives. Women novelists reflect in their novels the predicaments of today’s women who have realized that she is helpless and not independent. Among them, Anita nair is one of the notable novelists who portrays the condition and status of women and how they suffer in the patriarchal society. The aim of this paper is to study the feminine existence in Nair’s