ipl-logo

Misogyny In Rip Van Winkle And The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

584 Words3 Pages

Misogyny is the dislike of, contempt for, or prejudice of women; Washington Irving has been accused of misogyny because of the treatment of women in his stories and their content. Washington Irving was a writer during the 1800’s, and some of his most popular works include “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Within these tales and other works of Irving’s, aspects of misogyny is discernible, though there is debate about whether the author himself was a misogynist. I believe that the misogyny that is shown throughout a select few of Irving’s works is due in part to the time period, not entirely Irving, himself. During the 1800’s, women were not seen as equals or even close to being considered equal to men. Women were expected to stay at home and take of the house and the children. With almost no rights available to them, women were solely dependent on men. Consequently, these things …show more content…

The other stories belittle marriage and women slightly, while “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is all about a man’s conquest of the women he wants to marry. Without any criticizing or contempt, Irving tells of a school teacher who is tenacious about marrying a student of his. Throughout the entire story, misogyny is not present, which makes me hesitant about calling Irving a misogynist. If he really held those views, why exclude them from one story? Washington Irving’s stories make it seem indisputable that he was a misogynist. Nevertheless, I feel that when you take into consideration his time period in which he lived, you cannot say that idea was just one he held alone. With women expected to take on a background role in society and conflicts between spouses, it makes sense that the stories would take on these concepts as well. While I believe that while Washington Irving may have held slight misogynistic views, or views against marriage, I do not believe that he was solely to

Show More
Related
304 Words | 2 Pages

In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Woolf explicates the patriarchal system which evokes male dominance over women making them inferior in every aspect. She writes about some real-life encounters of gender discrimination she faced while exploring her thesis that for a woman to write fiction, she must have intellectual as well financial freedom. She makes use of logos, ethos, and pathos to make her argument more appealing to the readers. According to Aristotle, ethos is the most compelling factor out of three mentioned above because it appeals to one’s ethics, morals, and values. Therefore it is important for a writer to establish credibility early in the text.

Read More
487 Words | 2 Pages

In the 1800’s women were expected to do all of the housework, take care, and educate children, while men were out doing labor work. Women were trying to find their freedom during this time while still doing their jobs. The Cult of Domesticity was important because it showed the tradition of women which was staying at home and doing all of the housework. They did not have the same rights as men did and were not allowed to do many things, such as voting. During this Market Revolution, the economy had changed in a way that most people made things to sell and used that money to buy what they needed.

Read More
128 Words | 1 Pages

In an age of double standards, people try to pick out everything and anything that can be offending. The offense in this particular situation is misogyny. In plenty of Washington Irving’s books, the message portrayed about women is usually negative. The main women are usually abusive, hateful, as well as uncooperative. Though plenty of people in today’s society view Irving as a misogynist, I do not.

Read More
624 Words | 3 Pages

This “Utopian” society seems to still struggle with gender equality. Huxley demonstrates several instances throughout the novel in which women are portrayed as sexual objects, and even deemed as the bad ones. Brave New World begins with a class of students who are being toured around by the director of the facility. Much like that classroom and most top positions it appears that women are not as valued as men.

Read More
795 Words | 4 Pages

Hannah Webster Foster formulates a tale that, on the surface, appears as a novel warning women against seduction, a common theme of the times. Marriage was seen as a necessity for women who desired financial stability and status, and being sexually seduced by a man would not provide a woman with these needs. Thus, the warnings against seduction and romanization of marriage were rampant. Upon further examination however, The Coquette has strong feminist undertones calling women towards the American ideal of freedom. This new nation claimed to be built upon the rock of freedom, while simultaneously oppressing women.

Read More
855 Words | 4 Pages

In Washington Irving’s short stories, he shows many ways of criticizing feminism. This could be due to the way he was raised or even his relationships with women. In the short stories The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle and The Devil and Tom Walker, Washington Irvin shows his critiques of feminism and how it could be improved. In the short story, The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irvin comments on feminism in many ways.

Read More
387 Words | 2 Pages

Women in the 1600s to the 1800s were very harshly treated. They were seen as objects rather than people. They were stay-at-home women because people didn’t trust them to hold jobs. They were seen as little or weak. Women living in this time period had to have their fathers choose their husbands.

Read More
221 Words | 1 Pages

In Rip Van Winkle, in regards to the Nature of Marriage, I believe Irving exhibits sexism in many ways, perhaps without meaning to. For example, since the perspective and protagonist is male, the reader is then expected to adopt a position of hostility or indifference towards the main female in the story. This story is just one example in American Literature of how women are often portrayed through misogyny. It can be inferred that this story expresses the inherent male desire to escape from confrontation and responsibilities that one must handle when dealing with sex and marriage, among various other types of relationships. While this desire is easily applicable to both men and women, this desire is predominantly made male.

Read More
1622 Words | 7 Pages

Women had no rights when it came to working and since they didn’t have rights not many women got employed. Also, the jobs that were available were not for women and if mill owners decided to hire women they would go and hire immigrant women instead. The reason they would hire these immigrant women was because they accepted any amount of money so the owners of the mill would make more profit than they would if they paid American women to work for them. However, if a women did get a job they would normally get paid less than men did since they weren’t seen as equal to them and the conditions were usually not the best. Since there were no laws against discrimination in the 1800’s there was nothing an American women could do to demand the equality they deserved in the workforce.

Read More
1295 Words | 6 Pages

The Unnamed Woman Up until the 1900’s woman had few rights, thus they relied heavily on men. Women could not vote, they could not own their own property, and very few worked. Women’s jobs were solely to care for children and take care of the home. Women during this time, typically accepted their roles in society and the economy ( “Progressive Era to New Era, 1900-1909”).

Read More
769 Words | 4 Pages

Unfortunately we still have some gender inequality issues almost as common as the brave new world society. As I said, in the novel there wasn’t superiors who were women and in my society it isn’t any different, we have yet to experience a women becoming a president. In both of our societies we are looked as sex objects not for the same reason but they both lead to it; My society’s reason is how women are often looked at as sex objects because of the attire and just even the fact that much as the men do. Women aren’t viewed as highly and as great as the men do in both

Read More
1223 Words | 5 Pages

Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, seeks to portray the reality hidden beneath the social exterior of the ‘happy American Family’ of the 1950s, and aims to expose the dysfunctional relationships, often concealed behind an outwardly happy marriage. Albee has created a plot where his characters are immersed in peeling the veneers of pretension off one another and where truth and illusion are engaged in a continuous battle. The eponymous jingle, which is repeated many times in the play, is a parody of a children’s ditty and seeks to convey the fear associated with confronting the difference between illusion and reality. The name of the modernist author “Virginia Woolf” replaces the original reference to the big bad wolf as Albee wishes to find out “who’s afraid of living life without illusions” (Flanagan). Being an Absurdist, Albee believed that illusions often generate a false content for a person’s life and hence, should be abandoned ("Edward Albee: Who 's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?").

Read More
1706 Words | 7 Pages

1. Introduction According to Louis Rubin, Jr., Gone with the Wind is “the best-selling popular historical novel ever published in America” (81). The book “received the annual award of the American Booksellers Association (now the American Book Award) and the Pulitzer Prize” (Jones “Tomorrow” 315). Despite these awards and a wide appreciation among its reading audience, the novel has not won considerable popularity among literary critics (Adams 61; Burt 577).

Read More
1349 Words | 6 Pages

How does Henrik Ibsen use characterisation to criticise the patriarchal society of the time? How does Henrik Ibsen use the progressive characterisation of Nora to criticise the patriarchal society of the time? Intro Henrik Ibsen’s

Read More
156 Words | 1 Pages

In Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” she states secondary sources she reads about woman are “worthless”. The secondary sources consist of books about women, written by men. This means the sources are interpretations of primary resources. Primary sources comprise of authentic narrative concerning an incident. So the secondary sources Virginia Woolf was reading were biased.

Read More

More about Misogyny In Rip Van Winkle And The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

Open Document