As chapter 1 has shown, lesbian literature has been evolving from earlier work by Sappho, where lesbianism in poetry is ambiguous, to Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (1928) where gender and sexuality are more outspokenly presented and brought to the surface. This chapter, as well as the following, will present a case study that shows a certain way of portraying lesbian identities and stereotypes. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) by Jeanette Winterson, published at a time when gender and sexuality became a topic of interest in British popular culture (Bentley, 108). As Bentley states in Contemporary British Fiction (2008) the novel reacts to this sudden interest in gender and sexuality by “breaking down and challenging prescribed attitudes (especially religious ones) to sexuality and to the role of the nuclear family in the maintaining established gender roles” (108). Before moving on to exploring how Oranges pushes back against these normative gender roles and what stereotypes Winterson uses in the novel, I will present some general information on the author and the novel.
Jeanette Winterson was born in 1959 in Manchester. She was adopted into the Winterson family when her biological mother was unable to take care of her nine other siblings. She was raised in Accrington with her adoptive parents, who were Pentecostals: which are “a religious evangelical group who read the Bible more or less literally, and believe in the Second Coming of Christ and the End of the
How is the separation of lovers and its consequences presented in the extract? This extract of Flora Macdonald Mayors ' novel, 'The rectors daughter ', develops the theme of hedonism being extingished by the misfortune of unrequited love, through the perspective of a middle aged woman of the 1920 's. Mary Jocelyn, the stories narrator, aims to persue the man of her desires, however his absence of affection is prominant in this extract when we discover his devotion to another woman. This extract is significant to the era, as newly upcoming 'flapper girls ' encouraged a future of female independence and open sexuality, but this segment leaves connotations that not all women took this lifestyle by storm, and still remained unsatisfied as a woman when unaccompanied by a husband, as shown through Mary 's characterisation in the text. Throughout the excerpt, the consequences faced by the separation of lovers is evident to leave a negative effect on the person on the receaving end.
Even to this day, shame about one’s sexual orientation remains a prominent topic. Whether one identified themselves as gay, lesbian, and transgender, society viewed them and their actions as a sin, a crime, and a disease, which only increased the amount of shame–a painful feeling of distress or humiliation caused by the consciousness of wrong or fooling behavior–they saw within themselves. Then changes began to occur as a group of gays, lesbians, and transgender people confronted police in an event known as the Stonewall Riots or the Stonewall Uprising, which became a turning point for gay liberation. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a 1980s, family tragicomic-graphic memoir that addresses this perspective turning point through the use of the labyrinth
3. Explore how Hurston uses elements of nature as a metaphor for Janie's life. Hurston shames us immodestly with grotesque glimpses of our protagonist, Janie, whose life delicates through painful metaphors within the terrestrial veils of her world. They flutter and furiate like a beating heart, gasping in the polluted industry of sentience. In Their Eyes Were Watching God this chivalry of language erotosizes the ideas that human existence can translate into forms of seemingly ethereal aesthetics.
As Janie ages, she has been going through different stages of loves and misloves, which gradually introduced her to reveal her feminnity. In the book Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston depictures Janie’s feminism through her growth of life from an innocent and vulnerable 17 years old girl who had not yet experienced love to a true women who forgets “all those things (she doesn’t) want to remember, and remember(s) everything (she doesn’t) want to forget” (1) in various of perspectives: Janie’s education and her grandmother’s instigation about marriage; Janie’s misloves with Logan and Jody; and Janie’s love for Tea Cake. Before Janie even learned the concept of “love”, Hurston showed how Janie was raped when she still had her “womanly”
I decided to watch Christmas Oranges at my friend’s house with her husband and my brother. While watching the movie, there were more feedback between us. The movie was about that a young mother left her baby daughter at the foot step of an orphan. The owner of the orphan was named Mrs. Harper. She loved all her kids of the orphan including the baby girl that she decided to name Rose.
Johnson, in her examination of sentimentality, does take issue with considering it the equivalent of a lesbian relationship today. She argues, “Even if it were possible to demonstrate that the relationship between Mary and Ann was sexual, however, this would not mean that it existed in the discursive space now called ‘lesbian.’ The complexity of this relationship consists in its indiscursibility, in the fact that it cannot be so designated” (54). In this, I am inclined to agree with her, although not entirely. Mary seems to have an understanding of what she feels for Ann, but never truly expresses these feelings openly.
A lesbian is a woman- indentified woman and Adrienne Rich calls it ‘Lesbian continuum’ she explains lesbian continuum is “Include is a range through each woman’s life and throughout history of woman indentified experience no simply the fact that a woman has had consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman (25)”. Rich argues to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women including the sharing of a rich inner life. Their Eyes were watching God is overwhelmingly centered on Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake. Whereas certain critics recognize the female search for self and need for community as key issues in the novel, most still give priority to heterosexual love and experience as the sole informers of Janie’s existence.
Her sexuality is a relevant part of her identity. For a person who can be described as having an identity crisis, she is very open-minded toward all kinds of sexualities but when it comes to her lovers, she puts almost all of them under two labels - ‘rats’ and ‘superrats’. Moreover, Holly’s identity is repeatedly associated with complexity and contradict. It can be argued that we can connect her sexuality with her personality: “Holly is not only a physical paradox of a girl and a woman, but so is her personality, she has an odd mixture of child-like innocence and street smart sexuality” (Cash
The end of the eighteenth - beginning of the nineteenth century England was characterized by the downfall of the revolutionary “Jacobin” movement which advocated for freedom and equality, and symbolizes a return to, as well as an empowerment of the conservative British patriarchal system. This was the context in which Amelia Anderson Opie wrote “her most political novel”(King and Pierce, viii) Adeline Mowbray, a tale which provides a case study about, as Roxane Eberle notes, “progressive ideas that heterosexual relationships can and should exist outside of marriage”(1994: 127). As a result the clash between these innovational type of relationships and the English legal and social norms collide in their representation of models of proper conduct
The queer historical past has been characterized positively, with aspects such as identification, desire, longing, and love highlighted (31). In contrast, Heather Love seeks to focus on the negative aspects that characterize the relationship of queer history amid the past and present, in her work, “Emotional Rescue: The demands of Queer History,” the first chapter in her book, “Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History” (31-32). According to Love, some queer critics have failed to include the harsher accounts when studying queer cross-historical relations. The negative aspects of the past that queer figures can relate to makes it relevant. In her article, Love critiques various works to identify the negative aspects present within the queer history.
It can be contended that varying contemporary texts which have been created for both children and young adults endorse post-feministic values and the importance of adhering to a consumer culture. The text Pink by Lili Wilkinson (2009) can be viewed as promoting post-feminist ideals through the inferences of dialog between characters; specifically, through the protagonist Ava. Additionally, the film Mean Girls (2004) mirrors similar ideologies as Pink which portrays a post-feminist society, revealing issues which individuals face once gender equality has largely been achieved. Both of these texts have been created for a young audience and utilise various narrative strategies to convey their ideological position. Accordingly, this essay will
This novel follows the life of a recent college graduate, Marian MacAlpin, through her career and emotional maturation in a somewhat unnatural, if not threatening world. The queer concept of this world is branded by a spectrum of moral viewpoints of gender politics that manifest themselves and surround Marian. The political and cultural values and practices of a male dominated and sex driven society depicted in the novel are so strong that they seem to devour Marian physically and emotionally. She rebels against this cannibalistic, patriarchal society through a comestible mode and the end, reclaims her identity crisis by restoring her relationship with
The wife rejects the label ‘lesbians’ ﴾by definition ‘women having sexual relations’﴿ not for the sake of her own heterosexuality, but simply in regard of her husband’s personal identification. Faced with the ‘terrible lies’ ﴾Kay 277﴿ and cruel scrutiny of the media, Millie views herself as ‘the only one who can remember [Joss] the way he wanted to be remembered’ ﴾Kay 40﴿, constantly seeking solace from fond memories only she has control over. Colman Moody’s perception of his father’s identity is another puzzle solved accordingly to the story’s progress. Initially ashamed and ‘so embarrassed [he] could emigrate’ ﴾Kay 48﴿, Colman displayed a rather rude and sulky attitude whenever digging into his early years alongside Joss.
Immigrant lives in both Fruit of the Lemon and ‘reality’ hardships mostly share similar endurance. Many immigrants are stuck in two different cultures; their original culture and the new culture that they adopt in a new place. However, some immigrants only have a chance to adopt a new culture. Some immigrant family’s children were born in a country other than their native country. In Fruit of the Lemon, Faith is a person who lived her whole life without her native culture which was hard for her to understand her fellows race.
Introduction In this marketing assignment, we choose Apple as the company to analyze the marketing environment that affect the Apple Company’s ability to serve its consumer market and the major factors that influence consumer buyer behaviour. Apple became a computer company started in 1976. In the last decade, Apple had broaden into a complicated and intricate company.