Women In Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Woman

Questions: 2.) In this section, the Wife of Bath comments on the different answers given to the Knight, and her comments give insight to her opinions and views of women. For example, the text states, “Others assert we women find it sweet when we are thought dependable, discreet and secret, firm of purpose and controlled, never betraying things that we are told. But that’s not worth the handle of a rake; women conceal a thing? For Heaven’s sake!” This quote suggests that the Wife of Bath believes all women are incapable of keeping a secret, which is an untrue and harmful stereotype.

Portrayal of women is in answer to all the women in the Odyssey. There are different ways for women to be portrayed in the Odyssey. They can be disloyal, sexual, and loyal woman that gets used for these things. Could you ever grasp a point of how you would feel if you were the one being portrayed? In the first section of the Odyssey, women are presented to us as controlled by the culture of the day, and it is only within that area that we can consider the way Odysseus provides women to be admired or despised throughout his journey.

“Short sighted desire” has “subjected many” women, as well as made them unable to control oneself. Thus, suppressing one’s desires is important for Wollstonecraft: it is required in order for women to perceive the education, which is a way of gaining the equal right with men. Both texts, Zofloya, or the Moor (1806) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), deal with desires and their suppression. In Zofloya, or the Moor, Charlotte Dacre shows what can happen if the desires take over a woman. All social liberties, which a woman can obtain by not performing the gender-constructed role that requires her to fully suppress her desires, can be lost if one follows her desires unlimitedly.

Even though she is intelligent enough to know it is not worth it, the plot is manipulated so that she must succumb to the magic of Eros, demonstrating that as a woman she is has very little autonomy and self-determination. (quote?) This situation is also seen in the myth of Persephone; she is depicted as a young innocent girl swept into marriage against her will. This demonstrates the kind of culture surrounding marriage in that society; young girls must go into marriage, regardless of what they want and are expected to answer to their husband’s beck and call, as their purpose is to create children and please her husband. Medea is a doting wife and she does anything for Jason, including betraying her father, killing

traditional gender roles are challenged. Through the use of magical realism and characterization, Nottage irrevocably illustrates the power that women truly have. She challenges what is said in society and shows women in a different light. What is more, by giving it a feminist swing, Lynn illustrates that the society purposely places these gender specific roles to ensure that hierarchy is kept, and psychologically oppress women, who are equal in strength to

For centuries, women have been exploited by the society. Events of women being prohibited from doing things like voting or working and being forced to behave the way it is considered to be socially acceptable have been jotted down in history. Until today women are still viewed as the weaker sex. In some countries, women are regarded less than human and are treated like slaves. Khaled Hosseini goes into the oppression of women in his novel A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Of course, women, such as Murasaki, were forced into marriages without their own consent, which does identify her own experiences as a lady-in-waiting in the Heian royal court. This feminist view illustrates the forced submission of women as sexual objects for the Genji, which has much merit in terms of the Murasaki’s own insight into feminist narratives of women living in these patriarchal circumstances. In this case, Murasaki provides a feminine narrative of the experiences and choices that women had to make under an oppressive male dominant government. The Genji, therefore, is merely a central character that expresses the total control of male figures in the novel, as part of a larger narrative that reflects the unique views of women in medieval Japanese

1.2 Plath’s use of symbols & motifs to depict the theme of social conventions The idea of social convention, ‘the way in which something is usually done in mass similarity’, is one of the most prominent ways in which Plath depicts female entrapment within her novel. The entire novel revolves around a woman 's battle with herself and the life she wishes for herself. The social convention aspect is all in all a synonym for what society expects of us. What society expects of an individual. In The Bell Jar social conventions like women settling down and giving birth to children are what really shows where a woman 's place is within the community.

In the XIX century, Thomas Hardy brings the gender issue to Tess of the d'Urbervilles, showing that the condition of women in Victorian England brings unique implications to their trajectory as an individual. The women in Tess of the d'Urbervilles are, in general, submissive to the patriarchal order of society. The supremacy of man over woman in life dramatises the crisis of values in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, placing the heroine, Tess, at the mercy of the masculine judgment. Tess is a victim of male prepotency. She succumbs to the abuses of Alec d'Urberville and afterwards adopts a servile posture towards her husband, even after being godforsaken and banned from social life.

Feminists around the world turned to literature to advance their perspectives. One play commonly cited as a feminist text is “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen. Written in the nineteenth century, Ibsen’s play describes the struggles of a woman who desires to step outside society’s conventions. Although Ibsen argued that his work was exclusively about the human condition, Ibsen unintentionally created a feminist play. “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen is a feminist play, as shown by demonstrating the risks of defying societal norms and the burden of gender rules through many of his characters.