Women's Freedom In The Coquette

The texts ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ (1845) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ (1926). Both explore the universal values of idealised love, limitation of time and hope of restoration. As such inherently reflected through their relevant contexts of the Victorian Era and 1920’s Jazz age value systems. Even though the text share similar themes their interpretation completely differ influenced by diverse historical context, personal experiences and human values.

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.

Gender roles are present everywhere and are more and more prevalent the further back you go. They define relationships and heavily influence people's actions. Gender roles can hurt those that are trapped in them because they are not allowed the freedom of living like they want. In The Crucible by Arthur Miller, one key relationship in the story is wrecked by gender roles. The Puritan ways of the small town of Salem, Massachusetts, lead to each gender having a very set role in society. Men were to be the strong, detached ones, who did all the hard work. Well the women were subordinate, stay-at-home mothers, and could show no temper. These roles lead to the growth of distrust between a married couple. An analysis of John and Elizabeth’s marriage

In Fever 1793, Eliza cares more for others than herself during the fever. For example, Eliza is a free African American. People thought that African Americans could not get the fever, but Eliza knew this was not true. She goes to fever victims to care and help them

Foster returned the story to the front of the public’s mind, disguising her message as a call to virtue, and artfully crafting her novel to convey her feminist views. At the time the novel was written, conduct books were quite common, and this book could easily pass for that. But, while it does warn against becoming a coquette, it also brings up the idea of love and independence. Eliza chose not to marry Boyer, which while that ultimately was her demise, it also elucidates that women do in fact have the right to choose and control their own lives. Eliza refused to marry someone who would be very stable for her, because she knew there was more to life than that. She wanted real love and actively pursued that desire, proving her autonomy to all. However, this “real love” was tainted in a way she was unable to see, it was in fact seduction, not love. The seduction twists Eliza’s drive for independence and uses it against her. She attempts to decide her own fate, and society punishes her for it. The seduction ruins her name and her life, leaving her alone and with child, then eventually dead. Seduction was simply another way that society found to keep women in a submissive role, teaching them “their

In the short story “Fantomina: Or, Love in a Maze”, Eliza Haywood shows how societal values, standards that people are expected to follow, can also be manipulated to a person’s favor. In the eighteenth century, a woman’s reputation is extremely important because her actions do not only represent her character, but it also affects her ability to find a husband and wed. Finding a husband is an act necessary to survive as a woman in this time period. However, the protagonist pushes the boundaries of societal limits by actively pursuing and having sexual intercourse with a man dressed as four different characters. Although, the protagonist is extremely careful when it comes to hiding her identity,

In the award winning article, “Passages in Mary Shelly's Frankenstein: Towards a Feminist Figure of Humanity?” Cynthia Pon addresses masculinity and feminism in terms of conventions, ideals, and practices (Pon, 33). She focused on whether Mary Shelly's work as a writer opened the way to a feminist figure of humanity like Donna Haraway argued. The article has a pre-notion that the audience has read Frankenstein and Haraway's article. Pon has a slight bias, due to her passion as a feminist writer. It may skew her thinking and at times be subjective. The intended audience is someone who is studying literature and interested in how women are portrayed in novels in the 19th century. The organization of the article allows anyone to be capable of reading it.

First Generations: Women of Colonial America, written by Carol Berkin, is a novel that took ten years to make. Carol Berkin received her B.A. from Barnard College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She has worked as a consultant on PBS and History Channel documentaries. Berkin has written several books on the topic of women in America. Some of her publications include: Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence (2004) and Civil War Wives: The Life and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant (2009). The prejudice that the author brings forward strongly is the notion of feminism.

For decade women have been discriminated by society, all around the world. In many countries women are still treated as the inferior sex. “daily life for women in the early 1800s in Europe(Britain), was that of many obligations and few choices. Some even compare the conditions of women in time as a form of slavery.” (Smith, Kelley. "Lives of Women in the Early 1800s." Lives of Women in the Early 1800s. N.p., 2002.) Women have always been expected to find a husband, get marry and have children and nothing less was expected of them. Women during decades ago and even today in 2017, many women live by the norm that if you don’t get marry you’re a dishonor/disgrace to the family. Many men treated women as objects and without a doubt not as equals.

Margret Atwood’s short story “Lusus Naturae” is known as a work of fiction in which a monster uncommonly plays the role of the protagonist. Discussing character dynamics, it is interesting to examine the symbolic meaning behind the girl as a monster in this story. Is this text simply a fantasy created with the goal to serve solely as a horror story with a typical ending, or does this tale have a deeper meaning encompassing the treatment of women and their sexuality throughout history. Through close reading of “Lusus Naturae,” I plan to use evidence from the text to illustrate symbolic parallels between the unusual protagonist and the known historical role women held in society.

Daughter of fortune is a novel by Isabel Allende. The novel is about Eliza Sommers, an adopted daughter of Miss Rose an unmarried woman and Jeremy who is Miss Rose’s brother. In the early parts of the novel Allende, tell the origin of young Sommers. The reader learns that Eliza is abandoned as a child at the doorstep of Miss Rose and Jeremy’s company. Miss Rose is determined in making the best of Eliza. Eliza is taught how to play the piano, embroidery and cooking. Miss Rose has also plans of sending Eliza to Madame Colbert’s, a school of girls where she would advance her education. The reader is also introduced to Mama Fresia, Miss Rose’s cook and house cleaner. Eliza is delighted in her company, which tend to make Miss Rose

and women and their roles in the society. Gender is also used to organize relationships between

The 1920’s was a time of great change for women, how they lived, and the way they conducted themselves. The mentality of women and how they viewed their treatment of men was also drastically changed during this time. During the 20’s and 30s’ women began to show who they were; they did this by changing the way they dressed and how they looked overall. This change in appearence was used to show how women were tired of being under the control of men, it was in sorts, a rebel against everything previously thought of women. A perfect example of this shift in the mindset of women can be seen in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”. His story is set in the time of the great depression, roughly the 1920’s and 1930’s, and involves a woman, Curley’s wife,

In the nineteenth century, American writers became obsessed with the Realism movement. They started to focus on problems of that century such as wife abuse, child neglect and women’s freedom. They wrote about the middle class that suffers from different social problems especially women who act against their social norms and traditions. Realistic writers try to represent the events and social conditions as they really are without idealism. They show the harsh and cruel reality of the surrounding environment that women live in without framing that reality in beautiful frame. This is obvious in William Dean Howells’s “Editha” and Henry James’s “Daisy Miller”. Both Editha and Daisy share the same characteristic of the New Woman. These two women redefine the feminine ideology of women who suffer from following the social norms of their culture. They believe that women should have freedom as well as men, and they are responsible for making decisions in their lives without under

In 1880s, women in America were trapped by their family because of the culture that they were living in. They loved their family and husband, but meanwhile, they had hard time suffering in same patterns that women in United States always had. With their limited rights, women hoped liberation from their family because they were entirely complaisant to their husband. Therefore, women were in conflicting directions by two compelling forces, their responsibility and pressure. In A Doll’s House, Ibsen uses metaphors of a doll’s house and irony conversation between Nora and Torvald to emphasize reality versus appearance in order to convey that the Victorian Era women were discriminated because of gender and forced to make irrational decision by inequity society.