Today, for the most part, women are seen as equal to men. Women are given the same opportunities as men and an equal chance at getting a job as men. In today’s society, women do not just have one role and that role and that being to have kids, but they can pursue any career they wish. However, it was not always this way. According to feminist theorists, western civilizations were patriarchal which means that the society is dominated by males. The society is set up so that the male is above the female in all cultural aspects including family, religion, politics, economics, art, and the social and legal realms. The patriarchal biases of gender between male and female say that a male must be active, dominating, adventurous, rational, and creative. In the novel, A Passage to India, Forster expresses this male dominance by writing, “He took no notice of them, and with this, which would have passed without comment in feminist England, did harm in a community where the male is expected to be lively and helpful” (Forster 52). They say that to be female is to be passive, agreeable, timid, emotional, and conventional. The feminist theorists’ argument of a male centered society is definitely present in the novel A Passage to India. E.M. Forster reveals cultural, economic, and educational factors within the patriarchal society of India that limit women. In E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India, Forster exposes derogatory stereotypes of women and portrays women as inferior to men to uphold the view of women during the time period.
In the novel A Passage to India, written by Forster, he is bias towards the women in the novel. The society when Forster wrote the novel in the 1920’s had different views on women than it has today a...
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...ique 20.3 (1990): 331-41. JSTOR. Web. 4 Mar. 2011. .
Sharpe, Jenny. “A Passage to India by E.M. Forster.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. James P Draper, Jennifer Brostrom, and Jennifer Gariepy. Vol. 77. Detroit: Gale, 1993. 253-57. Rpt. of “The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counter-Insurgency.” Genders 10 (1991): 25-46. Literature Criticism Online. Web. 4 Mar. 2011. .
Silver, Brenda R. “Periphrasis, Power, and Rape in ‘A Passage to India.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 22.1 (1988): 86-105. JSTOR. Web. 4 Mar. 2011. .
Walls, Elizabeth Macleod. "An Aristotelian Reading of the Feminine Voice-as-Revolution in E. M. Forster's A Passage To India." Papers on Language & Literature 35.1 (1999): 56. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Mar. 2011.
Gender roles have been a predominant factor in our world since the early emergence of human societies whether they are positive or negative. They are based on expectations that societies have over the people in them. The Epic of Sunjata, shows us how men and women are treated almost equally in different forms. Women are praised for their ability to birth leaders, which is similar to the early Greek Society. In most societies, women are treated less equal than men. This was prevalent in the early Indian society. No matter the gender role, it has been shown that any society cannot survive without both men and women.
The author and her friends, Judewin and Thowin, alone with other children got excited about an adventure in to a new land. Their excitement was short because of their painful experiences from the white’s ignorance of the Indian culture. When a white women saw her arrived the school, she tossed her up in the air several times. It was insulting for her because of against the Indian culture. Her stay at the school was other painful experience.
In Nehru’s India, women were victims of a “passive revolution” that subtly advanced bourgeoisie men of higher castes under a guise of parliamentary democracy. Though women have presided over the Indian National Congress, served as a prime minister, and represent a large part of India’s la...
It seems that feminist argue that the biological difference might lead to some difference in women’s roles but should not become the leading factor in what men and women can and cannot do. All societies are structured around relatively stable patterns that establish how social interaction will be carried out. One of the most important social structures that organize social interaction is status, a category or position that each person occupies and it is a determinant of how he or she is going to be defined and treated. As long as the patriarchy stands as the only way, women will continue to be seen as objects for the boys of River High as well as in society.
the Tribal Twenties.” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 210, (1994): n. pag. Web. 20 May 2009.
As Clive Emsly explained in The Old Bailey Proceedings, in the eighteenth century, men were viewed as the stronger sex. They were expected to be tougher, both physically and emotionally, to have determination and will. Men were to be logical thinkers and erudite, they had to dominate their households and provide for their families. By the nineteenth century, historians argue that even though women began to experience more freedom in the workforce, they were still confined socially. Men were still expected to lead their households and be “breadwinners.” For many years, men dominated almost every aspect of society. However, in the past few decades, a movement known as feminism emerged. The feminist movement fought for women’s rights to an education and equality. Women longed for an opportunity to gain knowledge and freedom to seek adventure. In recent years, more so than ever, the feminist movement has made great advances. It has instigated a shift in gender roles and constructs forever altering how society views women and men.
The reason why women are scarcely mentioned throughout the history textbooks are because women are conformed in their status of the private sphere. Women are related to “nature” considering their roles in society such as child bearers and housewives. Culture is considered as a sustaining force that transcends nature to create and control a new interest. Because of this “nature” status put on women, they are considered inferior to men. However, this is not the case for everyone and not all society understands culture and nature like westerners do. Some consider what women and men do rather than the symbolic attributes that are placed on them.
Evelyn Cunningham once said, “Women are the only oppressed group in our society that lives in intimate association with their oppressors.” For thousands of years women have been oppressed, not in the bondage of slavery but in the bondage that comes from a lack of education and a dependence on men for their livelihood. Women have been subjected to scrutiny and ostracization, belittling and disparaging comments, and even at times they have been feared by men. Women themselves have even taken on the beliefs that they require a man in their life to be taken care of and have a satisfying life although some women and even some men have seen that the differences between the sexes is purely physical. This oppression, as well as the enlightenment of some, is well noted in many literary works. Literature has often been an arena for the examination of the “woman question,” as it was termed in the Victorian age. Four works that examine the role or view of women in society are John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Carol Ann Duffy’s “Medusa.” Although each work examines a side of the woman question in its own way with a variety of views on the question, all of the works examine the fear that women incite in men, the idea that women are dependent on men, and the idea that women are separate from men in some way and each piece works to show that there is actually an interdependence between men and women that is often not expressed.
Although women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced oppression and unequal treatment, some people strove to change common perspectives on the feminine sex. John Stuart Mill, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Virginia Woolf were able to reach out to the world, through their literature, and help change the views that society held towards women and their roles within its structure. During the Victorian era, women were bound to domestic roles and were very seldom allowed to seek other positions. Most men and many women felt that if women were allowed to pursue interests, outside traditional areas of placement that they would be unable to be an attentive wife and mother. The conventional roles of women were kept in place by long standing values and beliefs that held to a presumption, in which, women were inferior to men in every way. In The Subjection of Women, The Lady of Shalott, and A Room of One's Own, respectively, these authors define their views on the roles women are forced to play in society, and why they are not permitted to step outside those predetermined boundaries.
It is said that Western civilization had been primarily male dominated and as a result as diminished the feminine. Women’s roles in society have changed drastically over the past decades. While it took much time, progress for women’s rights has blossomed. Influences in civilization have affected view points of the commonly held mores, expectations, and stereotypes which define gender.
Gairola, Rahul. “Burning with Shame: Desire and South Asian Patriarchy, from Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ to Deepa Mehta’s Fire.” Comparative Literature 54:4 (Fall 2002). 307-324. EBSCOhost.
Ramamoorthy, P. “My Life is My Own: A Study of Shashi Deshpande’s Women” Feminism and Recent Fiction in English Ed. Sushila Singh. New Delhi: Prestige, 1991.
There are people bustling, merchants selling, Anglo-Indians watching, and birds flying overhead. How many perspectives are there in this one snippet of life? They are uncountable, and that is the reality. Modernist writers strive to emulate this type of reality into their own work as well. In such novels, there is a tendency to lack a chronological or even logical narrative and there are also frequent breaks in narratives where the perspectives jump from one to another without warning. Because there are many points of view and not all of them are explained, therefore, modernist novels often tend to have narrative perspectives that suddenly shift or cause confusion. This is because modernism has always been an experimental form of literature that lacks a traditional narrative or a set, rigid structure. Therefore, E. M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, uses such techniques to portray the true nature of reality. The conflict between Adela, a young British girl, and Aziz, an Indian doctor, at the Marabar Caves is one that implements multiple modernist ideals and is placed in British-India. In this novel, Forster shows the relations and tension between the British and the Indians through a series of events that were all caused by the confusing effects of modernism. E.M. Forster implements such literary techniques to express the importance or insignificance of a situation and to emphasize an impression of realism and enigma in Chandrapore, India, in which Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, takes place.
Fasset, I. P. Rev. of A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster. Criterion October 9, 1924
In order to achieve these goals, Indian feminist writers have exerted their energies to deconstruct the past, reconstruct a more meaningful present. They have unravelled the thick tapestries of male hegemony and analysed the reasons for the persistent reproduction of conscious and unconscious presumptions about women and they have knitted up a woman’s tradition.