Gender Role In Radclyffe Hall's The Well Of Loneliness

1945 Words4 Pages

Protection – she could never offer protection to the creature she loved: Could you marry me, Stephen? She could neither protect nor defend nor honour by loving; her hands were completely empty. She who would gladly have given her life, must go empty – handed to love, like a beggar. She could only debase what she longed to exalt, defile what she longed to keep pure and untarnished. ( Hall 2978) Radicyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness explains that gender roles are confusing and bring about unhappiness in life. The protagonist Stephen Gordon, although born a female, strives throughout the novel to be socially accepted as a male. However, in order for her to be considered this ‘privilege’, society must first grant her a God like ability to provide protection. Within this novel emphasis is placed upon a gendered meaning to provide protection, which Hall translates as only being accessible to males, and solely accomplished through marriage and sexual reproduction. In this way, gender roles are restricted to males being the provider of protection and females the receiver of this gift. Therefore, Hall’s The Well of Loneliness illustrates social inequality of perceived gender roles as a form of social alienation that limits the freedom to choose alternative paths to happiness. Males have a God given power/ divine rights , while …show more content…

as experessed through Stephen Gordon a rich eras who seeks social acceptance and compassion from her peers. that is expressed within social isolation of homosexuality, and heterosexual male power that is established through marriage. Indeed as Anna marries Sir Gordon , Angela marries Ralph, so as Mary will marry Martin. Hall questions that validity of heterosexual normativity as key to happiness and instead promotes through the character Stephen Gordon

Show More
Related

  • Gender Roles In Stephanie Coontz's The Way We Never Were?

    944 Words  | 2 Pages

    about marriage that our society assumes to be true today. These include ideas about single

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In The True Confessions Of Charlotte Doyle

    130 Words  | 1 Pages

    Could one trip across the Atlantic ocean change all the gender roles? How could that happen? In “The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle,” you will see how many different gender roles change in the book. In the first place Charlotte changed more into a sailer instead of a young lady. Next Charlotte wore boy clothes. Finally, Charlotte did some of the crews jobs that usually do and joined the crew. To conclude you can see Charlotte’s gender role changed throughout the book multiple times.

    Read More

  • Loneliness In Cynthia Rylant's Shell

    279 Words  | 1 Pages

    Everyone needs someone to not be lonely. In the story “Shells” cynthia Rylant writes about a boy named Michael whose parents have died and her Aunt has to take him in. As a result Michael got lonely and Aunt Esther was originally lonely to start. To overcome their loneliness they need someone to care for.

    Read More

  • Curley's Wife Loneliness Analysis

    598 Words  | 2 Pages

    Curley’s Wife experiences extreme exclusion from society. However, in her case, it is her gender and her husband that are the

    Read More

  • Cultural Influence on Gender Identities: Female Genital Mutilation

    1718 Words  | 4 Pages

    Gender identities and gender relations are determined by the culture of a society. Culture makes gender roles meet certain inescapable beliefs, assumptions, expectations, and obligations. Gender politics camouflaged by cultural norms and governed by patriarchal interests and manifested in cultural practices like female genital mutilation, make the life of women difficult and burdensome. Alice Walker’s fifth novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) discusses a tabooed cultural practice called female genital mutilation, camouflaged by gender politics, that is used to subjugate women, to protect the interests of men. Female Genital Mutilation is a painful procedure considered to be a mark of true womanhood in certain cultures. The procedure

    Read More

  • My Dangerous Desires Analysis

    1271 Words  | 3 Pages

    Loneliness and Its Opposite, My Dangerous Desires and Beggars and Choosers collectively address gender, sex, sexuality, race, class, and bodily capacity. Loneliness and Its Opposite examines the ethics of disabled persons fulfilling their erotic desires. My Dangerous Desires discusses growing up queer, in a lower class biracial familyl. Lastly, Beggars and Choosers challenges how race, gender, and class can impact one’s reproductive choice. Each category of these books define the value of a body, and unfortunatley, in today’s world, some bodies hold a higher value than others.

    Read More

  • Loneliness In Hrethel And Grendel

    1154 Words  | 3 Pages

    Feelings of loneliness and being lonesome are part of reality, yet the words have immensely different implications. While lonesome feelings are temporary, loneliness alludes to permanent emotional isolation. However, while loneliness implies a lack of friends or human relations, only surrounding oneself with those with mutual experiences will help alleviate this issue. Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney, and Grendel, by John Gardner, demonstrate loneliness and its consequences through the plight of Hrethel and Grendel, consecutively. In Grendel by John Gardner, Grendel’s ruthless actions trace back to his underlying chronic loneliness, as he has no one with whom to talk or relate to. In contrast, in Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney, Hrethel is lonely after his son

    Read More

  • Gender Roles in Society

    1030 Words  | 3 Pages

    Suggested roles of all types set the stage for how human beings perceive their life should be. Gender roles are one of the most dangerous roles that society faces today. With all of the controversy applied to male vs. female dominance in households, and in the workplace, there seems to be an argument either way. In the essay, “Men as Success Objects”, the author Warren Farrell explains this threat of society as a whole. Farrell explains the difference of men and women growing up and how they believe their role in society to be. He justifies that it doesn’t just appear in marriage, but in the earliest stages of life. Similarly, in the essay “Roles of Sexes”, real life applications are explored in two different novels. The synthesis between these two essays proves how prevalent roles are in even the smallest part of a concept and how it is relatively an inevitable subject.

    Read More

  • Friendship in Frankenstein

    586 Words  | 2 Pages

    Throughout this powerful novel, we observe the injustice in societal rejection and the pain caused by this. However, another extremely dominating theme involving the need for friendship surfaces again and again in all of the prominent characters. The Creature's isolation reveals the effects that loneliness can have when it is the strongest feeling in one's life. Taken as a whole, while the ability to care for oneself is important, people will always need someone to be there when the road gets rough.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles: The Female Role in Society

    2827 Words  | 6 Pages

    The female gender role in society has created a torturous fate for those who have failed in their role as a woman, whether as a mother, a daughter, or a wife. The restrictive nature of the role that society imposes on women causes extreme repercussions for those women who cannot fulfill their purpose as designated by society. These repercussions can be as common as being reprimanded or as severe as being berated or beaten by a husband or father. The role that women were given by society entails being a submissive homemaker who dotes on her husband and many children. The wife keeps the home impeccably neat, tends to the children and ensures their education and well-being, and acts obsequiously to do everything possible to please her husband. She must be cheerful and sweet and pretty, like a dainty little doll. The perfect woman in the eyes of society is exactly like a doll: she always smiles, always looks her best and has no feelings or opinions that she can truly call her own. She responds only to the demands of her husband and does not act or speak out of turn. A woman who speaks her mind or challenges the word of any man, especially her husband, is undesirable because she is not the obedient little doll that men cherish. Women who do not conform to the rules that society has set for them are downgraded to the only feature that differentiates them from men; their sex. Society’s women do not speak or think of sex unless their husband requires it of them. But when a woman fails to be the doll that a man desires, she is worth nothing more than a cheap sex object and she is disposed of by society.

    Read More

  • Women's Roles In The 1920s Essay

    895 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Women’s roles were constantly changing and have not stopped still to this day.” In the early 1900s many people expected women to be stay at home moms and let the husbands support them. But this all changes in the 1920s, women got the right to vote and began working from the result of work they have done in the war. Altogether in the 1920s women's roles have changed drastically.

    Read More

  • Division of Labor According to Gender in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own

    883 Words  | 2 Pages

    Virginia Woolf, in her treatise A Room of One's Own, identified a gendered division of labor. For her, men work in the market place and make the money while the women, the upper class women at least, attend to the social pleasantries and household management. While she lamented this state of affairs, she did not present, as Gilman did, a model for existence that would allow men and women to operate on the same level. However, a direct comparison to Gilman is somewhat unfair as she was not focused on the status of women in the economy so much as the status of women as writers. Like Gilman, Woolf saw this division between a man's work and a woman's work as a socially constructed conceit. Unlike Gilman, Woolf advocated a further break between the world of men and women.

    Read More

  • Gender Role In Gender Trouble By Judith Butler

    1060 Words  | 3 Pages

    Individuals who do not know what gender role they are disliked and shamed by society because they are not what society calls “normal”. The definition of normal is conforming to a standard or conforming to the expected. Society should not have the power to make an individual conform to anything. Does a person have to be born female to be female? The answer is simply no. Jenna Talackova is a prime example of this because she was born a man but knew he was a female from the beginning. These people who were born with a specific genetic gender have no control over their chemical make-up, but they do control what gender role they decide to be and no one should tell them to pick one that fits the normal standards of society. Judith Butler writes about gender is her book and how it should not be a preconceived notion. People who have non-normative gender roles struggle daily with the fact that they cannot express who they are because the public would disgrace them and society would not accept them, which are problems that can be solved by a simple lesson of not judging a book by its cover.

    Read More

  • One Hundred Years Of Solitude Gender Analysis

    1685 Words  | 4 Pages

    Traditional gender roles exist in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, but traditional distribution of power between the genders does not. In analyzing each character and their life, it’s easy to see how Marquez presented each in terms of his own view on gender constructs. Marquez portrays femininity and masculinity very differently. But why would Marquez choose to make such a clear distinction between the roles of each gender? Marquez sees women as spiritual and overpowered by traditional standards, and men doomed by their own obsessions. Men are wily and therefore vulnerable, whereas women are dignified and durable, and survive for much longer.

    Read More

  • Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: Women and Fiction

    1151 Words  | 3 Pages

    Many female writers see themselves as advocates for other creative females to help find their voice as a woman. Although this may be true, writer Virginia Woolf made her life mission to help women find their voice as a writer, no gender attached. She believed women had the creativity and power to write, not better than men, but as equals. Yet throughout history, women have been neglected in a sense, and Woolf attempted to find them. In her essay, A Room of One’s Own, she focuses on what is meant by connecting the terms, women and fiction. Woolf divided this thought into three categories: what women are like throughout history, women and the fiction they write, and women and the fiction written about them. When one thinks of women and fiction, what they think of; Woolf tried to answer this question through the discovery of the female within literature in her writing.

    Read More

More about Gender Role In Radclyffe Hall's The Well Of Loneliness

Open Document