In George Moore’s Esther Waters, the reader is able to examine the lives of individuals in the Victorian Era lower class. The novel depicts a working-class heroine, Esther Waters, who is of average appearance and circumstance. However, she exhibits a strong character, which allows her to overcome adversities in her life, including poverty, abandonment, and single parenthood. Esther’s story provokes a different ending to underprivileged, fallen womanhood as she transcends social and gender limitations in an upper class run, patriarchal society. Moore portrays Esther’s story as an antithesis to Romance as well as having psychology and a degree of free will as central components. These factors demonstrate an appreciation for unsupported mothers …show more content…
A woman is outcasted when fallen and must survive on her own means. Most fallen women have suffered greatly because of societal standards’ determination of their fates. However, Esther has a certain degree of free will. She could not have changed her fate as a struggling mother, but she was able to alter the effects of her situation. The birth of Jackie gave her the strength to continue living; she also rescued him from death and chose to forsake the money Mrs. Rivers was paying her as a wet-nurse to be with Jackie. The hardships that life threw at her were tolerable because she was happy. Additionally, when William Latch reappeared, she thought about how he could provide Jackie with schooling. Throughout the years, Esther has supplied all the amenities for Jackie. She was able to give him proper schooling and he became “a fine fellow” (Moore 326) as she was “blushing with pleasure and pride” (Moore 326). Esther did not abandon her child, like how she was left alone before him. She provided him a good life, which most children of fallen women did not receive; she was able to raise her illegitimate child to become a good, deserving citizen, which society thought was impossible for fallen
Even though women such as Lucy demonstrate stereotypical female weakness, characters such as Mina defy the conventional submissive female, as an independent woman, a role uncommon of novels in this era. In addition, Mina, in comparison to men, possesses substantially stronger emotional fortitude and controls her emotions, while the men who are supposed to be strong expose emotional weakness and frailty. Ultimately, however, no matter Mina’s intelligence or strengths, the men continually suppress Mina’s vast amount of wisdom in order to maintain their perceived dominance. Nonetheless, Stoker’s messages throughout the novel regarding women silently protest the sexist expectations of the overly limiting Victorian era. Should today’s modern feminists take Stoker’s peaceful approach and protest subtly hoping for long-term change? Or should feminists act with violent protests in hope for prompt change? Gender equality will not happen overnight, however, instead of rushing minuscule modifications with violent protest, society must patiently wait for productive and peaceful change, in order to prevent an even larger
...es these primitive standards, she becomes melancholy because she does not attune into the gender roles of women, which particularly focus on marriage, maternity, and domesticity. Like other nineteen year old women, Esther has many goals and ambitions in her life. Nevertheless, Esther is disparaged by society’s blunt roles created for women. Although she experiences a tremendous psychological journey, she is able to liberate herself from society’s suffocating constraints. Esther is an excellent inspiration for women who are also currently battling with society’s degrading stereotypes. She is a persistent woman who perseveres to accomplish more than being a stay at home mother. Thus, Esther is a voice for women who are trying to abolish the airless conformism that is prevalent in 1950’s society.
The character of Esther is widely criticized for her perfection as a character, both receiving positive acclaims and negative feedback. Esther’s reserved, quiet character illustrates the role of women during the Victorian period and what little impact on society women played. Critics of Bleak House generally praise the narration and Dickens’s use of Esther’s character, which gives direction to the novel.
Sylvia Plath wrote the semi autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, in which the main character, Esther, struggles with depression as she attempts to make herself known as a writer in the 1950’s. She is getting the opportunity to apprentice under a well-known fashion magazine editor, but still cannot find true happiness. She crumbles under her depression due to feeling that she doesn’t fit in, and eventually ends up being put into a mental hospital undergoing electroshock therapy. Still, she describes the depth of her depression as “Wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street a cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air” (Plath 178). The pressure to assimilate to society’s standards from her mother, friends, and romantic interests, almost pushes her over the edge and causes her to attempt suicide multiple times throughout her life. Buddy Willard, Esther’s boyfriend at a time, asks her to marry him repeatedly in which she declines. Her mother tries to get her to marry and makes her go to therapy eventually, which leads to the mental hospital. Esther resents the way of settling down and making a family, as well as going out and partying all night. She just wants to work to become a journalist or publisher. Though, part of her longs for these other lives that she imagines livings, if she were a different person or if different things happened in her life. That’s how Elly Higgenbottom came about. Elly is Esther when Esther doesn’t want to be herself to new people. Esther’s story portrays the role of women in society in the 1950’s through Esther’s family and friends pushing her to conform to the gender roles of the time.
In the novel, Esther Greenwood, the main character, is a young woman, from a small town, who wins a writing competition, and is sent to New York for a month to work for a magazine. Esther struggles throughout the story to discover who she truly is. She is very pessimistic about life and has many insecurities about how people perceive her. Esther is never genuinely happy about anything that goes on through the course of the novel. When she first arrives at her hotel in New York, the first thing she thinks people will assume about her is, “Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a
On the eve of her freedom from the asylum, Esther laments, “I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead- after all, I had been ‘analyzed.’ Instead, all I could see were question marks” (243). The novel is left open-ended, with a slightly optimistic tone but no details to help the reader fully understand the final step of her healing process. Esther desired to be free of social conventions and double standards, but consistently imposed them upon herself and on the people around her. Her evolution in understanding never reaches a satisfying conclusion, and the reader is also left with nothing but question marks.
Guy de Maupassant’s Mathilde Loisel and Eugenia Collier’s Lizabeth are two characters enduring what they perceive to be an abject state of existence. In Maupassant’s narrative, “The Necklace,” Loisel longs for material things she cannot have. In a similar way, Lizabeth, the protagonist of Eugenia Collier’s “Marigolds,” perceives her own life in the shantytowns of Maryland as dreary and dull. Despite their different character traits and backgrounds, Collier’s and Maupassant’s characters have similarly negative perspectives towards their own lives that greatly influence their actions and consequently, the outcome of the story.
Esther’s psychological transformation from a perfectly healthy person ends up suffering from depression. Her influences around her have negatively shown Esther a negative path to take. The events during the 1950s such as the Rosenbergs executions have only made the transformation even powerful. Sylvia Plath’s life could be compared to the Bell Jar because she was in the same situation as Esther. Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis and psycho dynamic has addressed depression through the main character Esther.
The beginning of the novel introduces the reader to Esther O'Malley Robertson as the last of a family of extreme women. She is sitting in her home, remembering a story that her grandmother told her a long time ago. Esther is the first character that the reader is introduced to, but we do not really understand who she is until the end of the story. Esther's main struggle is dealing with her home on Loughbreeze Beach being torn down, and trying to figure out the mysteries of her family's past.
In every stage of her life she was plagued with the insecurity of her future. “Esther’s search for selfhood through the dramatically opposed lives of poetry and motherhood offers us a character who throws herself against the limited options available to her like a furious pinball, aiming for and then bouncing away from discrete targets of female identity.” The Radical Imaginary of the Bell Jar by Kate A. Baldwin. When Esther started dating the well liked boy in town Buddy Willard, she got respected by for that. Her mother approved the relationship but just like
Kress says that Esther felt no control in her life and that was because she was confined to her choices by society. Esther aimed to live her life they way she wanted it, whether it went against the norm or not, but she was held back by her illness. It is hoped that the book lead girls to think more highly of themselves, and to not think of themselves like Esther did. “What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort.”
Esther’s suicide attempts, later on in the novel, depicts how much Esther and the impact of the climax has changed her life. The event is when she swallows multiple sleeping pills, and crawls into a hole in the cellar. After this attempt, there is a slow descent of events that build upon the Esther’s state of mind and the impact of this event had made. These event follow a set of therapy sessions and electroshock therapy to create a solution to her mental health in an attempt relinquish her dark thoughts. This creation of an ending reflects a dynamic that separates the folk narrative and the fictional.
The protagonist, Anne Elliot, exemplified the restrictions and expectations that were put on women in the 19th century. These traditional restrictions pressured Anne away from making decisions for herself. “Their predicament is to be born into a world which values them for their marriageability, where the culmination of womanhood is to be a wife and mother, where their lives are regulated by the artificial ideals of polite femininity” (Southam). Women were pictured as objects of frailty that couldn’t handle the tough day-to-day encounters that the men did. They did not have the wide array of opportunities women have earned today.
“Girls wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it is okay to be a boy; for a girl it is like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading” (McEwan 55-56). Throughout the history of literature women have been viewed as inferior to men, but as time has progressed the idealistic views of how women perceive themselves has changed. In earlier literature women took the role of being the “housewife” or the household caretaker for the family while the men provided for the family. Women were hardly mentioned in the workforce and always held a spot under their husband’s wing. Women were viewed as a calm and caring character in many stories, poems, and novels in the early time period of literature. During the early time period of literature, women who opposed the common role were often times put to shame or viewed as rebels. As literature progresses through the decades and centuries, very little, but noticeable change begins to appear in perspective to the common role of women. Women were more often seen as a main character in a story setting as the literary period advanced. Around the nineteenth century women were beginning to break away from the social norms of society. Society had created a subservient role for women, which did not allow women to stand up for what they believe in. As the role of women in literature evolves, so does their views on the workforce environment and their own independence. Throughout the history of the world, British, and American literature, women have evolved to become more independent, self-reliant, and have learned to emphasize their self-worth.
Once Esther returns home to Boston, she becomes an empty shell of a woman, brought down by the outer world’s expectations. People expect her to live the all-American dream by becoming a housewife but the protagonist does not give in to the American prospects, but instead she cuts ties to everyone...