The past years have brought much attention to young female celebrities who resorted to drugs, sex scandals, and extreme alterations to their bodies as a way of gaining media attention. As a result of this, females have been degraded and extra expectations come from men for them to be perfect which creates the status quo of going crazy and swinging on a wrecking ball in the nude as perfectly appropriate and arousing. Leading female cinematic characters like Bella Swan from the Twilight Saga, Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series, and have influenced the ideals of young women based on their presentation of three characteristics: their emotional stability, physical fitness, and intelligence level. In light of that, however, movies have begun portraying women as more mature and down to earth to present a more realistic nature, and these three characters are good role models that young girls can muse to.
Bella Swan on the other hand is regarded as an insult to feminism everywhere. She is immature, lustful, ignorant, and irrational. While the saga has many admirers, it also has critics labeling it as retarding women's equality rights and displaying inappropriate ideals of how to treat a woman. Bella’s soft lips and pale complexion, even so in comparison to her vampire friends,sets her apart in that she appeals more sensual and submissive to greater authorities. In the first book of the Saga, she meets Edward Cullen, who is a vampire that wants to protect Bella from his family and just desires her blood for food. Later in the series, she meets another man of equal aesthetical pleasure and is emotionally torn between her long term love for Edward and the debts she owes him or to go with th...
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...where and how they act.
Works Cited
Eddo-Lodge, Renno. "The Anti-Feminist Character of Bella Swan, or Why the Twilight Saga Is Regressive." The Anti-Feminist Character of Bella Swan, or Why the Twilight Saga Is Regressive...by Reni Eddo-Lodge, Kritikos V.10, January 2013. Kritikos, Jan. 2013. Web. 06 May 2014.
Hibbard, Laura. “Hermione Granger: The Heroine Women Have Been Waiting For.” Hermione Granger: The Heroine Women Have Been Waiting For. Women. 14 July 2011. Web. 05 May 2014.
Pockett, Trinna. “Katniss Everdeen Is a Good Role Model for My Daughter.” Katniss Everdeen Is a Good Role Model for my Daughter. Trinna Pockett, 22 Mar. 2012. Web. 5 May 2014
Sheffield, Helena. “The Importance of Strong Female Characters.” Feminspire. Feminspire,
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In bite me or don’t: twilight as abstinence porn, Christine Seifert from Westminster college in Utah, analyzes the twilight saga. Describing twilight saga as an abstinence porn saga. Christine agrees with twilight fans about the lost of abstinence and sexual tension in breaking dawn. Christine is a feminist writer from the Bitch magazine she emphasizes most of her critics towards Bella describing her as weak and with no control over her body (348). Seifert believes that Edward is in control of Bella’s protection, humanity and virginity.(348)Christine uses rhetorical strategies during her discussion, persuading the reader about the life of Bella as a teenage mom and how twilight transmits a message of abstinence.
The women in both Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are seemingly presented with traditional feminine qualities of inferiority, weakness and sexual objectification. However, the power that they hold in male-female relationships, and their embodiment of traditional male roles, contests the chauvinistic views of society during Conrad and Hardy’s era. While Conrad presents powerful female characters through their influences over men, the reversal of traditional gender roles is exemplified more by Hardy’s character, Tess, yet both authors present revolutionary ideas of feminism, and enlighten readers to challenge the patriarchal views of society towards women.
“Dracula, in one aspect, is a novel about the types of Victorian women and the representation of them in Victorian English society” (Humphrey). Through Mina, Lucy and the daughters of Dracula, Stoker symbolizes three different types of woman: the pure, the tempted and the impure. “Although Mina and Lucy possess similar qualities there is striking difference between the two” (Humphrey). Mina is the ideal 19th century Victorian woman; she is chaste, loyal and intelligent. On the other hand, Lucy’s ideal Victorian characteristics began to fade as she transformed from human to vampire and eventually those characteristics disappeared altogether. Lucy no longer embodied the Victorian woman and instead, “the swe...
Conclusively, while Bram Stokers novel Dracula is seen as a gothic and horror story, I argue that it is a novel that seeks to address female sexuality directly. Seen through numerous passages, Stoker confronts and battles the views between sexuality during the Victorian era though his genius of characterization of characters present within the novel. As it seems highly intentional to me, I respect the way in which he criticizes and critiques upon female sexuality by bringing into light new ideas regarding female desires. When contrasting his text upon today’s culture, the differences to how one perceived the vampire has changed significantly.
Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, is a highly controversial work of fiction that is still being read for the first time today. Dracula touches many different categories including; sci-fi horror to 1800’s English romance literature. This is the main reason why the novel Dracula can be analyzed in many different ways using many different literary theories. The theory which stuck out most to me while reading this novel was the Feminist Theory. The Feminist Theory cannot be used to analyze Dracula as a whole novel, but it can be used in order to analyze the different female characters throughout the book. Therefore, Bram Stoker’s Dracula can be analyzed through the feminist theory by focusing on the characters Mina Harker, Lucy Westenra, and the three brides of Dracula.
In Dracula, Bram Stoker portrays a clear battle between the “traditional woman” of the time and the “new woman.”. Stoker uses the contrasting characters of Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray to depict this evolution in women and, also, to paint an image of the reaction to this advance, expressed by both men and women.
In Twilight, Edward Cullen presents the question; “ But what if I’m not the hero? What if I’m the bad guy?” The role of vampires is very controversial. Back in the day they were evil, soulless monsters and people genuinely feared them. However, in the present day it seems that we have grown to love them and even hope to one day be them. There are a plethora of vampire stories and many of them have become immense hits. With so many vampire stories, it is not uncommon that readers are able to identify a vast amount of similarities. Although similar in aspects, there are still many differences between the classic and modern day vampires. Two highly popular stories, in which we can easily identify similarities and differences, are Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.
Disney movies have a very narrow view of what women should be like. Since the arrival of the first Disney movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, the idea of it has expanded, but rather marginally. There is a clear distinction of what a young women should be and what she shouldn’t be. Those who do not fit the mold of Disney’s expectations are cast aside to become villains, but those who do, end up becoming the damsel in distress. Ultimately, these stereotypes are what influences young girls who watch these films, and can have devastating effects on their self worth and change their idea of what it means to be a women. Films like Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
These novels tell the dark love story between Bella Swan, an average, somewhat shy high school student, and Edward Cullen, a mysterious and strong vampire. Rape culture is evident throughout these four novels. For example, when Bella’s best friend Jacob kisses her against her will, she tries to fight it and then gives up “acting on instinct…I opened my eyes and didn’t fight”. Charlie, Bella’s father, asked Jacob why Bella hit him, and when Jacob said “because I kissed her”, Charlie said “good job kid”. At another point in the novels, Bella admires the bruises on her skin after having sex with
...e relationship with men, as nothing but tools she can sharpen and destroy, lives through lust and an uncanny ability to blend into any social class makes her unique. Her character is proven as an unreliable narrator as she exaggerates parts of the story and tries to explain that she is in fact not guilty of being a mistress, but a person caught in a crossfire between two others.
In Case's article “Tasting the Original Apple,” it talks about the role that now the new woman has and how it comes into conflict with how men react towards it as stated “Dracula is often read as a largely reactionary response to the threat of autonomous female sexuality posed by the phenomenon of the "New Woman," with its anxieties about female sexuality being most clearly visible in Lucy Westenra's story. Particularly once she has been "vamped," Lucy's sexual assertiveness seems to link her with the New Woman. But Lucy's actions as a vampire, like those of the "awful women" (42) Jonathan encounters at Dracula's castle, perhaps owe less to the specific threat posed by the New Woman's insistence on sexual autonomy than to the ambivalences built into the model of Victorian womanhood from the start. Since ideal womanhood (and the ground of male desire) was characterized by a combination of total sexual purity and at least the potential for passionate devotion to a man, this model...
Since 1937, when Snow White was created, Disney princesses have been falsely portraying women. While their personalities have changed to keep up with society’s standards, their unrealistic body
...the young girl prior to meeting the wolf, how the young girl strays from the ideals of femininity once she meets the wolf, and last, what is inherently not feminine as represented by the wolf and his masculine characteristics. The wolf does not naturalize masculine characteristics within the reader because he still acts somewhat like a wolf, he is used as a tool to further naturalize the ideals of femininity, by standing in stark contrast to them.
Journal of Popular Culture, 32(2), pp. 79-89. Retrieved from: http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=6&sid=64cd7df8-8ea3-4d9a-ad60-1deef7e616e6%40sessionmgr114&hid=103&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=aph&AN=1585569 Starlet C. (2007). Women in action movie empowered role models or chicks with guns.
The Twilight Saga, by Stephanie Meyer, has been viewed as a narrative of either teenage lust or romantic love, characterized by Bella, an introverted seventeen-year-old girl, and Edward Cullen, a mysterious vampire who goes to Bella’s high school. The book series stole the hearts of teenage girls across the world and even expanded upon those horizons to reach an audience so wide that the book series became a household name. Still, no one has credited the Cullen’s in the way that they display family loyalty, self-control, and altruism among themselves. Critics have endlessly discussed the love and lust, of the two individuals and are fascinated by the ability of the Twilight Saga to fall not just in the genre of romance, but also in the supernatural/