Ms. Anna Cora Mowatt is an inspiring theatrical and historical figure. She fell in love with the theatre at a young age and exhibited a talent for acting. Moreover, Mowatt’s fame flourished due to her play and literature publications, not just from than from her acting abilities. Anna Cora Ogden was born on March 5, 1819 in Bordeaux, France to American parents. She and her family moved to New York City when she was seven years old. Anna married James Mowatt, a lawyer who was several years her senior, when she was 15 years old. Her poor health led her to move to and live in Europe during the years 1837-1840. Nonetheless, her feeble health did not put an end to her mental strength. Mowatt’s determination led her to pursue an acting career. She debuted in self-written plays such as The Lady of Lyons, Armand, the Child of the People as well as in a few Shakespearean productions. Mowatt published articles in magazines such Godey’s Lady’s Book, as well as wrote biographies, novels such as The Fortune Hunter (1844) and Evelyn (1845) and her most successful play Fashion. She prospered from the revenue her plays earned since they were well received in Europe and America.
Mowatt’s play Fashion opened in 1845 and has been crowned as the best American comedy of the 19th century. This play is also known as Fashion: or, Life in New York. It can be considered a representative play due to Mowatt’s usage of satire to reveal America’s obsession with “highbrow taste and cultural distinction”. The Industrial Revolution formed America into a developing nation which attracted citizens and foreign immigrants to the expanding industrial towns for job opportunities. Competition and trade relations increased between the American and European nations...
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... the etiquette verses virtue, decorum verses purity, and manners verses morals. Mowatt creates the conflict for her plot by demonstrating the struggle between greed for material wealth and the demand for personal integrity.
Anne Cora Mowatt demonstrates the continental manners and the developing American Spirit in her masterpiece Fashion. It is an idea that she may have used her experiences in America as well as Europe in order to formulate the plot and conflict of this play. She lived during the midst of the industrial expansion of both countries. These topics would have been very relevant during the time due to the increase of each country nationalism as well as trade and manufacturing competition. Despite not knowing how Mowatt devised the plot concept for Fashion, the uniqueness and relatable themes and characters still keep this play an American classic.
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Pellegrini, Ann. “The Plays of Paula Vogel.” A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Ed. David Krasner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 473-84.
Social pressures change as time passes, therefore it is interesting to see how these three texts whom differ by almost four hundred years perceive society and the effect this has on the protagonists; Shakespeare’s King Lear which was first performed in 1606 during the Jacobean era, presents a patriarchal society. Whilst, Arthur Miller uses the characters in ‘Death of a salesman’ to show the failure of the ‘American dream’ during the “golden era” of America in the late 40’s. The ‘American Dream’ was a set of ideals which suggested that anyone in the US could be successful through hard work, and had the potential to live a happy life. The sense of the deterioration in the equality of opportunities links to the fall in power and hierarchy in King Lear. Arudanthi Roy, however, uses her contemporary Indian novel to illustrate, using a proleptic and coalesce structure, the lives of the protagonists living in a post – colonial society. In each of these three texts there are characters who fit the stereotypes that society has instilled in them, but then there are those characters who noticeably differ from the norm; According to 19th century novelist Alfred de Musset “how glorious it is – and how painful – to be an exception.” Hence this statement can be seen as applicable to these characters, because in all three texts these characters do end up losing a lot.
In this essay we will be comparing two female characters from different texts and different time periods. We will be looking in depth at Lady Macbeth from Shakespeare's play 'Macbeth', and Sheila from J.B. Priestley's 'An Inspector Calls'. We will be looking at their roles in their respective plays, and how their characters develop over time.
When deciding what element a play should contain, one must look at a large variety of options. These options can alter how the audience depicts the play and change their overall opinions. Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” is a play set around 1895 where the protagonist, Jack Worthing, takes on two identities in order to avoid social obligations. This play’s era affects how the characters are dressed and how their households appear.
The play is set in the 1920s when women started to receive clerical jobs and were expected to complete certain milestones in life. For example, in the scene labeled “at home” young woman – the main character – tells her mom that she is going to get married, because everybody does it, but then says she will not because she does not love Mr. Jones (Machinal). Ultimately her choice was to not get married, but in the end she does because her mom needs and wants her to get married for financial stability and the young woman feels that her destiny was to care for her mother. However, in the scene titled “prohibited”, the young woman starts deciding her destiny and chooses to cheat on her husband, Mr. Jones (Machinal). This is the moment when she realizes she can control her own destiny. That she does not have to be the happy housewife that society says her fate has to be. But there was still one problem, society still appeared to be in control of her destiny because she hasn’t decided on what her exact destiny would
Though its primary function is usually plot driven--as a source of humor and a means to effect changes in characters through disguise and deception—cross dressing is also a sociological motif involving gendered play. My earlier essay on the use of the motif in Shakespeare's plays pointed out that cross dressing has been discussed as a symptom of "a radical discontinuity in the meaning of the family" (Belsey 178), as cul-tural anxiety over the destabilization of the social hierarchy (Baker, Howard, Garber), as the means for a woman to be assertive without arousing hostility (Claiborne Park), and as homoerotic arousal (Jardine). This variety of interpretations suggests the multivoiced character of the motif, but before approaching the subject of this essay, three clarifica- tions are necessary at the outset.
Tucker, Barbara M. Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry: 1790-1860. Ithaca: N.Y., 1984. Print.
Kemp, Theresa D. Women in the Age of Shakespeare. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2009. Print.
This paper will be an analytical, interpretive essay about Death of a Salesman (1949), the most profound work by author and playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005). Death of a Salesman received the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the year of its creation and has been reproduced over seven-hundred times. This analysis will concentrate on Willy Loman the central character of the play but also on the play as a whole. It will show that Arthur Miller’s critiques of American society still hold true to this day. That he was not just making a statement about the corporate social structure failing those that served it, or about how the American Dream in which those agencies perpetuate was dying. He was stating that the American Dream had never existed at all.
Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing is, on the surface, a typical romantic comedy with a love-plot that ends in reconciliation and marriage. This surface level conformity to the conventions of the genre, however, conceals a deeper difference that sets Much Ado apart. Unlike Shakespeare’s other romantic comedies, Much Ado about Nothing does not mask class divisions by incorporating them into an idealized community. Instead of concealing or obscuring the problem of social status, the play brings it up explicitly through a minor but important character, Margaret, Hero’s “waiting gentlewoman.” Shakespeare suggests that Margaret is an embodiment of the realistic nature of social class. Despite her ambition, she is unable to move up in hierarchy due to her identity as a maid. Her status, foiling Hero’s rich, protected upbringing, reveals that characters in the play, as well as global citizens, are ultimately oppressed by social relations and social norms despite any ambition to get out.
In the 1960’s women roles were changing they were getting more involved in the American society. While working as a journalist Susan Glaspell reported a case of a murder which influenced her to write the play Trifles. In the play, Trifles the women are being presented as weak and powerless, a murder has been committed by Minnie Wright. There are a total of five characters in the play, three of them are men and the other two are females. The males are the county attorney, sheriff, and a neighbor farmer. The women are Mrs. Peter and Mrs. Hale. The men are searching for clues to convict Minnie of the crime, while the women find the most important pieces to the crime. In the play “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell, the author demonstrates feminist stereotypes, representations of genders during the era when women had less power.
The title page offers an immediate insight into the patriarchal constraints placed on women in early modern England. Although The Tragedy of Mariam is the first known English play to be authored by a woman, the fact that Cary is unable to give her full name is indicative of the limitations on women writers of the period. This semi-anonymous authorship...
As the century changed, so did the fashion world. The 1900’s was a huge decade for growth in both the fashion industry and everyday fashion. Before the twentieth century, only those in the upper class could afford to be fashionable. Everybody else wore what was called “costume,” a more plain, practical, and made-at-home kind of dress (Fashion Encyclopedia). This century, though, brought with it the widespread use of magazines, which showed all of the public what was considered to be “in ...
In her play Widow Ranter, Aphra Behn takes quite a solid approach in disrupting the social order by empowering women. She presents the women with characteristics of authoritative figures. Set in 17th century Virginia, Behn use Bacon's Rebellion and the stereotypes of a developing colonial society as a foundation for developing gender politics at the time. Her play also attempts to justify the Emipre’s imposition of their social hierarchy within the Virginian society criticizing the wrongful seizure of power by those without the authority or nobility to do so.