In society females are subjected to stereotypes about what they are expected to be if they want to be considered a lady and/or a mother. Gwedolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha takes the reader throughout the life of an African American woman, named Maud Martha, who defies stereotypes and witnesses women around her doing the same thing. In Gwendolyn Brooks’s chapter, kitchenette folk, Maud Martha talks about people in her building, specifically focusing her attention on women who are not considered normal in society. She describes the unconventional and typical housewives in households that were dominated by men. Each of the women Brooks wrote about all had a specific problem that they were judged for by outsiders, and Brook’s sought out to counter that …show more content…
Society has painted a picture that a woman should focus on all domestic responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning, being well kept, and honoring husbands. Society has also created an image that if a woman strays from any one of these responsibilities they are deemed different or imperfect. In the poem, Sexton describes different characteristics that highlight imperfect qualities in a woman. The speaker in Sexton’s poem relates herself to “a possessed witch” (1). She also acknowledges that a witch is “lonely, twelve-fingered, [and] out of mind” (5). The characteristics that the speaker describes are all related because they portray a person that would be shunned out of society. A witch is often ostracized because they are unlike anyone else. Only a small few accept a witch and those are the ones who believe in the power and strength of a mythical being. Most people fear witches because they are not their rendition of normal. Society seems to not understand things that do not follow a specific guideline. In this situation the specific guidelines refer to the notion behind what makes a witch a witch, and in the same regards what it means to be a woman. As for the relationship between witches and women, Anne Sexton is saying that sometimes women are perceived to be similar to witches when they fail to follow the …show more content…
Sexton writes about the behavior of a mother in the second stanza. She writes that the speaker has come to “warm caves in the woods,/filled them with skillets, carvings, [and] shelves” (8-9). Sexton is describing typical domestic responsibilities, but instead of using just the home she metaphorically relates the home to a cave. The cave represents an image of a wild place that constantly needs to be well kept. The speaker’s purpose as a woman in the cave is to make it livable and comfortable. Sexton infers that a woman’s responsibility is to make a house a home. She also describes a woman’s duty as making sure everyone is comfortable. In the cave, Sexton is describing that the speaker spends most of her time “Rearranging the disaligned” (12). The speaker is so focused on fulfilling the domestic responsibilities of a woman that she barely has time for herself. The image of a person constantly fixing up a cave and reordering it to what is considered an acceptable one induces the image of a woman who is physically tired. When a woman is trying to please everyone, especially society, her needs and desires are often suppressed. When a woman finally decides not to fit into the societal norms, Sexton writes that then “a woman like that is misunderstood” (13). Sexton believes that women who finally decide to go against the norms of
...a convention a life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can’t build white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.” These feelings added a lot to her poems. She felt alienated as a house wife. In a lot of other interviews she her alienation as witchery, the “middle aged witch,” Sexton called it.
The word ‘houseskeeping’ refers to both the lack of domestic feminine roles in the book, but also to what the girls’ grandmother, Sylvia Foster, stated about keeping her home within the family, both in a physical sense and, as Sylvie and Ruth depart from it, a spiritual one. Ruth’s grandmother is using the maintenance of the family home as a metaphor for the women of the Foster house to maintain the very essence of their family itself, “Sell the orchards, but keep the house. So long as you look after your health, and own the roof over your head, you’re as safe as anyone can be,” (Robinson 27). In saying that the orchards should be sold, but not the house, Sylvia is telling her granddaughters that everything outside of the family can be lost and replaced, but so long as they contain the family unit, they will remain safe. While this story does deconstruct the idea of an “all-American”, aesthetically pleasing family, it doesn’t shed the values that one would consider typical for American Literature, such as a heavy emphasis on religion and family. Instead, it allows a unique viewpoint of the different structures of an American family, and demonstrates how, while the structures may change, the overall goals of staying rooted in one’s beliefs and in one’s familial comfort zone often are the same no matter how the roles within a household are established and
Moreover, the mother faces the turning point of the whole journey when she courageously confronts her husband and finally voices out her opinion against being treated as more of a thing rather than a person. She reminds him that “[her] name… is Elizabeth” and should not be referred to as a mere “woman”, but being outrageous as he was, he yells at her to “shut [her] mouth” as she was trying to explain, and “[get his] supper”. Through the mother’s confrontation with her husband, the readers learn the importance of having the courage of speaking out what we believe is right despite of the outcome, instead of merely submitting in silence. Ultimately, numerous positive changes occurred once resolution to both the mother's external and internal conflict are addressed. Not only does “[the husband] often speaks to [the] mother as though she were more of a person and less of a thing”, but the mother also decides to “[teach] her two grandsons how to wash dishes and make
Women like Martha followed the custom of publicly staying out of men’s affairs to honor their husbands, but privately they were the glue that held their lives together and kept the home running from day-to-day. Though these courageous and tireless women worked hard behind the scenes and did not enjoy the freedom and benefits their male counterparts did, they were an inspiration to future generations who recognized their hard work and accomplishments that paved the way for change in the words, “all men are created to equal” to include all of humanity and not just certain men.
The book's depictions and dissects remained on their own as significant commitments as far as anyone is concerned of witch legend and the vague status of ladies in colonial New England. Karlsen's work is one of imposing educated force and a real commitment to the investigation of New England witchcraft. It puts the focal part of ladies as witches under the magnifying lens an extensive 300 years after the events transpired. Karlsen's novel is obliged perusing for the hobbyist, casual reader, or general spectator looking to comprehend and translate the wide picture of pioneer witchcraft in New England.
...ues women’s work becomes wrong. Yes, in today’s society one could argue further that a woman who stays at home and does not work is only reinforcing the stereotype and prolonging the inequality. However, this essay was not written to change the world. It simply strove to identify and prove the reasons behind a ruined sense of self worth that many women in the early 1900’s felt as a result of their work being demeaned. By reaching out to people’s emotional sides, McBride relayed her grandmother’s tale so that people could clearly feel the hurt and demotion that women of that time lived with in order to have them persuaded that the oppression of women in any manner and capacity is wrong.
For, in relinquishing, a mother feels strong and liberal; and in guild she finds the motivation to right wrong. Women throughout time have been compelled to cope with the remonstrances of motherhood along with society’s anticipations Morrison’s authorship elucidates the conditions of motherhood showing how black women’s existence is warped by severing conditions of slavery. In this novel, it becomes apparent how in a patriarchal society a woman can feel guilty when choosing interests, career and self-development before motherhood. The sacrifice that has to be made by a mother is evident and natural, but equality in a relationship means shared responsibility and with that, the sacrifices are less on both part. Although motherhood can be a wonderful experience many women fear it in view of the tamming of the other and the obligation that eventually lies on the mother.
In the early 1900’s, around the time the story takes place; women were expected to be care takers of the home, to be clean, well dressed and mannered. All of these
Katherine Mansfield belongs to a group of female authors that have used their financial resources and social standing to critique the patriarchal status quo. Like Virginia Woolf, Mansfield was socioeconomically privileged enough to write influential texts that have been deemed as ‘proto-feminist’ before the initial feminist movements. The progressive era in which Mansfield writes proves to be especially problematic because, “[w]hile the Modernist tradition typically undermined middle-class values, women … did not have the recognized rights necessary to fully embrace the liberation from the[se] values” (Martin 69). Her short stories emphasized particular facets of female oppression, ranging from gendered social inequality to economic classism, and it is apparent that “[p]oor or rich, single or married, Mansfield’s women characters are all victims of their society” (Aihong 101). Mansfield’s short stories, “The Garden Party” and “Miss Brill”, represent the feminist struggle to identify traditional patriarchy as an inherent caste system in modernity. This notion is exemplified through the social bonds women create, the naïve innocence associated with the upper classes, and the purposeful dehumanization of women through oppressive patriarchal methods. By examining the female characters in “The Garden Party” and “Miss Brill”, it is evident that their relationships with other characters and themselves notify the reader of their encultured classist preconceptions, which is beneficial to analyze before discussing the sources of oppression.
Throughout time women have been written as the lesser sex, weaker, secondary characters. They are portrayed as dumb, stupid, and nothing more than their fading beauty. They are written as if they need to be saved or helped because they cannot help themselves. Women, such as Daisy Buchanan who believes all a woman can be is a “beautiful little fool”, Mrs Mallard who quite died when she lost her freedom from her husband, Eliza Perkins who rights the main character a woman who is a mental health patient who happens to be a woman being locked up by her husband, and then Carlos Andres Gomez who recognizes the sexism problem and wants to change it. Women in The Great Gatsby, “The Story of an Hour,” “The Yellow Wall Paper” and the poem “When” are oppressed because the fundamental concept of equality that America is based on undermines gender equality.
From the beginning of this work, the woman is shown to have gone mad. We are given no insight into the past, and we do not know why she has been driven to the brink of insanity. The “beautiful…English place” that the woman sees in her minds eye is the way men have traditionally wanted women to see their role in society. As the woman says, “It is quite alone standing well back from the road…It makes me think of English places…for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people. There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden—large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.” This lovely English countryside picture that this woman paints to the reader is a shallow view at the real likeness of her prison. The reality of things is that this lovely place is her small living space, and in it she is to function as every other good housewife should. The description of her cell, versus the reality of it, is a very good example of the restriction women had in those days. They were free to see things as they wanted, but there was no real chance at a woman changing her roles and place in society. This is mostly attributed to the small amount of freedom women had, and therefore they could not bring about a drastic change, because men were happy with the position women filled.
Friedan frustratingly explains how women’s choices to revert back to domestic roles after World War II compromised women’s independence and identity. Friedan uses this frustration to revive modern feminism and extinguish the prison that gender roles had imprisoned women in. In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan illustrates how women fell into the common portrayal of a housewife just fifteen years after the war and how “millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school…their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers…”(Friedan 61) and other description that fit the occupation of “housewife”.
The witch is both vulnerable and a powerful figure. The resulting tension between power and powerlessness as a response to laws created by those in power, rather institutionalised power: men, can be seen as expressed through such binary metaphors as that of physical strength and beauty versus weakness and ugliness, kn...
“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.
Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” shows in society how a woman should be placed and what it means to be a woman. A women doesn’t question her partner, instead she is subservient to him. A woman’s duties include staying at home taking care of the children and cooking; while the man works and brings home the money. A feministic approach to Kincaid’s “Girl” points to the idea of the stereotypes that women can only be what they do in the home, they should only be pure and virtuous, and their main focus should be satisfying their husband.