Analysis Of To The Ladies By Mary Lady Chudleigh

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Poetry serves different purposes and can be used in various different ways; whether it is to describe something as simple as a chair or explore something as complex as the meaning of life. Poets range their poetry to their tastes, finding beauty everywhere they look and scrutinizing the details around them so they can transfer what they sense at those moments onto their readers. Mary Lady Chudleigh used poetry to speak out against the injustices against women and support feminism (Famous Poets). In “To the ladies”, Mary Lady Chudleigh uses poetry as a means of communicating her ideas to the world and persuading her readers. The poem itself works as a warning to women, or as the title puts it “To the ladies”. The warning is simple: stay away …show more content…

Because of the time period in which Lady Chudleigh lived, 1656 to 1710, her views on marriage greatly differ to those of our 21st century society. During her time women were expected to marry and fulfill the wishes of their husbands by acting as household caretakers while their husbands went out and worked. Hence, it is no surprise that Lady Chudleigh compares being a wife to being a servant. In “To the ladies”, Lady Chudleigh warns women effectively to avoid marriage by using tone, diction, and implicit and explicit details as her weapon in the fight against sexism of her time.
Tones of sarcasm, obedience, and pride create a more alluring poem while concurrently taking different steps to make the reader question marriage as a whole. Lady Chudleigh uses a tone of frustration at the beginning of the poem as she explains how servants and wives are the same. However, being a woman herself and having no considerable say in the way things work, she utilizes a voice of obedience, one a woman of the 17th century would use when in the presence of men (Lambert). The first line of the poem clearly makes her thoughts evident as she says, …show more content…

Through this tone the speaker is able to empower women to question their husband’s authority as well as their marriage. The speaker becomes more outspoken and begins to more blatantly say the facts, “And all the fawning flatt’rers hate” (Chudleigh 22). The confidence that the speaker begins to show transfers into the readers and pushes them to understand that they are entitled to their independence. “You must be proud, if you’ll be wise” (Chudleigh 24) has a tone of experience and confidence to empower women to find their own independence and question their marriage. Ultimately, the author’s tone in the poem, “To the ladies” empowers women not only of her time, but those of the future to be proud, confident, and independent people. Lady Chudleigh’s choice of words plays a key part in the tone as well. Without diction, the tone wouldn’t be able to be detected or even be noticed. Words in each line set the tone of the entire poem and give away the speaker’s true feelings. For example, the use of the word “servant” in the first line give away her frustration despite the fact that the tone stills hold back all of her frustrations, the speaker is more obedient. However, as the poem progresses

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