Indira Yuldasheva B band “I, being born a woman and distressed/ By all the needs and notions of my kind/ Am urged by your propinquity to find/ Your person fair, and feel a certain zest/ To bear your body’s weight upon my breast.” Edna St. Vincent Millay was an openly-bisexual female poet in the 20th century who wrote about the female experience in regards to love and sex, which is evident in poems like “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed”, “Thursday” and “First Fig.” Edna St. Vincent Millay shows us how we can use tone to redefine the relationship between gender and power. In “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed”, Edna St. Vincent Millay uses a sarcastic and detached tone to demonstrate how tone redefines the relationship between …show more content…
Vincent Millay uses an apathetic tone in “Thursday” to prove that tone can change the relationship between gender and power. This is shown in the first four lines of the poem, it states, “And if I loved you Wednesday/ Well, what is that to you?/ I do not love you Thursday/ So much is true.” Millay nonchalantly states that her love for this person has disappeared in a period of twenty-four hours, showing no indication of emotion. Using an apathetic tone, Millay gets rid of the cliché that women are needy in relationships. The lack of emotion in these first few lines show that the affection she felt towards this person has completely vanished, she has no desire for their presence or approval. Millay’s problem isn’t that she’s too dependent in a relationship, it’s that she’s too fiercely independent to have long-term feelings for anyone. Millay continues with an apathetic tone in the last four lines of the poem “And why you come complaining/ Is more than I can see/ I loved you Wednesday, --yes-- but what/ Is that to me?” Millay doesn’t understand why her former lover is complaining about her fleeting feelings. By questioning their complaining, Millay coldly implies that she doesn’t owe anybody her love, even if she’s loved them before. Millay is nowhere near needy in this poem, she doesn’t fit the submissive or needy stereotype that women in her time were expected to fall under. Through her use of an apathetic tone in “Thursday”, Millay is able to redefine women as independent rather than needy and submissive, proving that tone can change the relationship between gender and
Unlike the other women of Victorian society, Edna is unwilling to suppress her personal identity and desires for the benefit of her family. She begins “to realize her position in the universe as a human being and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her” (35). Edna’s recognition of herself as an individual as opposed to a submissive housewife is controversial because it’s unorthodox. When she commits suicide it’s because she cannot satisfy her desire to be an individual while society scorns her for not following the traditional expectations of women. Edna commits suicide because she has no other option. She wouldn’t be fulfilled by continuing to be a wife and a mother and returning to the lifestyle that she...
In Cane by Jean Toomer, women are, as critic Meagan Abbott writes, “damaged by functioning primarily as vessels of others’ meaning.” Using a combination of prose and poetry, Toomer metaphorically alludes to the affects of sexuality on Karintha, the protagonist of the first short story in Cane, “Karintha,” over time. Because of her sultry beauty, Karintha is prematurely thrust into the sexual arena through no doing of her own, becoming burdened rather than invigorated by her beauty. Her early exposure to licentious prowling leads to the loss of her identity. Toomer’s language exposes Karintha as a damaged “vessel” of a patriarchal society, one in which men are the decision makers, holding positions of power and prestige, ultimately empowering them to define reality.
Accordingly, I decided the purposes behind women 's resistance neither renamed sexual introduction parts nor overcame money related dependence. I recalled why their yearning for the trappings of progression could darken into a self-compelling consumerism. I evaluated how a conviction arrangement of feeling could end in sexual danger or a married woman 's troublesome twofold day. None of that, regardless, ought to cloud an era 's legacy. I comprehend prerequisites for a standard of female open work, another style of sexual expressiveness, the area of women into open space and political fights previously cornered by men all these pushed against ordinary restrictions even as they made new susceptibilities.
In Sharon Old 's poem "Last Night " an erotic encounter between a man and women takes the reader through a rollercoaster of emotions in only a matter of seconds. Initially, the assumption could be made that this poem is a love poem, which it may be. But it is also a poem about an encounter with nature, graced with a feminine tone as it is being told through the women’s’ point of view. Olds uses descriptive metaphors and symbolic points drawn from nature, while also applying violent imagery and grammar throughout the poem; this allows the audience to feel a connection between submissive and aggressive feelings, and at the same time bringing to the surface what sex and love have to do with each other, if anything at all. A feminist point of view mixed with the harsh and aggressive imagery and symbolic notions, creates the question in the readers mind: Is the woman really in love or is the novelty of this experience what she mistakes for love? Different assumptions could be made because the truth of what the lovers relationship is, never gets explained. Instead, Old’s forces her audience to come to their own resolution after digesting the real emotions this poem brings to the surface.
As females, gender has given Petry and Clifton a voice to share different perspectives of female empowerment and identity. Using the mediums of poetry and prose, allows for an easily accessible, direct source, of life as a
In The Author to her Book, the author’s tone changes multiple times throughout the story making it quite clear where she stands and how she wants the reader to feel about each sentence she writes. By analyzing the words and images Anne Bradstreet uses and depicts, it clear she is frustrated and annoyed about what is happening based on what the speaker says in the poem.
Society continually places restrictive standards on the female gender not only fifty years ago, but in today’s society as well. While many women have overcome many unfair prejudices and oppressions in the last fifty or so years, late nineteenth and early twentieth century women were forced to deal with a less understanding culture. In its various formulations, patriarchy posits men's traits and/or intentions as the cause of women's oppression. This way of thinking diverts attention from theorizing the social relations that place women in a disadvantageous position in every sphere of life and channels it towards men as the cause of women's oppression (Gimenez). Different people had many ways of voicing their opinions concerning gender inequalities amound women, including expressing their voices and opinions through their literature. By writing stories such as Daisy Miller and The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Henry James let readers understand and develop their own ideas on such a serious topic that took a major toll in American History. In this essay, I am going to compare Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to James’ “Daisy Miller” as portraits of American women in peril and also the men that had a great influence.
Looking at these texts through a homoerotic lens simply allows for the possibility of a more nuanced reading of Dickinson’s work. Ultimately, Emily Dickinson’s tendencies to contradict literary convention, resist binaries of gender and sexuality, and call attention to societal conventions are better understood through a queer lens—a lens which inherently aims to understand and “disarrange normative systems of behavior and identity” (Juhasz 24). This analysis will use such a lens to consider multiple versions of four poems—“I hide myself within my flower,” “Her breast is fit for pearls,” “He showed me hights I never saw,” and “Going to Him! Happy letter!”—and demonstrate Dickinson’s capacity to tackle societal norms through subtle changes in diction and syntax, beginning with how the Amherst poet queered poetic
The well-acclaimed poem “Suburban Sonnet”, written by the talented author Gwen Harwood successfully portrays the disillusions that 1950s Australia has us to believe about their culture. Harwood addresses the past ethical issue of misogyny and patriarchy with a variety of techniques to meet her goal of sharing her experiences as an Australian mother. One instance of the text which captured this is in the poet’s dejected tone as she conveys to the reader. This has identified in the quote, “She practices a fugue, though it can matter to no one now if she plays well or not.” Lines 1-2. By using the example above, the author effectively implied to readers that in reality women faced oppression in society through a common neglect towards their role
Feminine power has long struck awe into the very heart of humanity. From modern believers in a single female God to the early Pagan religions, which considered every woman a goddess due to the mysterious and god-like power of the “sacred feminine” to create life, people of various faiths and time periods have revered the powers of womanhood. In traditional American culture, however, women are supposedly powerless and fragile, and men supposedly have both physical and political power. Is this true for modern society? Are our gender roles such that women are fragile and powerless, despite the historical prevalence of faith in the mysterious and creative powers of the female? Or are men fragile, and is modern feminine power not diminished but disguised? Dialogue surrounding gender in more recent periods of literature and thought, such as Romanticism, Modernism, and Post-Modernism, gravitate toward the latter argument. To understand their thinking, the following three works are instrumental: Romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “Kubla Kahn” (1797), Modernist Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), and Post-Modernist Gabriel García Márquez’s short story, “Death Constant Beyond Love” (1970). In these works, an increasing tendency to contain rather than exploit feminine power reveals the fragility of the male personality.
In LeBlanc’s words, “I am suggesting…that the presence of lesbian motifs and manifestations in the text offers a little-explored position from which to examine the strategies and tactics by which Edna attempts to establish a subjective identity.” (237) LeBlanc’s support for this analysis comes from a variety of sources including Adrienne Rich’s article “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience, Teresa de Lauretis’s, Monique Wittig’s and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s wor...
As a female university student, I feel deeply related to Marjorie since her personality is quietly similar to mine. Analogously, I could feel Bernice’s “vague pain” (Fitzgerald, 3) and realize her sensitivity as the things have happened to me when I was younger. In order to comprehend author’s main idea, I did numerous researches about the jazz age. Thus it can be seen, reader’s background is also crucial when responding to this literary texts. The writer’s main target audiences are women, who have different desires and needs than men. The meaning of the text often competes when we have a better understanding of our self-identities. We interpret the text based on our own psyches, experiences, and judgments. Literature, are like music, without interaction with its audiences, no profound meaning would be
...talented female writers have died by their own hand, victims of their own contrary instincts. They have fallen prey to a madness that also plagued their literary sisters, a madness caused by a stifled passion, a passion that eventually finds its outlet through the means of a tragic and untimely death. By examining the lives and works attributed to Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, it is easy to see the price a woman must pay from possessing a poet’s heart.
The poem refuses to idealize love in the manner that Arnold did instead optioning to take a more realistic approach. Not only does the poem take a more realistic stance there is a lack of emphasis on emotional intimacy and more on physical satisfaction, “But all the time he was talking she had in mind the notion of what his whiskers would feel like on the back of her neck”. The point-of-view has also shifted with the woman from Arnold’s thoughts being explored. Unlike her counterpart she is not focused on emotional intimacy instead her thoughts pertain to how her partner views her. Through her perspective her partner has reduced her to a last resort and implying that she needs to stay faithful in order to combat changing times. However readers learn that the woman has not been faithful and detest the ideas of what it meant to be a women in that time period. The author’s views on the world features blunt and non-romanticized ideals about relationships. That is to say that although the theme of relationships and how time affects them are presented in different perspectives they still have the baseline
She defines her idea of what is right in a relationship by describing how hard and painful it is for her to stray from that ideal in this instance. As the poem evolves, one can begin to see the author having a conflict with values, while simultaneously expressing which values are hers and which are unnatural to her. She accomplishes this accounting of values by personalizing her position in a somewhat unsettling way throughout the poem.