Feminist and Dialogic Approaches in The Fatal Sisters

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Feminist and Dialogic Approaches in The Fatal Sisters

Thomas Gray's method of transforming monological poems into intense psyche films is fascinating. While reading The Fatal Sisters, readers can actually engage in a mind performance because of the choices of words, vivid actions, social aspects, and mythology that Gray displays here. The feminist and dialogic approaches, applied together, help shape the realm of this poem into a complex event in history that still takes place today.

The feminist approach reveals many things about this poem that would otherwise be overlooked. To start, Gray presents us with Norse mythology. The twelve women in this poem are acknowledging the maidens of Oden who conduct the souls of heroes slain in the battle of Vahalla. This poem is their song. It sounds as a prayer that they are reciting to the war maidens Mista, Sangrida, and Hilda. "It is well-documented that in many cultures, when matriarchal societies were replaced with patriarchal ones, the previously venerated goddesses were turned by the new culture into witches, seductresses, or fools."(Guerin 207) These women's matriarch society was turned into a patriarch society. This is why the battle is going on. Supreme classes of men are combating for more power. The power that men took away from old matriarchal archetypes.

Another approach helpful in analyzing this poem is Marxist feminism. Marxist feminism points out the social class that these women are in and leads us further to determine their fate. The women in The Fatal Sisters belong to the working class. They constitute a union and are bonded by sisterhood. The writers of the 1970's movie, Norma Rae, had this poem in mind when making this film. The Fatal sisters know their job. The fate of the men's lives are in the sisters hands. "Glitt'ring lances are the loom, where the dusky warp we strain, weaving many a soldier's doom, Orkney's woe, and Randver's bane."(5-8) The sisters are not affected by the war that is taking place. Their only focus is their duties, which are to finish making war flags and aid in killing.

The biological and liguistical models also shape the feminine approach. The preface draws a detailed abstract to what these women look like. "Till looking through an opening in the rocks he saw twelve gigantic figures resembling women."(Gray 38) This is very offensive. He could have called them sturdy women, or large women.

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