Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From The Underground Gender Roles Analysis

Gender is a Huge Part in Determining Gender Roles Things are different now than they were a while ago. The idea of gender roles in still an issue but isn’t as bad as it was when this story and play were published. According to Dr. Gray, part of Exploring Grays Anatomy said “That it appears our society still believes in sex-role theory, which says that we humans learn from society 's institutions to behave in ways appropriate to our sex.” In Author Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, gender roles can be seen as the stereotypical traditional or normal roles that men should be the money maker and ones in charge and women should be the care taker.

First off, according to “Literary Criticism Post-Modernism:

The first sign from a gender criticism look, in this story and play, deals with the majority of the characters being on the masculinity side. This meaning that a lot of the characters are males rather than females. The main characters of each are men and they are the main focus throughout the whole story and the whole play. In Notes from the Underground, the story is based on the life of UM, the underground man, and Willy, the husband and father, in Death of a Salesman. The authors did this at a time when they wanted to show that men were the leaders and had more power than women, and should be paid more attention to because they more important due to being a male. This is the main theme throughout the play Death of a Salesman which is going off of the traditional “norm” of masculinity. Willy is the bread winner since he is a businessman and the male and Linda, the woman, or course is just a house wife and mother. As for in the story Notes form the Underground, UM worked in an office which gave a good indication that he was also the money maker. He never had a female figure in his life because that was one of his issues until he met Liza. She was a female prostitute. This is a very stereotypical point of view because of what society has always pictured male and females occupations to be like. People do not realize though that these beliefs limit women to do what they want to do. This can bring in the

Although the definition of masculinity and feminity hasn’t changed a whole lot from when it first originated, people in general, are adapting to the idea that it is okay to change up the roles in families and in the community. As in my first sign of masculinity in Notes from the Underground and Death of a Salesman, life now doesn’t always follow those rules. It is now okay for men and women to do whatever they want to without any restriction. Women now have full time jobs along with being a mother and house wife and there are some men that do stay home and are the primarily care taker of the children. According to National At-Home Dad posted in 2014 said that Pew Research released a report in June of 2014 that found 2 million men to be stay-at-home dads. This was double the number they reported in 1989. Unfortunately, the numbers are based entirely on unemployment, defining stay-at-home dads as “men ages 18-69 who are living with their own children (biological, step or adopted) younger than 18, not employed for pay at all in the prior year.” (no page). This statistic shows that stay at home dads are becoming more common. This is the difference in Death of a Salesman written in a time that this was almost not acceptable. According to Department for Professional Employees stated as for women with full time jobs in December 2014, there were over 73 million working women in the U.S. While