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Treatment of women in literature
Treatment of women in literature
Treatment of women in literature
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Is love empty? Is there nothing except the pursuit of lust and no time for courtship or time to love another person emotionally? Physical love provides a quick bond but often has no emotional or lasting value. Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” develops a carefully constructed argument as the speaker seeks to persuade his lady to surrender her virginity to him.
The argumentative point made by the speaker in this poem is the importance of time and a man in love not being able to wait another second to express his love for the women he desires. He begins with “Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime.” (L 1-2) The speaker is attempting to woo his love interest and court her in order to give her the time she needs to make the important decision. He writes, “We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide of Humber would complain.” Although they were apart they would enjoy the life and time they were given and would plan their future together (L 3-7).
The speaker says he would love her ten years before the flood (the flood of Noah’s ark in the Bible) and he says that if she please she could refuse till the conversion of the Jew’s (the end of the world). He would give her all the time in the world. (L7-10). The speaker says that he would praise her eyes for one hundred years and adore her face. (L13-14) He would gaze in to her eyes and express the love he has for her for one hundred years. Two hundred years to each breast and thirty thousand years to all the rest. The speaker would love and adore her body and would be gentle and warm loving her the way a lover should. He states, “An age to least to every part, and the last age should show your heart.” The lover would explore her heart and feelings and emotions and love them the same (L15-18).
Complementing her, the writer says, “For lady you deserve this state; Nor would I love at lower rate.” He feels that she deserves to be pampered and doted on and treated right, like a princess.
a passage from the letter she is writing to add a personal feel to the
The tone of the poem is conversational and pert written in a plain, informal style. Neither voice uses a lot of poetic imagery in any of the verses and the language is considerably colloquial not employing metaphor and ambiguity in terms of the meaning. A question is posed as the introduction and the address is clear; Lady Maria implores Gui D’ussel to engage with her in this dialogue and confronts him with questions regarding the dynamic of lovers. The taunting tone of the dialogue is suggestive of a courting between the two, however, it is not explicit about the nature of the relationship as they do not, on any occasion specify the lady and man in question. The ambiguity that does exist revolves around the authors’ position in the text and whether or not they are debating about courtly love in particular or whether the generality of the “lady” and “man” in question are their potential selves.
In the Victorian society, love, sex and desire were the unspeakable subjects, especially for a young, unmarried woman in care of two young children. The governess herself can not imagine thinking about or mentioning her sexual needs. Her desire for love is so strong that she immediately falls in love with the man she hardly...
Love can sometimes be seen as a counterintuitive and unconventional sense of life. The irony in it all is love could either be as warm as the Sunday morning sun or as cold as a New England winter when touched by the heart or the skin. As we grow up, if we believe we are cherished by the most respectful and admirable person, we give up the most vulnerable parts of ourselves: the body. However, throughout modern society, people tend to use sexual intercourse as a form of personal pleasure and gain without the obligations of emotions. Henceforth, stated in Sharon Olds’ “Sex Without Love”, premarital sex may be against God’s intentions to be pure but at the same time people love the priest more the teachings and are willing to go against the Lord
In the situation of Georgina there is a sentient need for a creative and rewarding relationship. This physical-psychological desire, however, does not have love as the basis of a long-term, deep emotional relationship between two individuals (Goldman, Philosophy of Sex, pp. 78-79). It is more the bodily desire for the body of another that dominates her mental life (Goldman, Philosophy of Sex, p. 76). In the Georgina's need for...
Mankind's intense yearning for love leads him to what seems to be an unending search for it. Man spends too much time searching for love; but not fully understanding its purpose. Love is a gift from one person to another, and thus it has the ability to posses many different meanings. Often, in search of love people fall into the trap of trying to alter love to suit personal fantasies of what it should be. Frequently spending their time convincing themselves of what they can change about the other, instead of how they can work to accept them. "I was one of those women whose fate is to take a war out of a man, or at least imagine she is doing so.
Through his writing, Andrew Marvell uses several strategies to get a woman to sleep with him. In his seduction poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvell first presents a problem and then offers his solution to the problem. Marvell sets up a situation in which he and his lover are on opposite sides of the world: “Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side/ Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide/ Of Humber would complain….” (5-7). He has set up a circumstance in which his lover is in India and he is in England; however, this situation can be interpreted as a metaphor for sexual distance. Marvell then goes on to profess his love for this woman, telling her that he will always love her, saying “...I would/ Love you ten years before the flood” (7-8) and saying that his “vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires and more slow” (11). This suggests that he is promising permanence in their relationship. In doing so, Marvell is also trying to pacify his lady’s fears of sexual relations. He wants his lover to feel secure and confident about having intercourse with him.
Romantic love is both an inward and an outward admiration and investment in another person. When a person loves another person, he or she displays admiration and respect for that person’s body, personality, emotions, and desires. On the other hand, when a person’s only admiration for another person is for their body, such desire cannot be defined as love. For example, a rich, middle-aged man may truly admire and enjoy his prostitute’s body, but his investment in her aesthetic beauty does not equate to love for her as a person. His fixation is purely visual and tangible, yet his regard for the prostitute’s personality and emotions is, most likely, almost non-existent. Final diagnosis: the rich man does not love his prostitute, but lusts for her.
Love and hate are powerful and contradicting emotions. Love and hate are also the subjects under examination for several centuries yet even to the present day; it remains to be a mystery. For the past centuries, writers and poets have written about love showing that the stories of love can never fade way. For this essay, I will discuss three English literature sources that talk about the theme of love and hate. These are the poem Olds "Sex without Love”, the poem Kennel "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps and the story by Hemingway "Hills like White Elephants. I will use the poems to compare the traditional stance of sex that are within the parameters of marriage and love versus the belief that love is in itself an act of pleasure
Why does one love? One loves for the sake of happiness. This was the common mindset in the pre-modern worldview from the time of ancient Greece. The ideas present in Plato’s The Symposium have however been replaced with a more contemporary view, particularly in Western societies. Allan Bloom details this transition in his work Love and Friendship. Bloom argues that the idea of “eros” has lost its true meaning; it has been morphed into a selfish and self-less act of mere sex: “Eros, in its Freudian version, is really all just selfishness and provides no basis for intimate human connection” (Bloom 24). Sex is no longer a form of a strong, intimate connection, but rather our contemporaries have allowed sex to become “no different from a description of eating habits” (Bloom 20). Society today sees sex everywhere, it is forced upon us by the media, but there’s no beauty in it. Love relationships once were for the purpose of exchanging knowledge, today it is a label frequently and erroneously used.
“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Rober Herrick and Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” have many similarities and differences. The tone of the speakers, the audience each poem is directed to, and the theme make up some of the literary elements that help fit this description.
The speaker continues to argue that time is not in favor of his mistress’s nervousness or his age. For instance, he says, “But at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near” (lines 21 and 22). In other words, he is saying his time is running out quickly. There can be many reasons why his time is running short, but according to the poem there is one reason he could be in a rush to make love with his mistress. The speaker says, “And yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity” (lines 23 and 24). “Deserts of vast eternity” (line 24) expresses his concern of not being able to have children, which would make him sterile. As men age, their sperm count becomes less and less, which makes conceiving a child nearly impossible.
In Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress," he's arguing for affection. The object of the speaker's desire wants to wait and take the relationship slow, while the speaker pushes for instant gratification. This persuasive poem makes the point that time waits for no one and it's foolish for two lovers to postpone a physical relationship.
Prior to the 19th century, love and marriage were often considered to be separate concepts. Marriage was strictly business management whereas love was a pursuit outside of marriage. During the renaissance, “ideal” love was a purifying and noble experience. There were two outcomes necessary for the love to be deemed ideal: there could only be a union of the hearts, minds and soul, not the bodies; and the unrequited desire had to lead to ennobling of the lover. The play Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare can be read as a satire of courtly love as opposed to a tragic love story celebrating it. This is because Shakespeare mocks “ideal” beauty conventions, suggest that courtly love is not actually love, and uses irony to exaggerate its effects.
This description is not of lustrous beauty, but of the true love he felt for her. This statement and