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Gender and its roles in literature
Gender roles in Literature
Gender and its roles in literature
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Men and women have not always been treated equal. Some would dispute that they aren’t equivalent to this day. Virginia Woolf, author of “Two Cafeterias,” saw this dissimilarity manifested in the smallest things; in this case, she noticed the discrepancy between the two meals fed to men and women at Cambridge University. While she paints a vivid picture of a beautiful meal for the gentlemen, the ladies were not so fortunate. Woolf’s dexterity of rhetorical techniques, allowed her to highlight the differences between the two genders by simply illustrating the luncheon at this campus. Such an illustration is wondrous and beautiful when Woolf describes the luncheon provided for the gentlemen. They were fed by a “silent servingman” whose sole purpose was to wait on the men hand and foot. They were not to speak unless spoken to first. Partridges had been supplied “many and various” with a plethora of “sauces and salads.” Crimson and yellow wine was served like water in wineglasses. As soon as the vessel “had been emptied,” it would be restored to capacity immediately. After the main courses, a pudding was served for dessert. However, this wasn’t just any common confection. In fact, to even compare this pudding to “rice and tapioca would be an insult.” Every course …show more content…
It wasn’t so much a cafeteria as it was a “great dining-hall.” People got in, got to eating, and got out. Food and drink were passed around, but there was no time for “lighting a good cigarette.” The women weren’t allowed the privilege of sinking into “the cushions in the window-seat” that the men were. There was a set schedule for this meal. As soon as everyone had finished up, they “scraped their chairs back” as the large doors swung “to and fro.” It wouldn’t be long before the entire cafeteria had been “emptied of every sign of food and made ready… for breakfast next morning.” There was no luxury at this dining-hall, just a modest
The meal, and more specifically the concept of the family meal, has traditional connotations of comfort and togetherness. As shown in three of Faulkner’s short stories in “The Country”, disruptions in the life of the family are often reinforced in the plot of the story by disruptions in the meal.
The difference between men and women is a very controversial issue, while there are obviously physical differences; the problem is how the genders are treated. It is stereotypically thought that the men do the labor work and make all the money, while the women stay in the house, cooking, cleaning and taking care of the children. While this stereotype does not exist as much in the 21st century, it was very prevalent in the 1900s. By using many different literary tools such as character development, symbolism, and setting, Alice Munro’s Boys and Girls and John Steinbeck’s The Chrysanthemums challenge this controversial topic of the treatment of women versus men in the 1900s.
In the predominantly male worlds of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh (Book I)”, the women’s voices are muted. Female characters are confined to the domestic spheres of their homes, and they are excluded from the elite literary world. They are expected to function as foils to the male figures in their lives. These women are “trained” to remain silent and passive not only by the males around them, but also by their parents, their relatives, and their peers. Willingly or grudgingly, the women in Woolf and Browning’s works are regulated to the domestic circle, discouraged from the literary world, and are expected to act as foils to their male counterparts.
Women and men are not equal. Never have been, and it is hard to believe that they ever will be. Sexism permeates the lives of women from the day they are born. Women are either trying to fit into the “Act Like a Lady” box, they are actively resisting the same box, or sometimes both. The experience of fitting in the box and resisting the box can be observed in two plays: Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” and Henrick Ibsen’s “A Doll House”. In Hansberry’s play, initially, Beneatha seems uncontrolled and independent, but by the end she is controlled and dependent; whereas, in Ibsen’s play Nora seems controlled and dependent at the beginning of the play, but by the end she is independent and free.
Greenwoods first sign of imagery is in the first paragraph, “The cafeteria was a place of foul odors, gelatinous spills, horrific mixtures of chocolate of chocolate pudding, fruit cocktail and ketchup consumed on dares. ”(Greenwood 1) This imagery appeals to all your senses in a grotesque way. In the second paragraph she uses a hyperbole ”As a survivalist must feel upon surveying his processors before hunkering in a bomb shelter. I would be fed.
One of the most prominent rhetorical devices Virginia Woolf uses throughout both pieces is imagery. She uses imagery in order to make the ideas and situations become more personal. An even more important way she used imagery was to express the differenced throughout her experiences at both colleges. In the first passage with the men’s college, Woolf uses very descriptive and colorful imagery to describe her surroundings. Describing the “soles, sunk in a deep dish…spread on a counterpane of the whitest cream…” and the wineglasses “flushed yellow and flushed crimson,” the author shows the lavish style that those in the men’s college lived in. With her second piece, Woolf described the place as plain, describing the food as very normal and borin...
As insinuated through her poem’s title, “A Double Standard,” Frances Harper examines a double standard imposed by societal norms during the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the different effects this standard foisted upon those of different genders. Harper’s poem is narrated by a woman who has been derided by society for her involvement in a sexual scandal, all while her male counterpart experiences no repercussions. By describing how her situation involving the scandal advances, delineating the backlash she receives for her participation, and reflecting on the ludicrously hypocritical nature of the situation, the speaker discloses the lack of control women had over their lives, and allows for the reader to ponder the inequity of female oppression at the turn of the 19th century.
Woolf’s long and flowy syntax and descriptive imagery in her first passage conveys the higher status and respect given to men in her society. The men at the college enjoyed every meal of various gourmet soups, meats, puddings, and wines with ease. Woolf’s lengthy syntax describes part of a meal over several lines, “ the lunch… began with soles,sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had
Virginia Woolfe's "Orlando" uses both humor and tragedy to observe humanity's often absurd and eccentric superficial constructions, both of class and gender. Woolfe creates the distinctions between male and female but continuously shatters them to reveal the illusions we create about gender.
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.
Woolf’s pathos to begin the story paints a picture in readers minds of what the
Avery Wells Professor Wilkenfeld English 102 02/08/14 “All Men and Women Are Created Equal” On July 4, 1776 it was said that all men are created equal. What the Declaration of Independence failed to mention was women. This seemed to be a common theme throughout the history of America and is still a problem to this day. Men are constantly being held up on a pedestal, while women are forced to assume the position of looking up to them. Zombieland (2009) tends to take these “old school” ways and sheds a new light on the fact that women too can be equal, if not better than some men.
Ernest Hemingway discusses the theme of hunger throughout A moveable feast by exploring and describing the different types of hunger that he felt. He aims to explore this theme in the passage where he strolls with Hadley, and they stop to eat at the restaurant Michaud’s. Through repetition and use of unconventional detail and word choice, Hemingway shows that he has more than one type of hunger, and needs to differentiate between them. Hemingway strives to tell that hunger is a feeling that is deep within someone, that changes depending on the situation and varies in intensity and meaning.
In terms of narrative structure, Woolf starts out both passages as the meal starting out. In describing the men’s college she says, “ ...tell you that the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream” (passage I). She goes into
Katherine Mansfield belongs to a group of female authors that have used their financial resources and social standing to critique the patriarchal status quo. Like Virginia Woolf, Mansfield was socioeconomically privileged enough to write influential texts that have been deemed as ‘proto-feminist’ before the initial feminist movements. The progressive era in which Mansfield writes proves to be especially problematic because, “[w]hile the Modernist tradition typically undermined middle-class values, women … did not have the recognized rights necessary to fully embrace the liberation from the[se] values” (Martin 69). Her short stories emphasized particular facets of female oppression, ranging from gendered social inequality to economic classism, and it is apparent that “[p]oor or rich, single or married, Mansfield’s women characters are all victims of their society” (Aihong 101). Mansfield’s short stories, “The Garden Party” and “Miss Brill”, represent the feminist struggle to identify traditional patriarchy as an inherent caste system in modernity. This notion is exemplified through the social bonds women create, the naïve innocence associated with the upper classes, and the purposeful dehumanization of women through oppressive patriarchal methods. By examining the female characters in “The Garden Party” and “Miss Brill”, it is evident that their relationships with other characters and themselves notify the reader of their encultured classist preconceptions, which is beneficial to analyze before discussing the sources of oppression.