These Shallow Graves Gender Roles

794 Words2 Pages

Imagine that your father has been murdered but you can’t look into it because of your gender. In Jennifer Donnelly’s novel, These Shallow Graves, you explore Josephine Monfort’s life as she tries to uncover her father’s secrets, including those that lead to his death. Set in New York during the nineteenth century, Josephine cannot just be a journalist as she dreams, and has to set out for help from a writer to find answers. Coming from a wealthy family, every move is watched by her family, friends, and even enemies. Jo has to act like a lady at all times, and when she stops, those closest to her take extreme measures to keep her from the truth that would ruin them all. This novel addresses and challenges gender roles, as Josephine turns from New York’s most attractive to most unsophisticated by speaking out, being curious, and persisting to find the truth. …show more content…

In Donnelly’s novel, you learn about Josephine challenging those gender roles and going against them. One part of gender roles that was addressed in the novel was with which topics that the women could speak of. “You know the rules: get yourself hitched, then do what you like. But for heaven’s sake, until you get the man, smile like a dolt and talk about tulips, not mill girls!” This quote is from Josephine’s friend from school, Trudy, explaining that Jo could not write about just anything she wanted in the paper because it would make her look undesirable when she was looking for a husband. Josephine couldn’t speak about many topics because she was a lady, despite the fact that she needed to discuss the subjects to be a

Show More
Related

  • A Murder In Virginia Summary

    900 Words  | 2 Pages

    Suzanne Lebsock, the author of “A Murder in Virginia”, has written many historical novels, including “The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860”, “Visible Women”, and “A Share of Honour”. Lebsock has been recognized with the MacArthur Fellowship, the Bancroft Prize and Berkshire Conference Prize for “The Free Women of Petersburg”, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. “A Murder in Virginia” captures the essence of the Southern society post-slavery. The strictly fact-based novel goes chronologically from soon prior the murder of a white farm wife, Lucy Pollard, to the convicting of suspects, to sentencing those found guilty of being hanged, to the children of Fort Mitchell searching for the lost money. These events span from 1895 to over a century later.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In Night Of The Living Dead

    795 Words  | 2 Pages

    Throughout the century gender roles have changed dramatically. During the 60s roles were given to certain genders. Stereotyping them to play the action of what their gender was expected to do. One may believe that a man or women should have a specific role, but as the years came, certain genders stuck up for themselves, making a statement that they are just as capable to do anything anyone else does. The 1968 drama film Night of the Living Dead directed by George Romero is full of gender discrimination. This movie shows the typical actions of how women and males were supposed to act during the 60s; however, the roles played in this film have changed majorly over the years. Women and males have every right to play any role they want in today’s world. Romero may leave the audience angry with how he judges gender roles in

    Read More

  • Gender: Annotated Bibliography

    1479 Words  | 3 Pages

    Gender Matters is a collection of various essays on feminist linguistic texts analysis, by Sara Mills. Mills develops methods of analyzing literary and non-literary texts, in addition to conversational analysis based on a feminist approach. The author draws on data from her collection of essays gathered over the last two decades on feminism during the 1990s. The essays focus on gender issues, the representation of gender in reading, writing, and in public speaking. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of feminists’ analysis of sexism in literature and the relation between gender and politeness. The article is informative for my research paper, as my topic is going to cover language analysis of the text and who women reading and writing differs according to the discourse analysis within linguistic, psychology, case studies audiences and surveys. The book would be helpful, particularly the last three essays that discusses gender, public speaking, the question of politeness and impoliteness in public speaking. Mills’ analysis is not complete without including the idea of global notions of both women and men, to see whether women and men write and read in the same way globally. Therefore, an update would enrich the book’s discussion section. Although, Mills addresses the class and race theme in language and public speaking, I will only look into the role of language that plays a part in doing or reducing gender in literary, non-literary texts and in conversation.

    Read More

  • Peyton Place

    938 Words  | 2 Pages

    The main story focuses on three women characters and their underlying search for their identities as sexual women in small town America. Allison Mackenzie is the bastard daughter of Constance Mackenzie who had an affair with a married man. She illegally changed Allison’s birth certificate and lied to the Peyton Place locals that her husband died. Connie didn’t want any of the town folk to find out the truth that the father of her child was a married man because she would become the town gossip of ridicule. She kept this secret to herself, and only to herself until an argument between her and Allison occurred when Connie thought Allison was having sex with one of her friends, and so she lashed out the truth to Allison.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In Notes From The Underground And Death Of A Salesman

    730 Words  | 2 Pages

    In my research essay for my English Composition 2 class, I will be analyzing the different gender roles in Notes from the Underground and Death of a Salesman. Often times, in American Literature work, gender roles are used very differently due to whomever wrote it. This story and play fall into the category of “traditional” gender roles that are given to males and females based off of society and what is expected of males and females. I will use the gender approach to explain that roles in families and society are based off of gender. I will also compare a feminist approach to the gender approach and see how they are different. In Author Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s

    Read More

  • Gender Roles in Society

    2016 Words  | 5 Pages

    “Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls”: few of our cultural mythologies seem as natural as this one. But in this exploration of the gender signals that traditionally tell what a “boy” or “girl” is supposed to look and act like, Aaron Devor shows how these signals are not “natural” at all but instead are cultural constructs. While the classic cues of masculinity—aggressive posture, self-confidence, a tough appearance—and the traditional signs of femininity—gentleness, passivity, strong nurturing instincts—are often considered “normal,” Devor explains that they are by no means biological or psychological necessities. Indeed, he suggests, they can be richly mixed and varied, or to paraphrase the old Kinks song “Lola,” “Boys can be girls and girls can be boys.” Devor is dean of social sciences at the University of Victoria and author of Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality (1989), from which this selection is excerpted, and FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (1997).

    Read More

  • Chronicle Of A Death Foretold Gender Analysis

    1382 Words  | 3 Pages

    "Angela Vicario was the prettiest of the four, and my mother said that she had been born like the great queens of history, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. But she had a helpless air and a poverty of spirit that augured an uncertain future for her" (Marquez 32). This quote from Chronicle of a Death Foretold, written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, highlights the theme of masculinity which appears throughout the book. Girls are born already deprived and suffocated of life, knowing their sole purpose is to grow up and become a wife. Chronicle of a Death Foretold takes place in a small Colombian village and tells the story of Angela Vicario's stolen virginity and the murder of the suspect, Santiago Nasar. The narrator, decades after the events, is trying to uncover the truth in all of the

    Read More

  • Puppy by George Saunders

    1100 Words  | 3 Pages

    Marie, who is a product of an abusive family, is influenced by her past, as she perceives the relationship between Callie and her son, Bo. Saunders writes, describing Marie’s childhood experiences, “At least she’d [Marie] never locked on of them [her children] in a closet while entertaining a literal gravedigger in the parlor” (174). Marie’s mother did not embody the traditional traits of a maternal fig...

    Read More

  • Gender Roles in Society

    379 Words  | 1 Pages

    Society places ideas concerning proper behaviors regarding gender roles. Over the years, I noticed that society's rules and expectations for men and women are very different. Men have standards and specific career goals that we must live up to according to how others judge.

    Read More

  • How Did Josephine Baker Overcome Discrimination

    1324 Words  | 3 Pages

    She had hard time with her husband. When she was thirteen she was married to Willy Wells. They stayed together for two months, but Josephine never saw Willy as a significant partner as she once broke a bottle of beer on his head. She tried to forget this marriage. Fortunately, when she was fifteen years old, she married to another man who named is Billy Baker. Billy liked her when he saw her at the local theater. Then they got married, and she was happy that she was able to change her last name into Baker. For the first time, she no longer gets the insecure feeling from her last name. However, she still hasn’t got the perfect “personal life”. Billy’s mother disapproved of Josephine because her skin was darker than her husband’s and because she was a chorus girl with apparently no family to talk

    Read More

  • Trifling Justice

    1534 Words  | 4 Pages

    Social gender separations are displayed in the manner that men the view Wright house, where Mr. Wright has been found strangled, as a crime scene, while the women who accompany them clearly view the house as Mrs. Wright’s home. From the beginning the men and the women have are there for two separate reasons —the men, to fulfill their duties as law officials, the women, to prepare some personal items to take to the imprisoned Mrs. Wright. Glaspell exposes the men’s superior attitudes, in that they cannot fathom women to making a contribution to the investigation. They leave them unattended in a crime scene. One must question if this would be the same action if they were men. The county attorney dismisses Mrs. Hale’s defenses of Minnie as “l...

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Where Are The Children

    1149 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Come on, Nancy. Tell us the truth. Where are the children?” wrote author Mary Higgins Clark in her chilling novel, Where are the Children. Clark’s thrilling murder mystery describes a toxic relationship between a professor, Carl Harmon, the mentally insane and abusive husband of Nancy Eldridge, a beautiful young mother who is being accused of the murder of her children. Manipulative tactics and gender play key roles in creating discussion and open ended ideas toward the theme of this novel. The reader can see how Nancy has been unfairly accused for the murder of her first set of children. Although in the end Carl is finally identified as the murderer, the entire novel is set to make it seem as if Nancy was capable of harming her own flesh and blood. Mary Higgins Clark writes a happy ending novel to give

    Read More

  • Comparing Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and William Wordsworth’s The Thorn

    1707 Words  | 4 Pages

    On the surface, the poems “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti and “The Thorn” by William Wordsworth appear to be very different literary works. “Goblin Market” was written by a young woman in the Victorian period about two sisters who develop a special bond through the rescue of one sister by the other. “The Thorn” was written by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth about a middle-aged man and his experience overlooking a woman’s emotional breakdown. Material to understanding the works “Goblin Market” and “The Thorn” is recognizing the common underlying themes of sex and gender and how these themes affect perspective in both poems.

    Read More

  • Bernice Bobs Her Hair Analysis

    1068 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Women's Issues in The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Souls Belated by Edith Wharton

    1014 Words  | 3 Pages

    These women authors have served as an eye-opener for the readers, both men and women alike, in the past, and hopefully still in the present. (There are still cultures in the world today, where women are treated as unfairly as women were treated in the prior centuries). These women authors have impacted a male dominated society into reflecting on of the unfairness imposed upon women. Through their writings, each of these women authors who existed during that masochistic Victorian era, risked criticism and retribution. Each author ignored convention a...

    Read More

More about These Shallow Graves Gender Roles

Open Document