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Gender roles have withstood the test of time and equality throughout the world, and only recently has society made advancements towards gender equality. Undoubtedly, this modern progression in equality can be partially attributed to canon literature which broadens a reader’s perspective and challenges them to think critically. Such as the plays “Trifles”, written by Susan Glaspell, and “M. Butterfly”, written by David Henry Hwang, which address gender inequality through dramatic portrayals. Moreover, when compared and contrasted, “Trifles” and “M. Butterfly”, share the universal themes of femininity and masculinity as well as cultural stereotypes. Initially, the play “M. Butterfly”, asserts its position on masculinity in Act 1, Scene III, when Gallimard declares, “And I imagine you—my ideal …show more content…
For example, in Act 1, Scene 1 of “Trifles”, when Mrs. Wright is being held accountable for her husband’s death and she worries over the state of her jars of jam, Mr. Hale makes the observation, “Well, women are used to worrying over trifles.” (Act 1, Scene 1). In this excerpt, we determine this play portrays women as their stereotypical stay-at-home figure whose significant worries in life are mere trifles, hence the play’s name. Moreover, in comparison to “Trifles”, the women in “M. Butterfly” are portrayed as tractable females in the eyes of a man. For example, in Act I, Scene X, Gallimard assures himself of Song’s involuntary infatuation for him by stating, “She is outwardly bold and outspoken, yet her heart is shy and afraid. It is the Oriental in her at war with her Western education.” (Act 1, Scene X). Gallimard perfectly outlines the stereotypical feminine attribute: timidness. Here, Gallimard is asserting the attributes of shyness and fear are reminiscent of Oriental’s; a cultural stereotype Gallimard believes due to the perceived submissiveness of his Oriental mistress:
The power of women is different than that of men. Women display a subtle and indirect kind of power, but can be resilient enough to impact the outside world. In Trifles, Susan Glaspell delivers the idea that gender and authority are chauvinistic issues that confirm male characters as the power holders, while the female characters are less significant and often weak. This insignificance and weakness indicated in the play by the fact that the women had the evidence to solve a murder, but the men just ignored the women as if they had no value to the case at all. This weakness and inability of the female to contest the man’s view are apparent. According to Ben-Zvi, “Women who kill evoke fear because they challenge societal constructs of femininity-passivity, restraint, and nurture; thus the rush to isolate and label the female offender, to cauterize the act” (141). This play presents women against men, Ms. Wright against her husband, the two women against their spouses and the other men. The male characters are logical, arrogant, and stupid while the women are sympathetic, loyal, and drawn to empathize with Mrs. Wright and forgive her crime. The play questions the extent to which one should maintain loyalty to others. Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale try to withhold incriminating evidence against Mrs. Wright, and by challenging the reader to question whether
Susan Glaspell, from Davenport, Iowa is only the second woman to win a Pulitzer Prize [1]. Much of her writing is strongly feminist, mostly dealing with how society viewed women and the prevalence of male dominance. Possibly, the idea behind the play “Trifles” was based on a woman named Margaret Hosack from Iowa, who is thought to have killed her husband due to his abusive behavior. Susan Glaspell was influenced by this story when writing ‘Trifles’ because she worked at the Des Moines Newspaper at the time of the event and in
Throughout the plays, the reader can visualize how men dismiss women as trivial and treat them like property, even though the lifestyles they are living in are very much in contrast. The playwrights, each in their own way, are addressing the issues that have negatively impacted the identity of women in society.
Sexism was evident in society during the time era of “Trifles” and is challenged by Susan Glaspell’s female characters through structure, setting, and symbolism. It was very much frowned upon that the women were superior to the men then and even today men don’t want women to be equal to them let alone superior to them. So in order for a woman to get the greatest victory, as displayed through Mrs. Hale and Peters, they must
“The treatment of women in ‘Trifles’”, a web site that analyzes the demeanor of women throughout the play, states “ The women are betrayed as if they are second class citizens with nothing more important to think about, except to take care of the medial household chores like cooking, cleaning, and sewing.
Gallimard’s supposed ignorance of Song’s sex in M. Butterfly illustrates how an individual’s desire for something or someone can create a fantasy that masks the truth. Ignorance is bliss. Desire allows an individual to create their own truth which can, in turn, be damaging. The theme of desire in the play is seen through Song and Gallimard’s relationship. Gallimard longs to be desired. He associates being desired with power and masculinity, and this desire to be desired makes him ignorant of Song’s true identity. He experiments in testing Song’s desire for him throughout the play. Because Gallimard associated women desiring him as “power”, he did not see through Song’s feminine mask, or perhaps he did not want to. Desire allows Gallimard to believe he is the masculine form dominating a relationship when, in fact, he is being dominated by his own desire which Song is using against him. Gallimard is unaware, or chooses to remain unaware of Song’s masculinity, looking at the world through rose colored glasses of desire. In the final scene of M. Butterfly, we see Gallimard succumb to his own desire. He realizes what he desired was a lie and refuses to accept the truth.
The issue of cultural stereotypes and misconceptions thematically runs throughout David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly. The play is inspired by a 1986 newspaper story about a former French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer, who turns out to be a spy and a man. Hwang used the newspaper story and deconstructed it into Madame Butterfly to help breakdown the stereotypes that are present between the East and the West. Hwang’s play overall breaks down the sexist and racist clichés that the East-West have against each other that reaffirm the Western male culture ideas. The stereotypes presented in the play revolve around the two main characters, Gallimard and Song. The play itself begins in the present with Gallimard, a French diplomat who has been incarcerated in a Beijing prison. He relives his fantasies for the past with his perfect woman and shares his experience with the readers throughout the remainder of the play. Upon Gallimard’s arrival in China, he attends the opera and meets Song, and Gallimard immediately describes Song as his “butterfly”. Gallimard falls in love with the “delicate Oriental woman” that Song portrays (22). He then buys into the Western male stereotype that Eastern women need protection by strong, masculine Western men. Gallimard ends up falling in love with Song and has an affair with her to fulfill the stereotypical idea of a dominant Western male controlling an Eastern woman. Throughout Gallimard’s relationship with Song, the readers discover that Song is in reality a male spy for the Chinese government. Song had manipulated his looks and actions to mirror those of the ideal Chinese woman in order to earn Gallimard’s affection. M. Butterfly’s main issue arises from the cultural stereotypes of the masculin...
Born in Los Angeles to immigrant Chinese-American parents, David Hwang has the perfect viewpoint of East versus West gender roles. M. Butterfly, largely a story of love and deception with an emphasis on how intertwining relationships can change the course of countries and lives. The focus, though is the different gender roles and the significance of those roles in how the story evolved and ended. In his play M. Butterfly, David Henry Hwang masterfully casts non-traditional gender roles while also pitting the East versus West point of views towards traditional gender roles from an unbiased perspective.
Susan Glaspell’s play, Trifles, was written in 1916, reflects the author’s concern with stereotypical concepts of gender and sex roles of that time period. As the title of the play implies, the concerns of women are often considered to be nothing more than unimportant issues that have little or no value to the true work of society, which is being performed by men. The men who are in charge of investigating the crime are unable to solve the mystery through their supposed superior knowledge. Instead, two women are able decipher evidence that the men overlook because all of the clues are entrenched in household items that are familiar mainly to women during this era. Glaspell expertly uses gender characterization, setting, a great deal of symbolism and both dramatic and verbal irony, to expose social divisions created by strict gender roles, specifically, that women were limited to the household and that their contributions went disregarded and underappreciated.
Trifles is an excellent example of gender stratification at the most basic level: everyday conversation and behaviour. Interactionists have observed common patterns which reoccur in everyday interaction between men and women. Like in Glaspell’s work, men have been shown to regularly change the topic of conversation and disregard a woman’s ideas. (Kumbamu) Throughout the play the County Attorney interrupts or considers the women’s concerns to be merely ‘trifles’ by wishing to ‘talk more of that…later.’(Glaspell 141) The women’s actions exemplify what are considered to be female behavioral roles. The women except and do not challenge the obvious male verbal dominance and instead prove to be adaptable to the circumstances and provide emotional support. (Kumbamu) Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale are unwillingly put into a ‘lonesome’ environment they normally would have stayed away from. (Glaspell 143)
Of all Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, perhaps the best known and loved is Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Many people think that it is unforgettable because of its poetic language and style. But, while these are factors that mark the play as a classic, it remains timeless because it explores many of the issues that are still important to people today. These issues, including loyalty to family and country, protecting loved ones, and deception are still prevalent around the world, and are especially prominent in the United States government. Another play that addresses major issues that are still relevant to society, especially women, is Susan Glaspell’s Trifles. Because Glaspell’s play shows women that they are certainly just as capable as men of completing any task, it encourages women to take a stand against the supposed supremacy of their husbands. It also forces men to consider more seriously the opinions and concerns of women. While Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale in Trifles do this in a quiet manner, they still remain defiant against their husband’s beliefs that they are only competent enough to worry about “trifles” (Glaspell 1618). Therefore, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and Trifles explore many issues that are still relevant to society today by questioning, supporting, and criticizing some of them, especially loyalty, gender roles, protecting loved ones, and deception.
Gender roles and inequality are still evolving and continue to change. It has only been not that long ago that women started to break out their outlined roles and looked at about the same or- almost the same level- as men on a wide scale basis. Indeed, some women in certain parts of the world are still represented in the same way as in both plays that will be compared in this essay. The characters in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll's House highlight the challenges of gender roles. The attention focused on points of comparison and contrast of men vs women's reactions in the course of both plays, which, allow the audience to think about gender identity and role conflicts. The other common shared view in both plays is that they are both showcased from a female perspective.
Extreme Roles In every country, city, town and neighborhood in the world, there are stereotypes. We all live in a classified area where you can be regarded as rich, poor or middle class. Within those three types there becomes sub-categories, where ethnicity , gender and sexuality also become a part of the environment. The list goes on and on. In David H. Hwang’s M. Butterfly, the roles of men and women in the Eastern and Western society are extremely limited in that men and women are both expected to act there part. Being a women in Eastern society, means basically, to do whatever possible to please your man. Song, although we come to find is actually a man, played the part of the perfect women. " Gallimard: I have a vision. Of, the Orient. That, deep within its almond eyes, there are still women. Women willing to sacrifice themselves for the love of a man. Even a man whose love is completely without worth."(Act three, scene three, pg.92). Song knew from experience that men of the Western world loved submissive women who would do anything to please the man they were with. Femininity is displayed as weak and passive. In order to find a man, a women had to do anything, even accept the fact that there husbands would find a mistress on the side. It was socially acceptable to be intentionally blind to what your husband was doing. The same also seemed to take place in the Western world as well, although not at such extreme cases.. Helga assumed that Gallimard took up a mistress while living in the Orient. Masculinity in this novel seems to be, the more women you have in your lifetime, the more you are considered a man. "Gallimard: (To us): Toulon knows! And he approves! I was learning the benefits of being a man. We form our own clubs, sit behind thick doors, smoke-and celebrate the fact that we’re still boys…."(Act two, scene 4, pg. 46). The men in this novel seemed enchanted with the idea of women and the fame they got with friends when it was found out that they were having extra marital affairs. In the Orient and the Western world as well, masculinity wasn’t defined by hard work and a having and striving toward a perfect marriage and family life, it was defined by sex. Sex with other women than your wife.
In the 19th Century, women had different roles and treated differently compared to today’s women in American society. In the past, men expected women to carry out the duties of a homemaker, which consisted of cleaning and cooking. In earlier years, men did not allow women to have opinions or carry on a job outside of the household. As today’s societies, women leave the house to carry on jobs that allow them to speak their minds and carry on roles that men carried out in earlier years. In the 19th Century, men stereotyped women to be insignificant, not think with their minds about issues outside of the kitchen or home. In the play Trifles, written by Susan Glaspell, the writer portrays how women in earlier years have no rights and men treat women like dirt. Trifles is based on real life events of a murder that Susan Glaspell covered during her work as a newspaper reporter in Des Moines and the play is based off of Susan Glaspell’s earlier writing, “A Jury of Her Peers”. The play is about a wife of a farmer that appears to be cold and filled with silence. After many years of the husband treating the wife terrible, the farmer’s wife snaps and murders her husband. In addition, the play portrays how men and women may stick together in same sex roles in certain situations. The men in the play are busy looking for evidence of proof to show Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. As for the women in the play, they stick together by hiding evidence to prove Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. Although men felt they were smarter than women in the earlier days, the play describes how women are expected of too much in their roles, which could cause a woman to emotionally snap, but leads to women banding together to prove that women can be...
At the end of the play M. Butterfly, a jailed French diplomat turned spy named Gallimard says, "There is a vision of the Orient that I have" (Hwang 3.3.7). In that moment he is implying that there are still beautiful women, as he thought his "Butterfly" was. This is suggestive of the colonial appeal. Colonization is made possible by one society characterizing another in a way that makes it seem like a good idea. The characterization of these cultures, such as the Orient or Africa, is carried out through literature, works of art, and drama. Certainly, plays, poems, books, and stories are only a few of the ways used to convince the masses of a modern nation of the justification to colonize. If one wants to rebel against colonization, one would need to place corruption upon the colonizer so to support the liberation. This approach looks to be accepted in drama, where there are two excellent illustrations of postcolonial literature, M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, and A Tempest by Aime Cesaire. Both plays are re-worked versions of and Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly and Shakespeare's The Tempest, and retain similar characters and basic plots. Shakespeare's and Puccini's works created symbols of other cultures. Caliban is the black devil, and Cio-Cio San is the timid and beautiful "Butterfly." These symbols have become stereotypes in Western culture, and formed, the justification for colonization.