Throughout the novel Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie explicitly illuminates gender stereotypes and paternal and maternal qualities of the Victorian era. In the early 20th century, patriarchal society strictly defined men and women’s roles in the community. Traditionally, men were expected to attain manhood in the eyes of other men in society, find a spouse, achieve success and respect, provide for their wife and family, work through hardships, live adventurously, and financially succeed. A woman’s main role in life was her responsibilities to her family- primarily seen as wives, mothers, and caretakers, with her place being in a domestic setting. Through Peter Pan, Mr. and Mrs. Darling, Wendy, and Peter Pan each adhere to the classic gender stereotypes …show more content…
Although Peter negates to play father to Wendy’s maternal role he fulfills the conventional Victorian era male part by serving as the leader, protector, and breadwinner, much like Mr. Darling. Mr. Darling and Peter are both set in their customary ways and are extremely certain of themselves: “Peter not coming! They gazed blankly at him, their sticks over their backs, and on each stick a bundle. Their first thought was that if Peter was not going he had probably changed his mind about letting them go. But he was far too proud for that. ‘If you find your mothers,’ he said darkly, ‘I hope you will like them.” (135) Desperately in need of nurturing, Peter pursues Wendy for himself and the lost boys, aligning with the need to find a spouse to take care of you. At the end of the novel, Barrie describes Mr. Darling as “quite a simple man; indeed he might have passed for a boy again if he had been able to take his baldness off; but he had also a noble sense of justice and a lion courage to do what seemed right to him...” (184), which coincides with Peter’s immature and childish character traits. By playing a father figure to the lost boys, defeating Captain Hook and the pirates, serving as a strong leader, measuring hollow trees for hiding places, building Wendy a house, and saving Wendy, Peter fulfills his role as a dominant male figure in the novel. By the end of the novel, Peter rejects his voluntary role of fatherhood with Wendy, but he still exhibits traditional male
In 1939, Victor Fleming made a film version of L. Frank Baum’s novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” However, both the novel and the film focuses or touches on the same moral, it features the protagonist Dorothy who resides in Kansas the farm, along with her aunt Em and uncle Henry as well as her dog Toto. Both Baum’s novel and Fleming’s 1939 film adaptation the setting is in Kansas which is described as a small farm which Dorothy lives in which in Baum’s novel is picturized as gloomy, grey and dull. Throughout Fleming’s adaptation of Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” there are a number of differences which presents itself in a direct manner on screen as well as similarities. The variety of changes in the film’s adaptation tends to take away from the meaning of L. Frank Baum’s depiction in his novel to a certain level and extent.
It is not often that a strong and significant female character is introduced in a movie and/or book as the main character. Pan’s Labyrinth, though not the typical fairy tale, introduces the viewer to three females that prove controversial and necessary to the plot, which passes the Bechdel Test, designed to identify gender bias in the media. There is Carmen, the loving mother, Ofelia, the supposed princess/innocent girl, and then there is Mercedes, Captain Vidal’s maid and rebel spy. These three women show different portrayals, different characterizations, of how women should defy the gender bias in films.
Wendy Darling’s development of maturity is expressed through the realizations of the consequences of her decisions and actions, and the interpretation of that development from text to movie, and text to drama. The development of maturity’s interpretation is transferred differently in adaptations of Peter and Wendy; including the Disney animated movie Peter Pan and the Broadway production of Peter Pan.
Ann Wilson explains the anxieties expressed in Barrie's Peter Pan as a reaction to the changes occurring in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, and is resolved by Humphrey Carpenter who explains that this statement is linked to the desire to remain a child and avoid the real world.
This forgetfulness is because of the fact that time is inconsequential and he is trapped as a child, so to remain a child mentally he can never retain the lessons he learns. One example of this happens when Peter is fighting Captain Hook and Hook him betrays him by lashing out at Peter unfairly. This happening to him sends him into a daze as though this is the first time this has ever happened to him. Rather than it being the first time “ He often met it [unfair treatment] but he always forgot. I suppose that was the real difference between him and all rest” (120). This difference is also made clear by his inability to remember the adventures he and Wendy went on together, at one point in “An After-Thought” he asks Wendy who Captain Hook is, to which she exclaims “Oh, Peter, you forget everything”(284). This lack of memory disconnects Peter from the people around him, leaving him lonely even though he is always being surrounded by new groups of people and supernatural beings. Unlike these groups though, Peter does not fit into the category of, for example, a pirate or a fairy. Peter is not even exactly like the lost boys, leaving him uniquely alone in the
William Golding’s book Lord of the Flies is a novel based on a group of schoolboys that were flying on a plane to escape World War II and were shot down. They were shot down over a deserted tropical island in Britain. The boys suffered a large fire that burned the island, little food, and a boy that is out to kill everyone by the end of the book.
In society, there has always been a gap between men and women. Women are generally expected to be homebodies, and seen as inferior to their husbands. The man is always correct, as he is more educated, and a woman must respect the man as they provide for the woman’s life. During the Victorian Era, women were very accommodating to fit the “house wife” stereotype. Women were to be a representation of love, purity and family; abandoning this stereotype would be seen as churlish living and a depredation of family status. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Henry Isben’s play A Doll's House depict women in the Victorian Era who were very much menial to their husbands. Nora Helmer, the protagonist in A Doll’s House and the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” both prove that living in complete inferiority to others is unhealthy as one must live for them self. However, attempts to obtain such desired freedom during the Victorian Era only end in complications.
The fact that Barrie chooses this location for both the beginning and the end of the novel shows the importance of domestic life and maternal care in Peter Pan. After the Darling children complete their adventures in Neverland, they come back to the womb in an embrace of the nursery room to be taken care of again by those maternal figures. However, Peter distrusts mothers because he believes that his own mother betrayed him, but he dislikes them because they turn children into adults. “Keep back, lady,” he yells at Mrs. Darling: “no one is going to catch me and make me a man.”
Throughout many fairytales, Cinderella more evidently, there is the stigma of male roles and female roles. The man is the prince, the knight in shining armor, the strong protector and able provider, and the woman is the princess. Dainty and innocent, weak and capable only of looking pretty, fostering children and maintaining appearances of house and home. These roles of placement have been around long before fairy tales, and they’ll be around long after fairy tales, but the inclusion of these roles through characters in fairy tales does nothing but enforce the idea that this is the way things are meant to be, and women who do not assume these roles are wrong and unworthy. In her article, Orenstein refers to Cinderella as “the patriarchal oppression of all women”, and she is exactly right (Orenstein “What’s wrong with Cinderella?”). The impression left of these gender stereotypes travels off the pages of the fairy tale and into the real world when studies show that there is a “23% decline in girls’ participation in sports and other rigorous activity … has been linked to their sense that athletics is unfeminine” (Orenstein “What’s wrong with Cinderella?”). The blatant disregard for equality in these stories can be summed up with a term Orenstein coined, “relentless resegregation of childhood”, which ultimately defines what it means to be a boy or a girl in the terms of set behaviors and life duties (Orenstein “What’s wrong with Cinderella?”). Whether it be Cinderella or any other princess, the fairy tale business makes it a point to create a place for women with their stories, and unfortunately that “place” is demeaning and still practiced
...nd great intelligence. Both in “The Beauty and the Beast” and “Fowler’s Fowl”, men do not play the part of redeemer as women expected in fairy tales. On the contrary, the female protagonists who are brilliant and persistent acquire happiness. These similar kinds of fairy tales thus admonish women for relying on men and marriage by taking risks with their future. Women should believe in their own abilities and strive to achieve a wonderful future.
Throughout most of literature and history, the notion of ‘the woman’ has been little more than a caricature of the actual female identity. Most works of literature rely on only a handful of tropes for their female characters and often use women to prop up the male characters: female characters are sacrificed for plot development. It may be that the author actually sacrifices a female character by killing her off, like Mary Shelly did in Frankenstein in order to get Victor Frankenstein to confront the monster he had created, or by reducing a character to just a childish girl who only fulfills a trope, as Oscar Wilde did with Cecily and Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. Using female characters in order to further the male characters’
In present day society, where political correctness and equality are at the top of the priority list, by reading essays such as the one by Karol Kelley we find that this might not have been the case in earlier days. Fairy tales such as Cinderella have been found guilty of possessing subliminal socialization traits. Classifying genders as inferior and molding young girls into the female that society expects them to be. In Charles Perrault’s version, which is considered the most common, Cinderella is seen as passive, limited, dependent and inferior. As critics argue, these traits can hinder a child’s self esteem. Karol Kelley states that the “expectations and the promises
...develops in. In Little Red Riding Hood, the grandmother, mother, and child all demonstrate the stereotypical woman in an ancient society where men are superior to women. The wolf and the male character that rescues the female validate the stereotypical male in that time period as the males become clever, brave, and strong throughout the entire story. These gender tactics appear in almost any work of literature to convey the message that the popular belief of genders can either be continued by the submission of individuals to society or altered by the recognition that these labels do not have to exist.
Some fairy tales are so iconic that they withstand the passing of time. One of those fairy tales is that of Cinderella. The rags to riches story that gives even the lowliest of paupers, hope that they may one day climb the social ladder. While the core message of the story has transcended time, over the years it has been adapted to address a variety of audiences. One of those renditions is Perrault’s Cinderella where the traditional idea of gender is conveyed and therefore associated with good/evil. This idea is challenged by a fellow 1600’s French author, L’heriter de Villandon’s, who’s version of Cinderella brings about a female protagonist who is also the heroine.
During the late 1800s, gender inequality was one of the common issues that existed in the society. Men and women were often distinguished among themselves. Men were regularly portrayed as the one who had power and strength, whereas women were supposed to do all the household work and they were seen as weak and trivial. Henrick Ibsen shows a prefect illustration of this example in the play A Doll’s House. Ibsen develops a notion of how the existence of gender roles in society affected one’s lives. The protagonist Nora, whose identity is shaped after seeing her husband’s actions, which depicts his beliefs of gender inequality, demonstrates this idea.