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narratives about gender roles
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Bliss and Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield and Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin On studying the texts Bliss and Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield and Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin I have associated all the stories with a sense of female repression. All the short stories feature a main female character and this character is being repressed in various ways such as by another character or their lives in general. In all the stories the awareness of repression appears towards the end mainly due to an event that has taken place. This event brings forth a realisation of their lives, which is so far from the rest of the story. The realisation that occurs in ‘Bliss’ is that Bertha finds out that her husband, Harry, is having an affair. Throughout the rest of the short story Bertha appears overly happy and joyous. This is shown through Mansfield’s choice of language predominantly at the start of the story. Examples of this are things such as ‘she wanted to run instead of walk…’ and ‘…is there no way you can express it without being “drunk and disorderly”. These are examples of where extreme happiness is shown, and she mentioned how this happiness could not possibly be explained without seeming ‘drunk and disorderly’. The extreme happiness has then been contrasted with the confusion, which is brought on at the end by the affair. ‘But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still.’ This is how Mansfield ends the story as the ‘still’ part symbolises her life, as the pear tree does. Her life is inert and has come to a halt, as she feels numb. The numbness is also symbolised by the word ‘still’ as when you are numb you generally cannot move. This shows how the act of knowing about t... ... middle of paper ... ... wanted to ask…’ showing she didn’t ask but would have liked to. She is being restrained by the nanny into having a full motherly relationship with her child. One example of how Harry subdues her is how he bullies her into believing Pearl is a dull, boring, and a typical blonde. Harry seems to have obtained the ability to demystify and trick Bertha. Which is a sign he has been doing this for a while and he has become quite expert at it. I think Mansfield did this to prepare the reader slightly for what is going to happen at the end n the revelation that is the affair. The theme of repression therefore runs throughout these stories all written by female authors that have a female view on the world. It is typical of female characters to make men out to be the cruel characters and the women who are the vulnerable main characters who are being repressed.
Men and Women in The Withered Arm and Other Stories by Thomas Hardy and Men and Women in Turned by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek to find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
“Like a river flows so surely to the sea darling, so it goes some things are meant to be.” In literature there have been a copious amount of works that can be attributed to the theme of love and marriage. These works convey the thoughts and actions in which we as people handle every day, and are meant to depict how both love and marriage can effect one’s life. This theme is evident in both “The Storm” by Kate Chopin and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman; both stories have the underlying theme of love and marriage, but are interpreted in different ways. Both in “The Storm” and in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the women are the main focus of the story. In “The Storm” you have Calixta, a seemingly happy married woman who cheats on her husband with an “old-time infatuation” during a storm, and then proceeds to go about the rest of her day as if nothing has happened when her husband and son return. Then you have “The Yellow Wallpaper” where the narrator—who remains nameless—is basically kept prisoner in her own house by her husband and eventually is driven to the point of insanity.
In the short stories "The Story of an Hour," by Chopin and "A Rose for
The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening were two works written during the Age of Expression. The entire country was going through an era of Reconstruction; politically, socially, culturally and econmically . The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening are feminist works aimed at the psychological, social, and cultural injustices during the era. According to Mizruchi, “ Cosmopolitanism aroused dis-ease: depression and disaection were prevalent in a society whose pace and variety seemed relentless. Yet the same circumstances also instilled hope. For it was widely recognized that the burgeoning heterogeneity of a newly global America would be a source of enduring vitality.”(Mizruchi, 2008) The wives portrayed in these works defeated the attitudes of their husbands during this patriarchal culture.
Furthermore, another form of symbolism and allusion that Plath includes in the novel to emphasize the struggles in which a woman withstands as she grows is the fig tree. Within the story of the fig tree, it is actually a based on the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden where the tree symbolizes conflict between genders. The story details a doomed relationship between a Jewish man and a nun. Interestingly enough, she infers that her relationship with Buddy is also hopeless when she states, “It seemed Buddy and I were like that Jewish man and that nun” (Plath 55). She figures that even though Buddy and her attend the same church, they may as well be following different religions due to their extreme differing perspectives regarding gender roles. In regards to symbolism, the tree implies the decisions Esther must face in her life because she can only pick one fig, yet she wants them
In this story the trees developed just like the characters. They are sitting around talking when Turtle says the word “beans”. Taylor thinks that she says the word “bees” but doesn’t realize that Turtle is looking at the wisteria vines. “Will you look at that, ‘I said. It was another miracle. The flower trees were turning into bean trees”(194). When one gets to this point it is close to the end when every character is finding their place. They are still developing but it’s not as messed up as it was in the beginning. Just like the trees they first start out as a seed and at some time they will become mature enough to produce what they are supposed to
Throughout the novel, the pear tree represents Janie’s and many women’s quintessential view of what relationships should be like. Early in her life, Janie sat under a tree and noticed the interaction between a bee and a pear tree:
Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour. Kate Chopin was a Victorian writer whose writing manifests her life experiences. She was not happy with the principles of the time, because women had fewer rights, and they were not considered equal to men. Afraid of segregation from society, people lived in a hypocritical world full of lies; moreover, Kate Chopin was not afraid of segregation, and used her writing as a weapon against oppression of the soul.
The tree “swings through another year of sun and leaping winds, of leaves and bounding fruit.” This sentence evokes images of happiness and serenity; however, it is in stark contrast with “month after month, the whip-crack of the mortgage.” The tone of this phrase is harsh and the onomatopoeia of a “whip crack” stirs up images of oppression. The final lines of the poem show the consequences that the family accepts by preserving the tree—their family heritage. When the speaker judges the tree by its cover she sees monetary value, but when she looks at the content in the book she find that it represents family. Even though times may be tough for the family, they are united by memories of their ancestors.
The fig tree is a very known section of the novel, and as stated in the article The Feeding of a Young Women by Caroline Smith, “... this passage is a metaphor for Esther’s psychological deterioration…” The fig tree is an important turning point for Esther, as she comes to the acceptance of her depression which causes her to now have a look at the world only through the lenses of depression. From that point on, everything Esther sees is ever more hell-like and
Betty Smith’s novel A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is a tale of poignant family relationships and childhood and also of grim privation. The story revolves around the protagonist of the story, young Francie Nolan. She is an imaginative, endearing 11-year-old girl growing up in 1912, in Brooklyn, New York. The entire story revolves around Francie and the Nolan family, including her brother Neelie, her mother Katie and her father Johnny. An ensemble of high relief characters aids and abets them in their journey through this story of sometimes bleak survival and everlasting hope. As we find out, the struggle for survival is primarily focused against the antagonist of this story, the hard-grinding poverty afflicting Francie, the Nolan’s and Brooklyn itself. The hope in the novel is shown symbolically in the “The “Tree of Heaven””. A symbol used throughout the novel to show hope, perseverance and to highlight other key points.
“Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield tells a story of a lonely, English lady in France. Miss Brill is a quiet person who believes herself to be important. The whole afternoon at the gardens, Miss Brill does not converse with anyone, nor does anyone show any inclination to talk with her. She merely watches others and listens to their conversations. This provides her with a sense of companionship; she feels as if she is a part of other people’s lives. Miss Brill is also slightly self-conceited. She believes that she is so important that people would notice if she ever missed a Sunday at the park. It does not occur to her that other people may not want her to be there.
Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” tries to shed light on the conflict between women and a society that assign gender roles using a patriarchal approach. Specifically Margaret Bauer highlights, that most of Chopin’s works revolves around exploring the “dynamic interrelation between women and men, women and patriarchy, even women and women” (146). Similarly, in “The Story of an Hour” Chopin depicts a society that oppresses women mostly through the institution of marriage, as women are expected to remain submissive regardless of whether they derive any happiness. The question of divorce is not welcome, and it is tragic that freedom of women can only be realized through death. According to Bauer, the society depicted in Chopin’s story judged women harshly as it expected women to play their domestic roles without question, while on the other hand men were free to follow their dream and impose their will on their wives (149).
Mrs. Marian Forrester strikes readers as an appealing character with the way she shifts as a person from the start of the novel, A Lost Lady, to the end of it. She signifies just more than a women that is married to an old man who has worked in the train business. She innovated a new type of women that has transitioned from the old world to new world. She is sought out to be a caring, vibrant, graceful, and kind young lady but then shifts into a gold-digging, adulterous, deceitful lady from the way she is interpreted throughout the book through the eyes of Niel Herbert. The way that the reader is able to construe the Willa Cather on how Mr. and Mrs. Forrester fell in love is a concept that leads the reader to believe that it is merely psychological based. As Mrs. Forrester goes through her experiences such as the death of her husband, the affairs that she took part in with Frank Ellinger, and so on, the reader witnesses a shift in her mentally and internally. Mrs. Forrester becomes a much more complicated women to the extent in which she struggles to find who really is and that is a women that wants to find love and be fructuous in wealth. A women of a multitude of blemishes, as a leading character it can be argued that Mrs. Forrester signifies a lady that is ultimately lost in her path of personal transitioning. She becomes lost because she cannot withstand herself unless she is treated well by a wealthy male in which causes her to act unalike the person she truly is.