remorse. A double reference to the female as the weaker sex is stablished. She wants to stop being women to stop being weak. She becomes a hybrid, hard and cruel woman, more than her husband. She refers to femininity also from the perspective of motherhood, the milk given to children is an extreme act of love, and is for her nuisance, an obstacle in the way of what she want to
William Dean Howells’ “Editha” features a woman of the same name who reads romantic novels and parrots what she reads from newspapers. Her fiancé Gearson is a pacifist, but she convinces him to join the army and fight in the war. He dies in battle, and Editha mourns this loss; however, she never comprehends her role in his death. “The Yellow Wall-paper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is told by journal entries of a nameless woman. The narrator suffers from postpartum depression and is isolated
Sophocles introduces us to the feisty Antigone in his play of the same name. Her strong character challenges not only the tyrannical leadership of her king, Creon, but also the position that women were subjected to in ancient Athenian culture. Sophocles is able to place his female protagonist in this unique position by giving her character a heightened masculinity. While Antigone voices that her prerogative is to bury her brother in accordance with the laws of the gods, I will be arguing that her
that “... marriage could only be dissolved only if it had not produced a son”(61). Clearly Medea fulfilled that criteria and hence Jason’s actions could also be deemed as illegal to some extent. Further in the text, it mentions that “marriage and motherhood were considered the primary goals of every female citizen”(62) and “The birth of a child, especially a son, was considered a fulfillment of the goal of the marriage”(64). This portrays Medea as a perfect wife who has fulfilled everything that was
The decades of the 1960s and 1970s brought many new ideas and changes to America, a departure from the extremely conservative 1950s. Swinging to the other extreme, these decades introduced expanded freedoms to the younger generation, and their power and opportunity to break the social confines of past generations. Mattel’s Barbie Doll was born in 1959, and each Barbie throughout the two subsequent decades gave testimony to the multitude of changes happening (Lord 78). Barbie reflected major events
. . . Motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not.” – William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying Addie says this and what it means is that words are never enough
Woman: God’s second mistake? Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, who regarded ‘thirst for power’ as the sole driving force of all human actions, has many a one-liners to his credit. ‘Woman was God’s second mistake’, he declared. Unmindful of the reactionary scathing criticism and shrill abuses he invited for himself, especially from the ever-irritable feminist brigade. The fact and belief that God never ever commits a mistake, brings Nietzsche’s proclamation dashingly down into the dust bin