Isabella In Measure For Measure

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We fight for spaces in wars, we explore new spaces and build boundaries around them. Literate can define space, and represent it through spatial relations which shape critical discourse on them. Robert T.Tally in Literary Cartography: Space, Representation, and Narrative mentions that: “The storyteller, like the mapmaker, determines the space to be represented, selects the elements to be included, draws the scale, and so on. In producing the narrative, the writer also produces a map of the space[…]. In a sense, all storytelling is a kind of mapping” (4). In fact, each space which is held by a character is distinguishable from another one. Shakespeare, like his other contemporaries, was able to shape the space he wanted to be represented. Different…show more content…
Some of Shakespeare’s female characters, like Isabella in Measure For Measure, moves from her privacy to the public and tries to inhabit as much space as possible. In this paper I will examine the spaces Shakespeare creates for Isabella in which they inhabit; that is to say, the notion of feminine place and space in this play, as well as their motivation to choose their way of living in a city where the Duke mentions that he has seen “corruption boil and bubble”(Shakespeare V.i.315). Barbara J. Bains in Assaying the Power of Chastity in Measure for Measure about the city of Vienna claims that: “In Vienna, as in Shakespeare’s England, women are defined and placed on the basis of their chastity. […] According to her chastity or lack thereof, a woman takes her place in nunnery, the jail, the moated grange, or the brothel (that other “nunnery” (287). In fact, I will endeavor to answer: why and where these female characters move? And to follow the movements of these female characters and the spaces they dwell. The methodology used in this paper consists of the cultural, historical and textual analysis of the…show more content…
Phyllis Rackin in Misogyny is Everywhere argues that: “With the turn to history in literary studies generally, and specially in the field of the Renaissance, feminist Shakespeare criticism has almost completely shaped by the scholarly consensus about the pervasiveness of masculine anxiety and women’s disempowerment in Shakespeare’s world” (47). Some feminist critics like, Peter Erickson, believe that in early modern England women were supposed to be silent, obedient and meant to be subordinated by male power. In his work, Patriarchal Structure in Shakespeare’s Drama, he states that Shakespeare’s female characters are “Peripheral to male-centered action” (7). According to him, there was a conflict between relations in early modern society. In fact, he argues that Shakespeare’s plays reflect the inequality of power and patriarchal structure of society at that time (22). Similarly, Anthony Fletcher in Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England 1500-1800 points out

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