2.4 Gender Stereotypes As Eagly (1987) suggests, gender roles are closely linked with gender stereotypes. Stereotypes are "over-generalized beliefs about people based on their membership in one of many social categories" (Anselmi and Law 1998, p. 195). The current gender stereotypes reflect beliefs that appeared during the 19th century, the Victorian era. Before the 19th century, most people lived and worked on farms where men and women worked together. The Industrial Revolution changed the lives
woman figures in his poems “Jenny” and paintings Found and Proserpine subverts traditional Victorian gender categories. Rossetti upsets this traditional perception by projecting masculine traits onto his female characters. Rossetti uses these women to express his own insecurities, anxieties, and fantasies. By casting his male gaze and voice onto the female objects, mixing the senses of the genders, creates synaesthetic works that give visual expressions to states of mind. Rossetti’s female twin
specific codes and behaviours in correlation to their prescribed gender. These prescriptions are governed by the gender binary system – a patriarchy-inducing system, in which holds that males and females are separate entities, each with their own physical and psychological characteristics. Authors Ellyn Lem and Holly Hassel observe that this binary is reflected and enforced, “from advertisements that place girls in domestic spheres and boys in outside settings to Happy Meal ‘Tonkas’ for boys and
novels, particularly, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood, ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti, and ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ by Geoffrey Chaucer. The restriction of this sexuality can be seen in the societal values of each era, and significantly, the role of religion in containing this. However, it is valid to say that sexuality can never be fully repressed, and this is explored in the imagery and language of the literatures. The definition of women is instrumental when considering the limiting of
The Dispossessed Following World War I, novels describing utopias gradually decreased in number, until the genre almost went extinct in mid-century, being replaced by dystopias like the famous Nineteen-Eighty-Four written by George Orwell. Later on, in the mid-seventies, fuelled by the upsurge of social reform that began in the late sixties and continued into the new decade, new utopias graced the scene, the most memorable ones being Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, Samuel R. Delany's Triton, and