Hi I’m Chloe Chadick and today in my IOP I will be discussing gender representation in both The Brothers Karamozov by Fydor Dostoevsky, and the movie, directed by Richard Brooks from a feminist prospective. In order to evaluate the novel and book I will use the Bechdel test, The Smurfette Principle, and look at the cultural influences Dostoevsky and Richard Brooks had during their time periods.
Does anyone know why it’s important to pay attention to gender representation?
Main points to look for:
We can better pay attention to culture, media
It’s important to analyze gender representation in literature as well as society because we must be able to understand what faults we’ve made in the past towards gender inequality to build a communication…show more content… the suffix “ette” was added on, rather than giving her a job description in her name like the male smurfs. Males in these kinds of movies will have varying personalities, while the females are there to portray the feminine side of, in this case, 18 males in The Brothers Karamozov, rather than being characters with a reason besides supporting the story of another male lead. You might be thinking to yourself, well sure, it’s not great that the ratio of men to women in the Brothers Karamozov is poorly portrayed. and you’d be right. However, the principle is comparing how males are more than just the masculine aspect, they have desires, feel pain because of suffrage, injustice, and doubt, while the women are there to represent femininity alone, which stereotypically is the equivalent to romance as we’ve seen in mainly in the movie and of some in the book. For a real life example of this to bring it home is actually our uniforms. They are feminized by the idea that females are to show more skin while keeping the tie, an attribute known as masculine. They are based upon masculine attributes with a few changes to make it distinct. While again there is nothing against showing more skin, but it is a stereotype that a female is the one to do so. Grushenka arguably dresses promiscuously in the movie and novel, but that’s not where the issue lies. It’s up to the male characters to objectify her physically, however Grushenka treats herself as a…show more content… The starting minority of women who began the Womens Movement came from a higher class, just like Katerina. Now, it could have been a coincidence she had her own money and had positive motives, but Grushenka’s character leads me to believe Dostoevsky compared these two to women searching for equality in the late 1870s to the 1900s. Grushenka had poor morality, dressed promiscuously to their standards, and did not fight against gender roles, and arguably used them to her advantage to get what she