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Gender and roles of women in literature
Gender and roles of women in literature
Essays on gender roles in literature
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In “The Mother”, Gwendolyn Brooks emphasizes her anti-abortion views through her emotional connections and past experiences with this very sensitive topic. This is a poem that seems to have been a gateway towards releasing feelings of guilt by a mother who has performed abortions and who has felt its direct impact as someone who believes that they are missing out this beautiful gift of motherhood through the absences of her children. Brooks begins by speaking directly to other mothers who have gone through abortions like herself and elaborates on the lasting effects this action will have on their lives, how they will never forget their “killed children” (line 11). She gives her readers a very disturbing visual of an innocent baby, having to be born, lifeless. Brooks tells the mother of the possibilities their children would have had as becoming things such as “singers and workers”, but never got the opportunity to even breathe in a single gasp of air. (line 4). …show more content…
She realizes the extent of damage her selfish actions have caused her late children, robbing them of “births” and “names” (line 16), elaborating on how they did not get to experience a single joyous moment nor worry a single day. She explains to them how although they are not with her, she hears their voices in the winds and is often reminded of them. It seems that she cannot find a remedy to rid the guilt she has been feeling so she can only confess and express her love for them, for partial
life. This theory is reflected in her text that reads, “I have argued that you are not morally required to spend nine months in bed, sustaining the life…but to say this is by no means is to say that if, when you unplug yourself, there is a miracle and he survives, you then have a right to turn around and slit his throat.”
Previously, the narrator has intimated, “She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. They belonged to her and were her own.” Her thoughts and emotions engulf her, but she does not “struggle” with them. They “belonged to her and were her own.” She does not have to share them with anyone; conversely, she must share her life and her money with her husband and children and with the many social organizations and functions her role demands.
Her family life is depicted with contradictions of order and chaos, love and animosity, conventionality and avant-garde. Although the underlying story of her father’s dark secret was troubling, it lends itself to a better understanding of the family dynamics and what was normal for her family. The author doesn’t seem to suggest that her father’s behavior was acceptable or even tolerable. However, the ending of this excerpt leaves the reader with an undeniable sense that the author felt a connection to her father even if it wasn’t one that was desirable. This is best understood with her reaction to his suicide when she states, “But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb.” (pg. 399)
In her essay “Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate,” Margaret Olivia Little examines whether it should be permissible for the state to force the intimacy of gestation on a woman against her consent. Little concludes that “mandating gestation against a woman’s consent is itself a harm - a liberty harm” (p. 303). She reaches this conclusion after examining the deficiencies in the current methods used to examine and evaluate the issues of abortion. Their focus on the definition of a “person” and the point in time when the fetus becomes a distinct person entitled to the benefits and protections of the law fails to capture “the subtleties and ambivalences that suffuse the issue” (p. 295). Public debate on the right to life and the right to choose has largely ignored the nature of the relationship between the mother and the fetus through the gestational period and a woman’s right to either accept or decline participation in this relationship.
Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "The mother" tells us about a mother who had many abortions. The speaker is addressing her children in explain to them why child could not have them. The internal conflict reveals that she regret killing her children or "small pups with a little or with no hair." The speaker tells what she will never do with her children that she killed. She will "never neglect", "beat", "silence", "buy with sweet", " scuffle off ghosts that come", "controlling your luscious sigh/ return for a snack", never hear them "giggled", "planned", and "cried." She also wishes she could see their "marriage", "aches", "stilted", play "games", and "deaths." She regrets even not giving them a "name" and "breaths." The mother knows that her decision will not let her forget by using the phrase "Abortions will not let you forget." The external conflict lets us know that she did not acted alone in her decision making. She mentions "believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate" and "whine that the crime was other than mine." The speaker is saying that her decision to have an abortion was not final yet but someone forced her into having it anyway. The external conflict is that she cannot forget the pain on the day of having the abortions. She mentions the "contracted" and "eased" that she felt having abortions.
Mary Anne Warren’s “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” describes her justification that abortion is not a fundamentally wrong action for a mother to undertake. By forming a distinction between being genetically human and being a fully developed “person” and member of the “moral community” that encompasses humanity, Warren argues that it must be proven that fetuses are human beings in the morally relevant sense in order for their termination to be considered morally wrong. Warren’s rationale of defining moral personhood as showcasing a combination of five qualities such as “consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, capacity of communication, and self-awareness” forms the basis of her argument that a fetus displays none of these elements that would justify its classification as a person and member of the morally relevant community (Timmons 386).
In A Defense of Abortion (Cahn and Markie), Judith Thomson presents an argument that abortion can be morally permissible even if the fetus is considered to be a person. Her primary reason for presenting an argument of this nature is that the abortion argument at the time had effectively come to a standstill. The typical anti-abortion argument was based on the idea that a fetus is a person and since killing a person is wrong, abortion is wrong. The pro-abortion adopts the opposite view: namely, that a fetus is not a person and is thus not entitled to the rights of people and so killing it couldn’t possibly be wrong.
Abortions have been performed for thousands of years. In the 1800s abortions began to be outlawed. The reasons for anti-abortion laws varied for each state. Some people did not want the world to be dominated by newly arrived immigrants. Abortion in the 1800s were very unsafe due to the fact that the doctors had a limited educations and hospitals were not common. The outlawing of abortions from 1880 to 1973 led to many woman attempting illgeal abortions. (add author). Almost two hundred women died from attempting illegal abortions in 1965. Between two hundred thousand and one million illegal abortions were given each year. In states where local laws restrict the availability of abortion, women tend to have the lowest level of education and income. Additionally, in those states, less money goes toawrds education, welfare, fostercare programs, and adoption services. (Anderson, 5).
Why Abortion is Immoral by Don Marquis is an essay that claims that abortion is morally wrong, and uses one argument in particular to explain why. He argues that many of us would agree that it is wrong to kill a human, and if you believe that then you should also have that view on abortions. If you think killing is wrong then you think all killing is wrong and the persons biological state, whether it is when a person is a fetus, one years old, or thirty years old, makes no difference. He then explains that killing is wrong not only because it is immoral, but wrong because it deprives the victim of life and the enjoyments one would have otherwise experienced; which Marquis believes is the greatest lost one can suffer (Marquis, 189). Given certain circumstances Marquis agrees there are cases where killing is acceptable, but nonetheless it is immoral.
With the final lines give us a better understanding of her situation, where her life has been devoured by the children. As she is nursing the youngest child, that sits staring at her feet, she murmurs into the wind the words “They have eaten me alive.” A hyperbolic statement symbolizing the entrapment she is experiencing in the depressing world of motherhood.
Katherine Philips gained a lot of attention as a poet after writing “On the Death of My Dearest Child, Hector Philips”. This poem was written in a way to give readers an emotional account of a mother mourning the experience of losing her child. Philips expressed deep emotions from a maternal standpoint in the elegy. Unlike Jonson, Philips had the unspoken right of claiming a deep maternal connection with her son through pregnancy and childbirth. Philips’ approach to writing “On the Death of My Dearest Child” illustrates that the pain of losing her son, Hector, was enough for her to never write another verse again.
Generally, everyone agrees that it is wrong to kill innocent adult human beings in most circumstances. So then let me ask you this, why is it permissible to have an abortion? If it is wrong to kill an innocent adult human being, then why is it not also wrong to kill an innocent fetus through performing an abortion? Now, looking at the two stances one can have on this act: a pro-choice or a pro-life. So then if killing an innocent adult human being is wrong, doesn’t that also make having an abortion morally wrong as well?
Growing up with 4 younger siblings and many cousins has taught me that all babies can turn into wonderful people. By killing a baby and preventing its development into a full person is the ultimate undervaluing of a life. To take the life of a future being, especially in the horrific way of abortions which is essentially tearing and vacuuming a fetus out of a pregnant woman, would wreak havoc on anyone having to witness it day after day. The author’s battle inside of her heart would not exist if she taught these women and couples about the many alternative options that did not end in their baby dying. Amidst discussing this ethical battle, Tisdale states, “Each basin I empty is a promise- but a promise broken a long time ago,” and is speaking of the women’s unpreparedness to raise a child and the large number of women who fall victim to failed contraceptives.
Someone once said, “The guilt of abortion hurts more than labor”. This is very true for many women who have had abortions. Women who have abortions must endure the guilt associated with taking an infant’s life. Gwendolyn Brooks expresses the heartbreaking guilt of this in her poem, The Mother. The poem conveys the remorse and regret women may experience after having an abortion, while Brooks also is apologizing in the poem to her unborn children for having them terminated.
She feels that her vengeance will be a substitute for her father’s presence, and it somewhat is, as her father’s love kept her alive before he was executed. She thinks only of her vengeance, and this is what kept her so determined to live. Her rage is slowly influencing her in negative, uncontrollable