Character Analysis on Firdaus Coming to Age
The character of Firdaus in Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi is seen to be influenced by several circumstances which changes her unique perspective of life overall. Some of the dominant and prevailing forces that cause Firdaus to experience several metamorphoses were exerted by men upon her. Throughout the novel, Firdaus reveals her resentment against men as she believes that the male sex has only used her and has undermined her dignity and pride. The control that men have upon her not only changes her perspective towards her standards in society but also in her life to a certain extent where it caused Firdaus to measure and reevaluate her level of self-worth and as a person.
At the beginning of the novel, Firdaus responses are in a passive, lethargic manner towards men whom she has encountered with like if she has not yet seen much self-worth. Her first encounter is with Mohammadain; he’s another kid that lives in the same town. Mohammadain is the first male that has given her a strong sensation of pleasure: “I saw Mohammadain lying on a bed of straw under the open shelter. The smell… crept up my nose… My whole body shuddered with a faraway yet familiar pleasure arising from some unknown source, from some indefinable spot outside my being… something I tried to hold on to… but it slipped away… I wept in my sleep as though it was something I was losing now… and not something I had lost a long time” (El Saadawi 25). The use of “shuddered, “whole body”, “my being”, and “wept”, gives the sense that Mohammadain did not only exert an emotional force upon Firdaus, but has also caused her to assess and examine her sense of “being” and identity. Her first experience shows how naïve an...
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...er father a sexist, but her society was as well. The way Firdaus is treat made her be aware of the dominance of men in both the household and the society itself. From Bayoumi, her roommate; Fawzy, her client; and her pimp, she learner to have the dangerous sensation effect of a woman wanting to hurt a man’s pride. Ibraham, her true love, shaped her to become a cynical, emotionless prostitute once again he unveiled the truth about her statues and the nonexistence of “love”. She realizes that the impact of money can be confused with lust. Finally, Firdaus freed herself from the male grasp by ripping apart the only thing expressing her true self, money. Lastly, by entering the prison after killing her pimp, where she is ironically freed. After she has been asked to sign the pardon, she rejects it and she buys her ticket to the internal freedom by the penalty death.
In Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll House, Ibsen tells a story of a wife and mother who not only has been wronged by society, but by her beloved father and husband because of her gender. Nora left her father’s house as a naïve daughter only to be passed to the hands of her husband forcing her to be naïve wife and mother, or so her husband thinks. When Nora’s husband, Torvald becomes deathly ill, she takes matters into her own hands and illegally is granted a loan that will give her the means to save her husband’s life. Her well guarded secret is later is used against her, to exort Torvald, who was clueless that his wife was or could be anything more than he made her. However, Nora has many unrecognized dimensions “Besides being lovable, Nora is selfish, frivolous, seductive, unprincipled, and deceitful” (Rosenberg and Templeton 894). Nora is a dynamic character because her father and her husband treat her as a child and do not allow her to have her own thoughts and opinions, as the play progresses she breaks free from the chains of her gender expectation to explore the world around her.
...oss lightning? To watch—poor perdu!—/With this thin helm? Mine enemy’s meanest dog,/Though he had bit me, should have stood that night/Against my fire. And wast thou fain, poor father,/To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn/In short and musty straw? Alack, alack!/'Tis wonder that thy life and wits at once/Had not concluded all.—He wakes. Speak to him.” (King Lear, 4, vii, 30-42). Knowingly even after how she is being treated by her father, she still shows her faithfulness.
Literature is the key to our world or language. Many writers have emerged from this subject such as Homer who wrote The Odyssey and Euripidies who wrote about the evil Medea. Also mentioned in this paper are the Thousand and One Arabian Nights which is a collection of folktales and stories that are compiled into one. Each of these works of literature has a woman character that has many similarities in solving their problems. In The Odyssey the woman character that will be in comparison is Penelope which is Odysseus’s wife. In the story of Medea, Medea is of course the character we will be discussing and Shaharazad is the woman character from the Thousand and One Arabian Nights that will also be in comparison. Each of these women find themselves in a particularly “sticky situation.” However, Penelope, Medea, and Shahrazad are three strong women whose perseverance and cleverness help them to attain their goals.
Due to traditional stereotypes of women, literature around the world is heavily male-dominant, with few female characters outside of cliché tropes. Whenever a female character is introduced, however, the assumption is that she will be a strong lead that challenges the patriarchal values. The authors of The Thousand and One Nights and Medea use their female centered stories to prove their contrasting beliefs on the role of women not only in literature, but also in society. A story with a female main character can be seen as empowering, but this is not always the case, as seen when comparing and contrasting Medea and The Thousand and One Nights.
Pleading profusely, she insists that The Misfit is a man of good southern aristocratic blood that would never harm a lady. The Misfit refuses the title of a good man, but agrees that he is not the worst of men, and begins to treat Grandmother with staccato politeness. As her family is led off one by one to be slaughtered, her increasingly desperate calls for civility take on a religious tone. The Misfit has pious feelings of his own, but views the vindication of one’s sin as either all important or impossible. Unable to act on faith, he tells her that if he only could be sure of salvation, he wouldn’t be what he was now. This tortured explanation touches Grandmother, and she reaches out to him as her own child. The Misfit recoils in horror and kills her without hesitation, and Grandmother dies
Literatures had always been the reflections of the world’s issues. These literatures showed the problems within society in the period of time. In the book, “The Natural”, by Bernard Malamud had developed how women were seen as an object to men that they did not have the equal rights and social status as men. Also, women in the novel were classified as the trophies to men, whom they were either gold diggers digging for massive fortunes for the future, or accomplishments for men to chase after them. The author had established several female characters to optimize these issues. In the novel, Harriet Bird, Memo Paris, and Iris Lemon were representing different figures of female in that period of time. Both Harriet and Memo were being the negative effects to the main protagonist, Roy Hobbes, while Iris was the positive hope for Roy. The author chose to use these few characters to criticize the stereotypes of women in that period, and how they affected the others around them.
According to “The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language”, the word “feminity” is defined as “the quality or condition of being feminine or a characteristic or trait traditionally held to be female.” Further speaking, feminity is formed by various socially-defined and biologically-created gender roles played by women influenced by a number of social and cultural factors. For example, the traditional gender roles of women include nurturer, birth giver, homemaker and caregiver. However, marked by a series of women's rights movements starting from the 19th century, women’s gender roles, as well as the ways how society and men perceive women, have been largely changed. This significant change, described as a process of female awakening, was widely reflected in many contemporary literature works. This essay will specifically focus on the construction of feminity in two short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway and “The Stoy of an Hour” by Kate Chopin through examining how the authors define “feminity” in their treatment of female characters.
In spite of being ruled by men in her entire life, Penelope remains patient and not only dexterously runs Odysseus’s state, but also cunningly manipulates the suitors in the ploy of shroud weaving. In addition, Atwood depicts the melancholy life of Penelope in the chapters of her childhood, marriage, slanderous gossip and suitors stuff their faces, where she struggles for her dignity and existence. Thus, the author often favours matriarch, opposes the double standard between genders and the roles imparted to boys and girls from their early age. Therefore, Atwood wonders that why women not men have to deal with violence, patriarchal oppression, infidelity, and objectification along with indifferent roles as well as duties in the society. Subsequently, Atwood exhibits the face of gender biased society and how female is treated as mere object of pleasure and child birth. As girls learn domestic work such as craft or to do things with hands, whereas, boys get training in bravery or war acts. Similarly, all twelve maids spend their childhood as slaves with no parents or playtime, sing of freedom, and dream of
In The Penelopiad written by Margaret Atwood, feminism and anti - feminism is present in many settings and scenes proving the sole purpose of the book is to give a voice to the women of The Odyssey showing us different facets of one story. By repeating words and phrases that give the reader negative connotations, Margaret Atwood helps to destroy the predisposed ideology of men being superior to women. Margaret Atwood narrates the book as different female characters that relate instances during which they are discriminated against. By using the maids of Odysseus as examples of dehumanized women, the reader gets to see different perspectives of the original Illiad story. By having the whole story be about Penelope’s adventures while Odysseus was away shows the reader the independence and courage she possessed whereas in the beginning of The Penelopiad when she was reliant on her kingdom. The usage of words like cold blood to describe a murderer, slave to describe a human being, and blame repeatedly to describe an act shows the reader of the torture women in this time period had to suffer through.
At the beginning of the story Nora is very happy, and everything with her family is going great. Nora responds in joy when Torvald brings up all the extra money that he will bring to the family with his new job. But as the story goes on Nora says she is not just a “silly girl” as Torvald says she is. Torvald does not agree that she understands all the business details referring to debt that she incurred to take out a loan to preserve Torvald’s health. She thinks that if she knows all these things about business that she will think that Torvald will see her as an intelligent person that knows more than just being a wife. But the fact that she is willing to break the law just to show her courage for Torvalds health.
The narrator was accused of being a threat to the Brotherhood. He was given the choice of either becoming inactive in the Brotherhood completely or lecturing on the "woman question" in another neighborhood until an investigation into his loyalty was conducted. The narrator was rewarded with an important insight into his character. Many women believe that he would understand them and their needs, because of his talks about women and their place in society. The narrator is able to realize that these girls are seeing him only as they want to see him instead of how he really is. This was an important realization for the narrator to make, but the discovery of his true self was still unfound
This time, she used a new medium, the feature-length film, to express her feeling of Iranian society, and she declared that the film is telling a story rather than conveying a concept (754). In this way, the film Women Without Men tells four women’s story in islamic society, and Neshat tired to use these four emotional and sad stories to reflect women’s status in islamic society. Shirin Neshat separated the film to different sections, and each section tells a single story of each woman (754). All of them are from different social classes and backgrounds, and they meet each other in a garden where they try to live safely during the difficult time in 1953 coup (754). Zarin is a young woman from the lowest social class who is unwilling to be a prositutue, and her struggle was shown when she lost herself in brothel (754). Munis and Faezeh represent two positions of women in middle class; Munis cares about political events, however her brother always prevent her from participating in political events (Danto 223); in this way, Munis’s struggle emphasize a gender issue in Islamic society that women has to right to participate in political events. On the contrary, compare to Munis, Faezeh is a very traditional woman, however, this character in the film reflects a serious issue in Islamic society, which is sexual assault (215). Unlike other
In a nation brimming with discrimination, violence and fear, a multitudinous number of hearts will become malevolent and unemotional. However, people will rebel. In the eye-opening novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns written by Khaled Hosseini, the country of Afghanistan is exposed to possess cruel, treacherous and sexist law and people. The women are classified as something lower than human, and men have the jurisdiction over the women. At the same time, the most horrible treatment can bring out some of the best traits in victims, such as consideration, boldness, and protectiveness. Although, living in an inconsiderate world, women can still carry aspiration and benevolence. Mariam and Laila (the main characters of A Thousand Splendid Suns) are able to retain their consideration, boldness and protectiveness, as sufferers in their atrocious world.
All decisions are made in regard to her future and life is influenced by men. The fact that the father is deceased does not diminish his power. In fact, his status as her late father may enhance the perceived impact of his authority.... ... middle of paper ... ...:
“Gender is one of those big themes that is a little difficult to nail down, in part because it often informs a text without being explicitly addressed. Of course, there are instances in Sula in which we do get direct commentary on gender and gender roles, particularly as they relate to the limits placed on women. But more often than not, we have to dig a little deeper to understand the gender dynamics. And it 's not just men who are invested in upholding certain gender roles while dismantling others. Some women are just as invested in maintaining these societal roles, no matter how restrictive they seem.”