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Role of women in general literature
Role of women in general literature
Gender roles of women in literature
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In both Trifles and Fences, the relationship between genders plays a large part of the story and in both plays women are not created equal to their spouses. In comparing both plays, the women are tradtionally forced to stay home and do all the housing chores, while the men went to work and socialized with friends while at work. This idea of women staying at home portrays the control that society has over women and makes women unfree and confined to only their homes. In the play "Trifles" the wife, Mrs. Wright seems to have had a interesting life, singing for a chouir during her youth. However, when she marries Mr. Wright, she no longer sings for the chouir and starts lossing herself within her marriage and is unhappy. In the play "Fences,"
the husband Troy, believes that his wife should not be in any male conversations and grabs her during an argument to portray his male dominance. The women in both plays want control and want to no longer be oppressed, however; both wives take a different path in obaining it. In the play, "Fences," Troy's wife Rose believes she has a voice and she argues with Troy because she wishes to have control over her family.
“Fences” is a play written by August Wilson about a family living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1957. Troy and Rose have been married for 18 years and have two grown children; Lyons and Corey. Troy is an uptight, prideful man who always claims that he does not fear death, the rest of his family is more laxed and more content with their lives than Troy is. As the play progresses the audience learns more about Troy’s checkered past with sharecropping, his lack of education and the time he spent in prison. The audience also learns more about Troy’s love for baseball and the dreams he lost due to racism and segregation. In the middle of the play the author outwardly confirms what the audience has been suspecting; Troy isn’t exactly satisfied with his life. He feels that he does not get to enjoy his life and that his family is nothing more than a responsibility. Getting caught up in this feelings, Troy cheats on Rose with a woman named Alberta and fathers a child with the mistress. By the end of the play Troy loses both of the women and in 1965, finally gets the meeting with death that he had been calling for throughout the play. Over the
The main idea showed in Trifles, the male character, and the empathy described by the females is why the author shows everyone that in every section of this play. Throughout the play, the women were being ignore and belittled by men. With their role, it is showing how back in the early 1900’s men were figured as gods. Women had to give all attention to the children, housekeeping and especially taking care of their spouse. Even though the women think very different as to what men use to think, they still maintain a close relationship in respecting the man 's job. According to Elke Brown, “ As a sheriff 's wife, she is married not only to Mr. Peters, the person but also to his profession”. The women are giving their world just so the men can be satisfied with the job they have and not cause any other problem other than their job. During the play, the men are only looking for hard concrete clues. They seem not to see the reality behind minor things. Mrs. Peters is directed by this belief until she remembers the stillness in her house after a child had died. This memory produces a dominant bond between her and Minnie 's experience of isolation and loneliness. The scene where exactly Mrs. Peters herself attempts to hide the box with the dead canary in it. She is well aware that this action that happens, which can apply to on the society and the way her husband wants the things done. Just because her husband stands
In a simple fictional world, characters are either good or bad, heroes or villains. The heroes almost always win and defeat the villains. In August Wilson’s Fences, Troy Maxson is more complex than that. He has both good and bad qualities. He is both a hero and a villain. Because of this, Troy can be considered an antihero.
In the 19th Century, women had different roles and treated differently compared to today’s women in American society. In the past, men expected women to carry out the duties of a homemaker, which consisted of cleaning and cooking. In earlier years, men did not allow women to have opinions or carry on a job outside of the household. As today’s societies, women leave the house to carry on jobs that allow them to speak their minds and carry on roles that men carried out in earlier years. In the 19th Century, men stereotyped women to be insignificant, not think with their minds about issues outside of the kitchen or home. In the play Trifles, written by Susan Glaspell, the writer portrays how women in earlier years have no rights and men treat women like dirt. Trifles is based on real life events of a murder that Susan Glaspell covered during her work as a newspaper reporter in Des Moines and the play is based off of Susan Glaspell’s earlier writing, “A Jury of Her Peers”. The play is about a wife of a farmer that appears to be cold and filled with silence. After many years of the husband treating the wife terrible, the farmer’s wife snaps and murders her husband. In addition, the play portrays how men and women may stick together in same sex roles in certain situations. The men in the play are busy looking for evidence of proof to show Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. As for the women in the play, they stick together by hiding evidence to prove Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. Although men felt they were smarter than women in the earlier days, the play describes how women are expected of too much in their roles, which could cause a woman to emotionally snap, but leads to women banding together to prove that women can be...
In “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell and “A Dollhouse” by Henrik Ibsen, the authors use symbolism to shed light on the way woman were once looked down upon by men. In both plays the woman face similar derisive attitudes from the men in their lives. Women are treated as property, looked down upon and only useful in matters pertaining to cooking, taking care of children, housework and sexual objects. The women’s marriages, socioeconomic and social status are completely different, but both women reach their emotional breaking point, and grow so discontent with their situations they are willing to take drastic actions.
...mpletely dependent upon men. Playwright Susan Glaspell cleverly causes the reader to question the way that women and men are viewed in society. The women in Trifles, though they were overlooked by the men, solved this case while the men failed to do so when they were supposedly in charge. In failing to recognize the women’s ability to contribute to their work the men succeed in causing the women to unite, giving them the real power and knowledge to solve this mystery. All the while the women are moving a little closer together and moving forward toward their rights.
To begin, in both plays the men dismiss the women as trivial. In Trifles, when Mrs. Wright is being held in jail for the alleged murder of her husband, she worries about the cold weather and whether it will cause her fruit to freeze which will burst the jars. After the women come across a shattered jar of canned fruit, they converse about Mrs. Wright’s concern about the matter. Mrs. Peters states, “She said the fire’d go out and her jars would break” (Glaspell 918). The women here identify with Mrs. Wright’s concern, because they understand the hard work that goes into canning as part of the demanding responsibilities women endure as housewives. The Sheriff’s reply is “Held for murder and worryin’ about her preserves” (Glaspell 918). In other words, the men perceive the event as insignificant; they clearly see women as a subservient group whose concerns hold little importance. Likewise, the reader can relate to this treatment in A Dollhouse, when Torvald complains to Nora about spending Christmas time the previous year making frivolous ornaments instead of devoting it to family. Torvald says, “It was the dullest three weeks that I ever spent!” (Ibsen 1207). He believes her role i...
“The treatment of women in ‘Trifles’”, a web site that analyzes the demeanor of women throughout the play, states “ The women are betrayed as if they are second class citizens with nothing more important to think about, except to take care of the medial household chores like cooking, cleaning, and sewing.
Fences, a play first published by August Wilson in 1986, is an exploration of the relationships and individuals within a black tenement family living in the United States just before the start of the Civil Rights Movement. The story focuses on Troy Maxson and his family’s struggle to make ends meet, while each person’s emotions and desires threaten pull them apart from one another as well. Within the two acts that make up the play, readers and viewers learn much about Troy and Rose Maxson and their children. In his younger years, Troy was a great baseball player, but missed an opportunity to take his talent to the professional level due to racial discrimination. Events such as this take a toll on Troy’s disposition, and he grows into a hardened man, with major unresolved psychological issues that carry over into his adulthood and family life. Fortunately for Troy’s children, his wife, Rose, has a more kind and caring nature than that of her husband, and when their situation worsens, she takes charge. The two opposite personalities of Troy and Rose are the forces that push the play forward, and it is for their dreams and actions that the play is given its name. In one sense, the fence that Troy has been dragging his feet to finish resembles the family that, over the years, he has neglected; similarly, both are things that Rose has been begging for him to pay more attention to. In another sense, the fence is a symbol for a metaphorical barrier: for Troy, it is a barrier between his world at home and what he wants to keep away, and for Rose, it is a barrier between the world and what she wants to keep protected. The title represents various aspe...
In conclusion, Even though both Ibsen and Glaspell are showing the responsible for giving women insight to what their lives could be as an independent person who is treated as an equal, their plays deals somewhat different sight to deals with the problems of the inequality between men and women. In other words, in A Doll’s House, Nora – like many others – begins to realize that she is more than capable of thinking and living for herself. Unlike Nora, however, in Trifles, Mrs. Wright chose to stay married to her unloving and murder her husband. Moreover, unlike what A Doll’s house portrayed, in Trifles, Glaspell shows the power of women can gain by sticking together and looking out for one another in order to improve their social positions from the behavior of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters.
The power of women is different than that of men. Women display a subtle and indirect kind of power, but can be resilient enough to impact the outside world. In Trifles, Susan Glaspell delivers the idea that gender and authority are chauvinistic issues that confirm male characters as the power holders, while the female characters are less significant and often weak. This insignificance and weakness indicated in the play by the fact that the women had the evidence to solve a murder, but the men just ignored the women as if they had no value to the case at all. This weakness and inability of the female to contest the man’s view are apparent. According to Ben-Zvi, “Women who kill evoke fear because they challenge societal constructs of femininity-passivity, restraint, and nurture; thus the rush to isolate and label the female offender, to cauterize the act” (141). This play presents women against men, Ms. Wright against her husband, the two women against their spouses and the other men. The male characters are logical, arrogant, and stupid while the women are sympathetic, loyal, and drawn to empathize with Mrs. Wright and forgive her crime. The play questions the extent to which one should maintain loyalty to others. Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale try to withhold incriminating evidence against Mrs. Wright, and by challenging the reader to question whether
Trifles is one play that really shows the conflict between gender roles in the early 20th century. At the beginning of the 1900s the idea of everyone having equal rights didn’t exist. Men clearly dominated every aspect of life, while women were often left with little importance. The oppression of women during that time stretched to the point that they were not truly acknowledge as their own person. Their sole purpose was to take care of their families by keeping house and performing their caretaker duties. According to the essay “Literary Context in Plays: Susan Glaspell” by Bailey McDaniel claims that Glaspell’s work Trifles is considered an observation on the demeaning, insignificant characterization of women’s labor and their lives within domesticity (McDaniel). Susan Glaspell really tries to emphasize this feminist view throughout the entire play.
Susan Glaspell's play, "Trifles", attempts to define one of the main behavioral differences between man and woman. For most of the story, the two genders are not only geographically separated, but also separated in thought processes and motive, so that the reader might readily make comparisons between the two genders. Glaspell not only verbally acknowledges this behavioral difference in the play, but also demonstrates it through the characters' actions and the turns of the plot. The timid and overlooked women who appear in the beginning of the play eventually become the delicate detectives who, discounted by the men, discover all of the clues that display a female to be the disillusioned murderer of her (not so dearly) departed husband. Meanwhile, the men in the play not only arrogantly overlook the "trifling" clues that the women find that point to the murderer, but also underestimate the murderer herself. "These were trifles to the men but in reality they told the story and only the women could see that (Erin Williams)". The women seem to be the insightful unsung heroes while the men remain outwardly in charge, but sadly ignorant.
The title of this drama "Trifles" demonstrates how men have the assumption that women and their respective actions are seemingly unimportant. Trifles can be used in two forms in the English language. In verb form, trifle means to treat someone or something as unimportant or non-essential. The word trifle in noun form means something of little value or importance. Both definitions of this word yield an idea in this story that women are seen as trivial and are not worthy of respect by men. This idea is conveyed throughout the entire story by the belittling assumptions and attitude the men use toward the women. For example Hale says, " Well, women are used to worrying over trifles" (1003). Typically, a kitchen represents women's work and the idea of domesticity. In Glaspell's eyes, men tend to assume that nothing of importance occurs in the kitchen and this can be related to the idea that women are insignificant. As Glaspell writes,
Trifles by Susan Glaspell tackles the problems of the patriarchal systems that women have lived in. The focus of Trifles is bringing the oppression of women to the public. However, I believe that understanding the different roles men played in Trifles and will give a new perspective of the trials women went through in this proto-feminist play. As such, this essay will explore the roles men played in the lives of women. Specifically, what aspects of the writing illustrate the implied authority of men and the active oppression over Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters. In addition, interesting aspects of the subtexts are found in metaphors and motifs of the text. These metaphors are indicative of the behaviors women had to attain in response to male dominance. Finally, by analyzing the relationship of the antagonist against protagonist and where the chracters sit on the axis of conflict