On January 25, 1959, the daily newspaper in Oakland, California, ran a profile of one of the city’s well-known residents, a fifty-six-year-old French woman who had been living there, off and on, since 1940. Appearing under the headline “She Also Cooks,” the article began:
Love should decide a woman’s career. To a Frenchwoman this fact hardly needs stating. And for Madeleine Milhaud, actress, authentic beauty, wife and mother, it is the rule of her life. But though it has brought her a life of devotion to one of the great musical figures of our time, Darius Milhaud, greatest living French composer, it hasn’t ruled out the use of her own talents. “There is no question about it,” she says, “women have to work—I am absolutely for the complete activity
…show more content…
I had already decided to include a chapter on his wife, because I knew from my preliminary research that she was a vital part of the story I would tell, and I did not want to keep her in the background. But, as I began to realize, the figure of “the composer’s wife” poses a particular problem for feminist musicologists. The field of musicology has a history of elevating composers above everyone else—and of viewing music composition as an essentially masculine type of creativity. Without a feminist lens, it is all too easy to view the wife of a composer as either a passive muse or a destructive force. Yet the more immediately appealing subjects for feminist musicology are women who can challenge male-dominated historiography on its own terms—those with their own independent careers in composition or another music-related profession. In the case of a composer’s wife, the impulse may be to portray her as a creative force “in her own right” and to resist interpretations that place her primarily in her husband’s …show more content…
Many newspaper articles described her background in acting and her ongoing work as a teacher and director. However, she was careful not to appear as if she wished to take the spotlight for herself. Her characterization as a bright and interesting person “in her own right”—as she absolutely was—had the dual effect of highlighting her individuality and of making her insistence that her husband was her first priority seem all the more striking and
The way perspectives of composers and the cultural paradigms that they are influenced by are of a peculiar and often hidden nature. Through thorough textual analysis, the possibility of revealing these cultural values is enhanced, allowing the observation and appreciation of the how different ways of thinking have developed over time. Cultural values that deal with topics of gender inequalities, racial and social status prejudices and the result of societal dynamic are often hidden in texts from the Victorian Era, and this is absolutely true of Vanity Fair by William Thackeray as well as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. The two texts hold many areas of diversification and commonality which provide a basis of characters and their ways of thinking, in turn exposing attitudes towards certain cultural values.
A common trait for Willa Cather's characters is that they possess a certain talent or skill. This art usually controls the lives of these characters. According to critic Maxell Geismar, Cather's heroines who possess a skill often either do not marry or marry men whom they dominate; if they do marry the marriage is without excitement because their passion is invested in their art. In a sense, Geismar accuses Cather's heroines of sacrificing their marital roles for their art (172). However, marriage is not the only aspect that raises the subject of sacrifice for Cather's protagonists - there is also the issue of family. This is because a woman artist, or any woman, is judged not only on her art but also on her personal life, especially by her submissiveness to man in the role of daughter, wife and mother. If a woman is unable to commit towards one of these roles, she is blamed for renouncing her expectant role for something that is associated with a man's world - talent. Many readers judge Thea Kronberg and Lena Lingard according to these female roles, and hence place the accusation of sacrifice upon them. Thea Kronberg and Lena Lingard in Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark and My Antonia, respectively, are accused of sacrificing too much for their art because they apparently choose to overlook their families and love relations in respect to their art. On the surface, it appears as if Thea sacrifices her relationship with her mother and her love with Fred Ottenburg in order to achieve her musical desires. Similarly, Lena is depicted as a female who sacrifices her bond with her mother and her prospects for marriage for the life of an indepe...
Cutter, Martha J. “The Search for a Feminine Voice in the Works of Kate Chopin”. Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women’s Writing, 1850-1930, pp. 87-109. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
During the nineteenth century, Chopin’s era, women were not allowed to vote, attend school or even hold some jobs. A woman’s role was to get married, have children
Allen, Priscilla. "Old Critics and New: The Treatment of Chopin's The Awakening." In The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977, 224-238.
5.Agnes de Mille was born in a family where both his parents were theatre professionals. However, she walked on the path of dancing not because of her family but because of her sister’s disease. In order to prevent the same disease, she had to practice dancing. In her studying years, she showed great genius in organizing dancing. Her contribution to dancing was that she made dancing one of the necessary parts of the whole musical drama. It is her that made people realize the importance of the dancing in
Joseph Mankiewicz 1950’s ‘film du theatre’ All About Eve, provides an insight into the qualities needed to succeed in the star-studded world of the theatre. In particular, the protagonists, Margo Channing and her “carbon copy”, Eve Harrington, are portrayed as flawed characters because of their single-minded pursuit of fame and fortune. Whilst Margo eventually recognizes the absurdity of her dreams in a 1950s socially-conservative chauvinistic world, Eve appears to emerge triumphantly but discredited due to her wily, manipulative streak.
A large portion of Fannie Flagg’s life before writing was spent on stage; she was an actress, comedian, and producer (Contemporary). She got her start at a young age by volunteering to work a spotlight in a local show (Blog). Flagg spent many years acting in movies, television, and Broadway (Contemporary). Bystanders may have believed she had an affinity for theater, but this was not the case. Surprisingly Flagg stated in an interview that she “was never comfortable being an actress or being in the spotlight” and dreamed of being a writer (Blog). Although she
Adèle Ratignolle uses art to beautify her home. Madame Ratignolle represents the ideal mother-woman (Bloom 119). Her chief concerns and interests are for her husband and children. She was society’s model of a woman’s role. Madame Ratignolle’s purpose for playing the pia...
... to mind works written by subsequent generations of women novelists. One sees Chopin’s text straining toward, among other elements, the narrative innovations achieved in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves. One is also reminded of the “lyric” novels of the American writer Carole Maso, whose so-called experimental works typically eschew plot and conventional linear narration. In a recent book of essays, Maso admits that her erotic novel Aureole was “shaped by desire’s magical and subversive qualities,” she notes; “[desire] imposed its swellings, its ruptures, its erasures, it motions.” (Break Every Rule, 115). If contemporary authors like Maso are able to access such boundless spheres of narrative play, it may be due in part to the pioneering efforts of writers such as Chopin, who first began to articulate the need for such liberating spaces in the novel.
In “Tradition and the Female Talent: The Awakening as a Solitary Book,” Elaine Showalter makes a compelling argument that “Edna Pontellier’s ‘unfocused yearning’ for an autonomous life is akin to Kate Chopin’s yearning to write works that go beyond female plots and feminine endings” (204). Urging her reader to read The Awakening “in the context of literary tradition,” Showalter demonstrates the ways in which Chopin’s novel both builds upon and departs from the tradition of American women’s writing up to that point. Showalter begins with the antebellum novelists’ themes of women’s roles as mothers—especially the importance of the mother-daughter relationship—and women’s attachments with one another and then moves to the local colorists of the post-Civil War who claimed male and female models but who wrote that motherhood was not a suitable partner for the true artist. According to these women writers, a woman had to choose to be either an artist or a wife and mother; one negatively affected the other. The literary history then delves...
As a young child, I would visit my grandparents in Marin County often. My parents would pack my sister and me up in the car, and we would head north from San Francisco to the small town of Novato. The road to Novato took us through San Rafael, where I would always marvel at the one mile stretch of shopping mall that Highway 101 traversed. However, once we were into the hills of wine country and the shopping mall was a distant memory, so too became San Rafael. It wasn’t until I met Paul, my partner, that I learned the full story behind this fascinating town.
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. "Maid in L.A." California Dreams and Realities: Readings for Critical Thinkers and Writers. Ed. Sonia Maasik, and J F. Solomon. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2001. 116-129. Print.
When Howard asserts that “it is the woman who demands her own direction and chooses her own freedom that interests Chopin most” (1) she is right on target. Howard only fails when she chooses not to expand that vision to include the truly feminist perspectives that differentiate Chopin as a woman far ahead of her time.
Frances Farmer gained notoriety early on through her unconventional ways; from writing a high school award-winning paper revealing her atheist beliefs to traveling to the Communist Soviet Union in thick political tension, she was a beautiful intellectual put on the map. Farmer quickly became a talented movie star and Hollywood began to groom both her outside and inside appearance into something she was not. Farmer’s same unconventional ways that brought her into the spotlight pulled her tumbling down. Her outspoken manner on set “for a woman” nd her defiance for authority challenged the Hollywood studios. She began to lose parts of her identity as she gave in to Hollywood, society, and her overbearing mother. Farmer was soon swept into alcohol,