Gender Roles In Notes From The Underground And Death Of A Salesman

Gender is a Huge Part in Determining Gender Roles In my research essay for my English Composition 2 class, I will be analyzing the different gender roles in Notes from the Underground and Death of a Salesman. Often times, in American Literature work, gender roles are used very differently due to whomever wrote it. This story and play fall into the category of “traditional” gender roles that are given to males and females based off of society and what is expected of males and females. I will use the gender approach to explain that roles in families and society are based off of gender. I will also compare a feminist approach to the gender approach and see how they are different. In Author Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s

The main characters are men and they are the main focus throughout both. In Notes from the Underground, the story is based on the life of UM, the underground man, and Willy, the husband and father, in Death of a Salesman. They are the main characters to show that men are the leader and should be paid more attention to because of what they do for their families and themselves. This plays a huge role in Death of a Salesman. Going off of the traditional “norm”, Willy is the bread winner since he is a businessman and Linda, the woman, or course is a house wife and mother. As for in the story Notes form the Underground, UM worked in an office which gave a good indication that he was also the money maker. He never had a female figure in his life because that was one of his issues until he met Liza. She was a female prostitute. This is a very stereotypical point of view because of what society has always believed about gender roles. People do not realize though that these beliefs limit women to do what they want to do. This also brings in the idea of the feminist approach. Feminist criticism, according to “Literary Criticism Post-Modernism: Feminist, African American, Womanist, Psychoanalytical, Post- Colonial, and Gender notes, Feminist is the idea that society is male dominated and all texts are products of

In Notes from the Underground, Liza, the woman, is a prostitute so she does exactly what UM wants her to do. This being another sign of roles being based off of gender. Not many times do you hear of a male prostitute. No way is a prostitute a steady well paid job. This is the idea that women cannot make enough money to support a family by themselves. As for Linda in, Death of a Salesman, she really doesn’t even have a “real” job besides cleaning the house and cooking for Willy, Biff, and Happy. These are not real