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The portrayal of women in literature
The portrayal of women in literature
The portrayal of women in literature
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The portrayal of men and women has varied in different stories throughout history. Many portray women as beautiful, deceptive, manipulative, and smart, while men are portrayed as being strong, masculine, and easily tricked. In many of the works covered in the course “Major British Writers to 1800,” men are advised to refrain from acting lustful, believed that it would harm their overall ability to succeed in whatever the characters aimed to do. An example of this is seen in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” when Gawain is deceived by Lady Bertilak in an effort to prove that Sir Gawain is imperfect. The depictions of men and women are very similar in Fantomina by Eliza Haywood, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Phyllis and Aristotle. . While each of these stories maintain a similar image on men and women, the means in which the deception is very different. Unlike these three stories however, Paradise Lost by John Milton does not depict women as being deceptive or manipulative, nor men as being easily tricked or deceived. John Milton’s depiction of men and women is portrayed very differently in comparison to Fantomina, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Phyllis and Aristotle.
In Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina women are depicted as being deceptive and manipulative through the actions of the main character, known by many names although her true identity is unknown, throughout the entire story. The main character, which often is referred to as Fantomina, manipulates Beauplaisir through the use of sex and different costumes. Fantomina uses these disguises to test the will power of Beauplaisir, even writing letters as two different people to see which woman he would choose. Fantomina is a very different female character as seen in the ...
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...s Milton shows us, this is not always the case and men and women can work together in ways that benefit each other as well as create possibilities for a successful future for others.
Works Cited:
Anonymous. Phyllis and Aristotle. N.p.: n.p., n.d. LATECH. Louisiana Tech University.
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Haywood, Eliza. Fantomina and Other Works. Ed. Alexander Pettit, Margaret Case
Croskery, and Anna C. Patchias. Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2004. Print.
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Milton, John, and Merritt Y. Hughes. Paradise Lost. New York: Odyssey,
1935. Literature.org. 20 Dec. 1996. Web. 3 May 2014.
Poet, Pearl. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Trans. A. S. Kline. N.p.: A. S. Kline,
2007. PoetryInTranslation. A. S. Kline, 2007. Web. 03 May 2014.
8[8] Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Trans. Marie Borroff. Norton Anthology of British Literature Vol. 1, New York: WW Norton, 1993.
Eliza Haywood wrote Fantomina, a short novel, at a time when the genre was only just being introduced. The novel had not yet gained respect as a literary form. Many people, around the eighteenth century, believed that novels were meant for mothers and their daughters, who were typically at home all day with nothing else to do, since most did not work. Many novelists would adhere to this idea when creating female characters; they often carried few roles. However, Fantomina appears to demonstrate feminist views that were rare, and more radical for its time. Eliza Haywood shows an intelligence and stealthiness in her main character, in contrast to the era’s concept of what a woman should be. This seems to put Fantomina ahead of its time, in many respects.
During the medieval ages, women were described as evil creatures that would destroy anyone standing in their way to get what they want. People claimed that women's malicious intentions clouded their judgment from doing the right thing forcing them to be selfish. In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Malory’s The Death of King Arthur, both focus on women’s behavioral impulses through their dishonesty, manipulation, and their promiscuity.
Traditional female characteristics and female unrest are underscored in literary works of the Middle Ages. Although patriarchal views were firmly established back then, traces of female contempt for such beliefs could be found in several popular literary works. Female characters’ opposition to societal norms serves to create humor and wish- fulfillment for female and male audiences to enjoy. “Lanval” by Marie De France and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer both show subversion of patriarchal attitudes by displaying the women in the text as superior or equal to the men. However, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” also incorporates conventional societal ideas by including degradation of women and mistreatment of a wife by her husband.
Barron, W.R.J., trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.. New York: Manchester University Press, 1974.
Over the course of time, the roles of men and women have changed dramatically. As women have increasingly gained more social recognition, they have also earned more significant roles in society. This change is clearly reflected in many works of literature, one of the most representative of which is Plautus's 191 B.C. drama Pseudolus, in which we meet the prostitute Phoenicium. Although the motivation behind nearly every action in the play, she is glimpsed only briefly, never speaks directly, and earns little respect from the male characters surrounding her, a situation that roughly parallels a woman's role in Roman society of that period. Women of the time, in other words, were to be seen and not heard. Their sole purpose was to please or to benefit men. As time passed, though, women earned more responsibility, allowing them to become stronger and hold more influence. The women who inspired Lope de Vega's early seventeenth-century drama Fuente Ovejuna, for instance, rose up against not only the male officials of their tiny village, but the cruel (male) dictator busy oppressing so much of Spain as a whole. The roles women play in literature have evolved correspondingly, and, by comparing The Epic of Gilgamesh, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Wife of Bath's Prologue, we can see that fictional women have just as increasingly as their real-word counterparts used gender differences as weapons against men.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, Volume One. General Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: Norton, 1993.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume A. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006. 162-213.
Markman, Alan M. "The Meaning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Modern Language Association 72.4 (1957): 574-86. JSTOR. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.
Although society has advanced dramatically technologically, I feel that we still have a long way to go when it comes to how we view one another. It amazes me that in a society such as ours, that bases its existence on the equality of all people, that misogyny (as it occurred in medieval times) still takes place. A timeless example of misogyny is the objectifying of women, which suggests that a woman's sexual beauty is her only worth. In dealing with this misconstruction, some women, as in the case of Bercilak's wife in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and Alisoun in "The Miller's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales, use their sex appeal to deceive, lure, and, manipulate men. A small part of me shamefully admits that I respect, and even appreciate, the way in which a woman can outsmart a man by entertaining his sexist views; however, as a whole, I strongly feel that if a woman uses her sexuality for her own advancement, then she is contributing to her own misogyny.
The eponymous pseudonym Fantomina suggests derivation from a phantom, an apparition or an illusion; and the character is defined by her talent for deception. Immediately, Haywood describes Fantomina as “A Young Lady of distinguished Birth, Beauty, Wit, and Spirit” (713), yet she is soon marked out as different. Once, Fantomina is released from her context in the rural gentry and untethered from obligation, she moves from contempt to curiosity toward the London gentlemen. Active in pursuit of her sexual desire, Fantomina takes on traditionally male traits. Beauplaisir, on the other hand, serves as the object of desire, the passive recipient of her manipulation and deception. Fantomina’s sexual desire was motivated by nothing but pure curiosity: “[She had] at that Time no other Aim, than the Gratification of an innocent curiosity” (713). However, her male-like curiosity and assertiveness immediately backfired as Fantomina realized she could not remain desirable to the male without changing. She becomes the object of desire “upon being undone” (716) by Beauplaisir and her appeal is soon lost. To maintain his affection, Fantomina feels the need to play various other roles. In doing so, Haywood had reverted Fantomina back to her traditional
Women were often subjects of intense focus in ancient literary works. In Sarah Pomeroy’s introduction of her text Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, she writes, “Women pervade nearly every genre of classical literature, yet often the bias of the author distorts the information” (x). It is evident in literature that the social roles of women were more restricted than the roles of men. And since the majority of early literature was written by men, misogyny tends to taint much of it. The female characters are usually given negative traits of deception, temptation, selfishness, and seduction. Women were controlled, contained, and exploited. In early literature, women are seen as objects of possession, forces deadly to men, cunning, passive, shameful, and often less honorable than men. Literature reflects the societal beliefs and attitudes of an era and the consistency of these beliefs and attitudes toward women and the roles women play has endured through the centuries in literature. Women begin at a disadvantage according to these societal definitions. In a world run by competing men, women were viewed as property—prizes of contests, booty of battle and the more power men had over these possessions the more prestigious the man. When reading ancient literature one finds that women are often not only prizes, but they were responsible for luring or seducing men into damnation by using their feminine traits.
Many people think that boys in our culture today are brought up to define their identities through heroic individualism and competition, particularly through separation from home, friends, and family in an outdoors world of work and doing. Girls, on the other hand, are brought up to define their identities through connection, cooperation, self-sacrifice, domesticity, and community in an indoor world of love and caring. This view of different male and female roles can be seen throughout children’s literature. Treasure Island and The Secret Garden are two novels that are an excellent portrayal of the narrative pattern of “boy and girl” books.
Within the writings of Greek mythology women commonly display certain attributes that the Greek society associated with women or femininity back in the day. A common quality demonstrated amongst the women in Greek society, and more specifically in Greek mythology, is deception. Throughout the Greek literature discussed in class, women have commonly showed their deception and trickery in different ways and for numerous different reasons. The Odyssey, Theogony, and Homeric Hymm all displayed Greek women showing some form of deception within the stories and poems. These stories show various ways and reasons for Greek women being deceiving and disingenuous, reasons for which there needs to be more discussion.
“Girls wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it is okay to be a boy; for a girl it is like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading” (McEwan 55-56). Throughout the history of literature women have been viewed as inferior to men, but as time has progressed the idealistic views of how women perceive themselves has changed. In earlier literature women took the role of being the “housewife” or the household caretaker for the family while the men provided for the family. Women were hardly mentioned in the workforce and always held a spot under their husband’s wing. Women were viewed as a calm and caring character in many stories, poems, and novels in the early time period of literature. During the early time period of literature, women who opposed the common role were often times put to shame or viewed as rebels. As literature progresses through the decades and centuries, very little, but noticeable change begins to appear in perspective to the common role of women. Women were more often seen as a main character in a story setting as the literary period advanced. Around the nineteenth century women were beginning to break away from the social norms of society. Society had created a subservient role for women, which did not allow women to stand up for what they believe in. As the role of women in literature evolves, so does their views on the workforce environment and their own independence. Throughout the history of the world, British, and American literature, women have evolved to become more independent, self-reliant, and have learned to emphasize their self-worth.