Portrayal of Women in James Joyce's Ulysses
The novel, "Ulysses", by James Joyce shows the reader hour by hour a single day in the life of one man. But this epic which specifically deals with Leopold Bloom and has reference to Stephen Dedalus, holds so much more appendage to other areas of life. One, is the portrayal of women in Ulysses. A common speculation is that men seem to have a more dominating status over women. However, in Ulysses that theory dwindles due to the women who play significant roles in the story. Although the women in the novel all use various tactics to entice the men to succumb and cower to them, it all ends up that the men do heed to the qualifying factors.
The first woman of purpose that we become aware of is Stephen Dedalus's mother. Even though she is dead, her presence is accounted for in Stephen's night and day dreams. His refusal to pray at her bedside while she was dying triggered an immense amount of guilt that he cannot shake. His undeniable brooding over her was shown when he remembered the song by W.B. Yeats, " and no more…the brazen cars." In the annotated text it claims that, "The song, accompanied by a harp, is sung to comfort the countess, who has sold her soul to the powers of the darkness that her people might have food." That song is important because he is trying to lift the blame from his heart by reaching out for forgiveness. The book then tells of a "bowl with bitter waters." That bowl implies what is told in "Portrait of a Young Man", which is that his mother was an adulteress, and that recollection was bothering him. He even goes as far to say aloud, "No mother, let me be and let me live." It seems that he wants to escape her clutches, yet is clinging...
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... get away with acting disdainful and speaking to Bloom with a harsh tongue, but he does not leave her. In fact, he does cower, and takes her, illicit affairs and all.
The men in "Ulysses" are viewed as the warriors, or bread-winners, yet they are only characterized as that due to the women in the novel. Many of the women are able to be looked upon as the "hierarchy" in a sense because of the way the people around them reacted. It is said that whenever there is an action, there is a reaction. As cliché as that may be, the women were the ones that created the "action" and the men rebutted with the "reaction". Despite the social conventions that most of us are familiar with pertaining to men and women, "Ulysses", can surely counteract with notable arguments.
Works Cited
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Random House, 1986.
Water Resources Group, D. o. E. a. N. R., 2013. fact sheet 1. Whats What About Salinity and the River Murray, pp. 1-4.
The direct relationship in the artistic practices and methodologies of Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton played a role in facilitating new ways of appreciating and developing movement.
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Bytwerk, Randall. "On the German People and Its Territory." Calvin German Propaganda Archive. Calvin College, n.d. Web. 8 Apr. 2014.
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Research projects in down syndrome. (2014). Retrieved January 26, 2014, from Center for Mind and Brain website: http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu/labs/Rivera/research-areas/down-syndrome
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Throughout American Literature, women have been depicted in many different ways. The portrayal of women in American Literature is often influenced by an author's personal experience or a frequent societal stereotype of women and their position. Often times, male authors interpret society’s views of women in a completely different nature than a female author would. While F. Scott Fitzgerald may represent his main female character as a victim in the 1920’s, Zora Neale Hurston portrays hers as a strong, free-spirited, and independent woman only a decade later in the 1930’s.
Women roles have changed drastically in the last 50 to 80 years, women no longer have to completely conform to society’s gender roles and now enjoy the idea of being individuals. Along with the evolution of women roles in society, women presence and acceptance have drastically grown in modern literature. In early literature it was common to see women roles as simply caretakers, wives or as background; women roles and ideas were nearly non-existent and was rather seen than heard. The belief that women were more involved in the raising of children and taking care of the household was a great theme in many early literatures; women did not get much credit for being apart of the frontier and expansion of many of the nations success until much later.
Challenging gender roles has been an arduous task. As Virginia Woolf notes, “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” The structure of history, particularly that of war, has placed women as useless in comparison to men and as having no purpose beyond pleasing their partner. Euripides, for example, places women in the aftermath of the Trojan War as helpless in the face of the victors. Moreover, Macawen’s adaptation of the tragedy Trojan Women and Evans’ Trojan Barbie both discuss the docile attitude of women after a period of war. Aristotle signals diction and plot, two of the six parts of tragedy, which interprets events through the language and the actions that take place. Through the use of diction and plot, both Macewen and Trojan Women and Trojan Barbie, both Macawen and Evans challenge gender roles through the character of Helen, shows she will do whatever it takes to survive an atmosphere of male dictated war.
All throughout the early part of history women were portrayed as the inferior sex, because at that point in time, women were seen as beings only born to have children. Men didn’t think that women were capable of being anything other than a typical housewife. It was unthinkable that women would actually need an education, let alone earn a living, or become a leader. These ideas are revealed all throughout classical literature. Rarely was a woman seen as doing anything but being dominated by males in some form, whether she was a man’s submissive devoted wife, a sexual object, or a woman being punished for wanting her freedom. We finally begin to see women trying to break free from these traditional expectations and barriers through the lives of Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, John’s wife in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Louise Mallard in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, and Songlian in Raise the Red Lantern by Su Tong.