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Gender roles in Literature
Gender issues in literature
Gender issues in literature
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The Feather Pillow written by Horacio Quiroga is a very touching story. The story contains a female who seems to be in love with her husband. The female seemed to not feel conformtable at home though, she mentioned that her husband gives her chills. She narrates the story as if he husband controls her life and she has no freedom. The plot is a women is in love but she questions it due to the fact that she feels like she has no freedom. The conflict is resolved because the man takes care of her se is sick to prove his love. The Main character ends up sick and her husband hass to take care of her. The settin conveys the inside of a home in a bedroom on death bed. Universal themes displayed are love when a husband does everything he can to take
“Story of an Hour”, written by Kate Chopin presents a woman of the nineteenth century who is held back by societal constraints. The character, Louise Mallard, is left to believe that her husband has passed away. She quickly falls into a whirlwind of emotions as she sinks into her chair. Soon a sense of freedom overwhelms her body as she looks through the window of opportunity and times to come. She watches the world around her home run free as nature runs its course. Louise watches the blue sky as a rush of “monstrous joy” shoots through her veins (Chopin). She experiences a new sense of freedom. Although she sometimes loved her husband, his “death” breaks the chain that keeps her from experiencing a truly free life. Thoughts over times to
Robert Olen Butler is an author born in Granite City, Illinois who won a Pulitzer Prize. In writing this short story, “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot”, Robert Olen Butler writes about a character whose life revolves around his wife and is a compulsively jealous husband. In this story, the main character was a very jealous husband who dies because of the way he decided to deal with his wife’s cheating ways by climbing a tree and falling to his death, only to come back in life as a parrot and still have very strong feeling for his wife. The jealousy and suspicion that took over his human life has now taken over to his life as a parrot. The tone of the story is frustration and jealousy at which you can tell the tone from the very start when the parrot becomes very observant and jealous of the guy at his wife's shoulder. His feathers became slick flat when the man came around.
At the beginning of the story, the protagonist, Cleofilas, had an illusion that all romances are like the ones she has seen on television. However, she soon realizes that her relationship with Juan Pedro was nothing like what she had dreamed it would be. Cisneros wants to emphasize the idea that when men bring home the primary source of income in the family, they feel they have power over their wives. Cisneros uses Juan Pedro in the story to portray this idea. For instance, Cleofilas often tells herself that if she had any brains in her, she would realize that Juan Pedro wakes up before the rooster to earn his living to pay for the food in her belly and a roof over her head (Cisneros, 1991, p.249). Cisneros wants to make a point that when men feel that they have power over their wives, women begin to feel a sense of low self-worth.
Throughout history, the story of womankind has evolved from struggles to achievements, while some aspects of the lives of women have never changed. Poet Dorianne Laux writes about the female condition, and women’s desire to be married and to have a home and children. She also seems to identify through her poetry with the idea that women tend to idealize the concept of marriage and settling down and she uses her poetry to reach out to the reader who may have similar idyllic views of marriage or the married lifestyle. Though Dorianne Laux’s poem “Bird” reads very simply, it is actually a metaphor for an aspect of this female condition.
In “The Yellow Wall-paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the unnamed female protagonist is going through a rough time in her life. (For now on, this paper will refer to this unnamed character as the “the narrator in ‘Wall-paper,’” short for “The Yellow Wall-paper. The narrator is confined to room to a room with strange wall-paper. This odd wall-paper seems to symbolize the complexity and confusion in her life. In “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, the protagonist, Mrs. Mallard must also deal with conflict as she must deal with the death of her spouse. At first there is grief, but then there is the recognition that she will be free. The institute of marriage ties the two heroines of these two short stories together. Like typical young women of the late 19th century, they were married, and during the course of their lives, they were expected to stay married. Unlike today where divorce is commonplace, marriage was a very holy bond and divorce was taboo. This tight bond of marriage caused tension in these two characters.
Marriage is an important theme in the stories Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin. When someone hears the word “marriage”, he thinks of love and protection, but Hurston and Chopin see that differently. According to them, women are trapped in their marriage and they don’t know how to get out of it, so they use language devices to prove their points. Chopin uses personification to show Mrs. Mallard's attitudes towards her husband's death. Louise is mournful in her room alone and she is giving a description of the nature as a scene of her enjoying “the new spring life” and “the delicious breath of rain was in the air” (Chopin1).
Kate Chopin’s “The Story of the Hour” and Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” are viewed from a woman’s perspective in the nineteenth century. They show the issues on how they are confined to the house. That they are to be stay at home wives and let the husband earn the household income. These stories are both written by American women and how their marriage was brought about. Their husbands were very controlling and treated them more like children instead of their wives. In the nineteenth century their behavior was considered normal at the time. In “The Story of the Hour” and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” both women explore their issues on wanting to be free from the control of their husband’s.
In “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Story of an Hour”, the woman in each story imprisons in the domestic sphere. In “Hills Like White Elephants”, the woman in this story conflicts between keeping the baby or getting abortion although the relationship with her boyfriend would not improve as he said. In “The Story of an Hour”, even though Louise Mallard, an intelligent, independent woman understands that she should grieve for Brently, her husband and worry for her future, she cannot help herself from rejoice at her newfound freedom. The author of this story, Kate Chopin suggests that even with a happy marriage, the loss of freedom and the restraint are the results that cannot be avoid.
In the short story, “The Story of an Hour,” author Kate Chopin presents the character of Mrs. Louis Mallard. She is an unhappy woman trapped in her discontented marriage. Unable to assert herself or extricate herself from the relationship, she endures it. The news of the presumed death of her husband comes as a great relief to her, and for a brief moment she experiences the joys of a liberated life from the repressed relationship with her husband. The relief, however, is short lived. The shock of seeing him alive is too much for her bear and she dies. The meaning of life and death take on opposite meaning for Mrs. Mallard in her marriage because she lacked the courage to stand up for herself.
The narrator spends her young childhood drunk with love for her mother. She happily sleeps late on school holidays, follows her mother ar...
...-like symbols are fading--“black once but faded now to that fierce muted metallic green of old peacock feathers”--revealing the length and magnitude of the struggle (142). The contrast is apparent by the mention of the peacock feathers, which in their natural state are lively and radiant. There is an inability for the woman to reconcile with the man because “the indomitable woman-blood ignores the man’s world in which the blood kinsman shows the coverage or cowardice, the folly or lust or fear, for which his fellows praise or crucify him” (123). One must follow the male characteristics to the roots of their southern heritage to acknowledge the full tragic beauty of the female.
The short story provides two different perspectives by one person, which makes this story unique. One perspective is from the husband when he is a human being and the other perspective is from the husband when he is in the form of a parrot. The human being perspective is blinded by jealousy and refuses to communicate. The parrot perspective is more open to many of the things his wife does and why she does those things. The parrot perspective also differs from the human perspective because instead of refusing to communicate, the parrot is unable to communicate clearly due to its obvious shortcomings of being a
The bleak tone of this story takes a particularly sad and disturbing tinge when the wife illustrates a scene from early on in her marriage where she tries to get her husband to satisfy her desire and provide her with mutual satisfaction, only to have him rebuke and reprimand her. In fact, the husband responds in such a particularly brusque and hysterical manner that the reader can see how traumatized the wife would have been at ...
The Tomb written by Guy de Maupassant is a novel that explains the love a young man known as Courbataille has for his mistress and how he’s in sudden distress after she passes away from pneumonia. Courbataille confesses to the judge in a court room the love he has for his late mistress and how he cannot fathom the thought of not being able to see her ever again. The tomb can be comparable to the horror movie The Orphanage. In the horror film the Orphanage a family lives in an old orphanage home that the mother used to live in. Laura grew up in an orphanage where she later on wanted to raise her adopted Simón who is ill and goes missing for a couple months and is later on found dead.
In the story this young mother is pictured as a careless and weak woman who barely pays attention to her children and the people who take most part of the mother’s responsibility is everybody else in the house. In the story the two boys realize that their mother is different from other mothers because she does not act like the rest of their friend’s mothers who care about their children. The problem keeps escalating because the mother’s parents keep putting pressure on her so that she can dedicate more time to her children. I noticed that things were a little different when she invited her boyfriend to the house to have dinner with her children, a true family moment in my opinion if you ask me. At this point I come to the realization that she wants to have a family like she once did. The young mother then enters a great depression after Max and her end the relationship and that drives her to take her life