Why were women looked so far down upon by men within the revenge tragedies discussed in class? Was this simply a theme or was this reality? During the Renaissance Era men looked at women as if they were threats. Men were very dominant in society and women did not hold any political positions, unless they were royal. However even a royal woman did not have much to say next to a man. Women’s good looks and sexuality made men feel threatened and in turn they portrayed women as either, angelic or promiscuous. ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and The Spanish Tragedy have the typical revenger tragedy plot where women are looked at as either angelic or promiscuous in which men look down upon them without having a say.
Laurie A. Finke’s, Painting Women: Images of Femininity in Jacobean Tragedy, uses the term “painting women” to describe the way women were dolled up and treated during the Jacobean Era. Finke describes women as only having two roles; a wife or a whore. In this excerpt it describes how men were ultimately scared of the women and the power women could gain through their beauty and through their promiscuity. Matthew R. Martin’s, The Raw and Cooked in Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore, mainly discusses the use of the heart on Giovanni’s dagger, which happens to be his sister Annabella’s. Martin discusses how the use of the heart is using the female body as way to describe the disgrace of women, how men have all the power, and that all the problems that men have are directly related to women. Roxanne Grimmett’s, ‘By Heaven and Hell: Re- evaluating representation of woman and the angle/ whore dichotomy in Renaissance Revenge Tragedy, discusses the male dominance of this time period, how females were not allowed to have any kind of voice...
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...ould rule over men, and that is why the writers of the Renaissance and Jacobean Tragedies viewed the women as under the dominance of men and used their bodies as ways to plot revenge against other characters.
Works Cited
Finke, Laura. Theatre Journal, Vol. 36, No. 3, Renaissance Re-Vision (Oct., 1994), pp. 356- 370
Ford, John. ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Other Plays, ed. Marion Lomanx. Oxford,1995.Print.
Grimmett, Roxanne. “’By Heaven and Hell’: re-evaluation representations of women and the angel/ whore dichotomy in Renaissance Tragedy.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 6.3 (2005): 31+. Academic One File. Web. 18 Apr.2014.
Smith, Emma. Five Revenge Tragedies. London; Penguin Classics, 2012. Print.
Martin, Mathew R. “The Raw and the Cooked in Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore” Early Theater 15.2 (2012): 131+. Academic OneFile. Web. 14 Apr. 2014
Pellegrini, Ann. “The Plays of Paula Vogel.” A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Ed. David Krasner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 473-84.
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.
The Manipulation of Gender Roles in Shakespeare’s Othello. Of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, the story of the rise and fall of the Moor of Venice arguably elicits the most intensely personal and emotional responses from its English-speaking audiences over the centuries. Treating the subject of personal human relationships, the tragedy, which should have been a love story, speaks to both reading and viewing audiences by exploring the archetypal dramatic values of love and betrayal. The final source of the tragic action in Shakespeare’s
Butler, Judith. Ed. Case, Sue-Ellen. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution." Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
The subjugation of women is a key theme across my three chosen texts, Othello, The Great Gatsby and Wuthering Heights, that is presented both subtly and obviously through forms of physical, sexual and mental denegation. As a subtler example of subjugation, each woman is ultimately controlled and manipulated by a male figure, whether it be through Othello’s suppression of Desdemona upon believing she is unfaithful, Heathcliff’s domination over Isabella or Tom Buchanan’s economic control of Daisy via his financial stability within a class defined society. This confirms Evelyn Cunningham’s perception that, “Women are the only oppressed group in our society that lives in intimate association with their oppressors”, notably in the way that women’s roles are dictated and restricted by the domineering, patriarchal men in their lives, however there are still aspects of female rebellion in each of the texts.
In Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice, there are several strong, predominate female characters. Emilia, Desdemona, and Bianca have to defend themselves from the vicious men in the play. However, despite being victimized by the domineering men, their individual strengths set them apart from their abusers.
Pitt, Angela. “Women in Shakespeare’s Tragedies.” Readings on The Tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Reprint from Shakespeare’s Women. N.p.: n.p., 1981.
Women have always been the backbone of human civilization, whether it be in ancient times or even in the modern era. However, they are oppressed and not given the same fundamental, human rights as men, like access to education, leaving this discrimination and sexism to span over prolonged periods of time. Specifically, sexism is seen during the Elizabethan Era of history when William Shakespeare writes his prominent dramatic piece, Macbeth. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, the prevalent theme of sexism is depicted in the play when Lady Macbeth, a character of strength and ambition, is shown as manipulative and inevitably weak when Shakespeare portrays her eventual downfall and suicide. Throughout the world today, the many different forms of sexism
In William Shakespeare’s tragic play Othello there are numerous instances of obvious sexism aimed at the three women in the drama -- Desdemona, Emilia and Bianca – and aimed at womankind generally. Let us delve into this subject in this paper.
In her work, “This that you call Love”: Sexual and Social Tragedy in Othello, Gayle Greene (2004) argues that the tragedy occurs from adherence to patriarchal rules and stereotypes (Greene 655-659). According to Gary Greene, the tragedy is caused by “men’s misunderstandings of women and women’s inability to protect themselves from society’s conception of them” (666). In the ...
Statement of intent: The role of women in William Shakespeare’s play Othello is portrayed through the behaviors and actions of Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca. William Shakespeare integrates his Elizabethan society to create the patriarchal Venetian society in the play. Women in his society were seen as inferior to the men. The three women play a significant role in different social stratification. How are women submissive, possessions, bold, and degraded to sex objects and whores? How have they displayed unconventional acts and boldness?
The attitude towards women, their treatment and their rights, underwent many changes during the Renaissance. During feudal times women were given more liberties and enjoyed freedoms. They could own land and had many of the rights men had. However, this period where so many great changes had been made in the church, in literature, and in all other artistic areas, women took a big step backward in their fight for equality.
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.
...f the Courtier during the Renaissance, there was no real societal consequence for husbands that mistreated their wives. On the contrary, women were regarded as the property of their men and thus, could be treated in anyway the husband saw fit. The concept of equality among both of the sexes is one that truly emerged only at the start of the 20th century. Change in the society's view of women only came about when women began to speak out against their mistreatment and inferiority.
Treatment of women has evolved much since Elizabethan England. As a preface to the dissection of The Tempest – in particular, the character of Miranda, Shakespeare’s role for women as a whole must be addressed. According to Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz’s introduction of Woman’s Part, “patriarchal order takes different forms and is portrayed with varying degrees of emphasis throughout the Shakespearean canon” (5). In the midst of this patriarchy, where do women stand? What social assumptions guided the pen of the great English poet and playwright as he wrote The Tempest? Lenz discusses that “In the comedies women are most often nurturing and powerful; as their values educate the men, mutuality between the sexes may be achieved” (6). However, “in tragedy…their roles are at once more varied, more constricted, and more precarious…they are condemned for acting, accused of being deceitful even when they are not” (6). Why the canyon between the two? How does Shakespeare reconcile women in what The Norton Shakespeare terms a romance play?