Misogyny In Rip Van Winkle And The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Woolf explicates the patriarchal system which evokes male dominance over women making them inferior in every aspect. She writes about some real-life encounters of gender discrimination she faced while exploring her thesis that for a woman to write fiction, she must have intellectual as well financial freedom. She makes use of logos, ethos, and pathos to make her argument more appealing to the readers. According to Aristotle, ethos is the most compelling factor out of three mentioned above because it appeals to one’s ethics, morals, and values. Therefore it is important for a writer to establish credibility early in the text.

In an age of double standards, people try to pick out everything and anything that can be offending. The offense in this particular situation is misogyny. In plenty of Washington Irving’s books, the message portrayed about women is usually negative. The main women are usually abusive, hateful, as well as uncooperative. Though plenty of people in today’s society view Irving as a misogynist, I do not.

In Washington Irving’s short stories, he shows many ways of criticizing feminism. This could be due to the way he was raised or even his relationships with women. In the short stories The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle and The Devil and Tom Walker, Washington Irvin shows his critiques of feminism and how it could be improved. In the short story, The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irvin comments on feminism in many ways.

Gilman investigated what went on in the progressive era within gender inequality. After gathering evidence of how women were treated in their marriage, she wrote her book “The Yellow Wallpaper” to educate readers on this obnoxious idea of separate spheres ideology, where the husband is to control, and the wife is to obey by his rules. In her book, she wrote a fantasy of a single woman from the progressive era. By using just a single woman she was able to explain in detail how all women were treated because that one woman from Gilman’s fantasy represented many women from that time period. When looking back at the book that Gilman wrote and re examining the quote, “Investigate, educate, legislate”, it seems blatantly obvious that Gilman was a muckraker.

Women had no rights when it came to working and since they didn’t have rights not many women got employed. Also, the jobs that were available were not for women and if mill owners decided to hire women they would go and hire immigrant women instead. The reason they would hire these immigrant women was because they accepted any amount of money so the owners of the mill would make more profit than they would if they paid American women to work for them. However, if a women did get a job they would normally get paid less than men did since they weren’t seen as equal to them and the conditions were usually not the best. Since there were no laws against discrimination in the 1800’s there was nothing an American women could do to demand the equality they deserved in the workforce.

Women in the 1600s to the 1800s were very harshly treated. They were seen as objects rather than people. They were stay-at-home women because people didn’t trust them to hold jobs. They were seen as little or weak. Women living in this time period had to have their fathers choose their husbands.

Hannah Webster Foster formulates a tale that, on the surface, appears as a novel warning women against seduction, a common theme of the times. Marriage was seen as a necessity for women who desired financial stability and status, and being sexually seduced by a man would not provide a woman with these needs. Thus, the warnings against seduction and romanization of marriage were rampant. Upon further examination however, The Coquette has strong feminist undertones calling women towards the American ideal of freedom. This new nation claimed to be built upon the rock of freedom, while simultaneously oppressing women.

The Unnamed Woman Up until the 1900’s woman had few rights, thus they relied heavily on men. Women could not vote, they could not own their own property, and very few worked. Women’s jobs were solely to care for children and take care of the home. Women during this time, typically accepted their roles in society and the economy ( “Progressive Era to New Era, 1900-1909”).

Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, seeks to portray the reality hidden beneath the social exterior of the ‘happy American Family’ of the 1950s, and aims to expose the dysfunctional relationships, often concealed behind an outwardly happy marriage. Albee has created a plot where his characters are immersed in peeling the veneers of pretension off one another and where truth and illusion are engaged in a continuous battle. The eponymous jingle, which is repeated many times in the play, is a parody of a children’s ditty and seeks to convey the fear associated with confronting the difference between illusion and reality. The name of the modernist author “Virginia Woolf” replaces the original reference to the big bad wolf as Albee wishes to find out “who’s afraid of living life without illusions” (Flanagan). Being an Absurdist, Albee believed that illusions often generate a false content for a person’s life and hence, should be abandoned ("Edward Albee: Who 's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?").

This “Utopian” society seems to still struggle with gender equality. Huxley demonstrates several instances throughout the novel in which women are portrayed as sexual objects, and even deemed as the bad ones. Brave New World begins with a class of students who are being toured around by the director of the facility. Much like that classroom and most top positions it appears that women are not as valued as men.

In Rip Van Winkle, in regards to the Nature of Marriage, I believe Irving exhibits sexism in many ways, perhaps without meaning to. For example, since the perspective and protagonist is male, the reader is then expected to adopt a position of hostility or indifference towards the main female in the story. This story is just one example in American Literature of how women are often portrayed through misogyny. It can be inferred that this story expresses the inherent male desire to escape from confrontation and responsibilities that one must handle when dealing with sex and marriage, among various other types of relationships. While this desire is easily applicable to both men and women, this desire is predominantly made male.

In Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” she states secondary sources she reads about woman are “worthless”. The secondary sources consist of books about women, written by men. This means the sources are interpretations of primary resources. Primary sources comprise of authentic narrative concerning an incident. So the secondary sources Virginia Woolf was reading were biased.

Unfortunately we still have some gender inequality issues almost as common as the brave new world society. As I said, in the novel there wasn’t superiors who were women and in my society it isn’t any different, we have yet to experience a women becoming a president. In both of our societies we are looked as sex objects not for the same reason but they both lead to it; My society’s reason is how women are often looked at as sex objects because of the attire and just even the fact that much as the men do. Women aren’t viewed as highly and as great as the men do in both

How does Henrik Ibsen use characterisation to criticise the patriarchal society of the time? How does Henrik Ibsen use the progressive characterisation of Nora to criticise the patriarchal society of the time? Intro Henrik Ibsen’s

1. Introduction According to Louis Rubin, Jr., Gone with the Wind is “the best-selling popular historical novel ever published in America” (81). The book “received the annual award of the American Booksellers Association (now the American Book Award) and the Pulitzer Prize” (Jones “Tomorrow” 315). Despite these awards and a wide appreciation among its reading audience, the novel has not won considerable popularity among literary critics (Adams 61; Burt 577).