Patriarchy In Oates's Stories

The prejudice that the author brings forward strongly is the notion of feminism. The author’s main purpose of writing this novel is to examine the role of women played around

In the first paragraph of the first chapter in the novel, Yonnondio by Tillie Olsen, the speaker is speaking in third-person. The narrator is someone who is able to get in the mind of the characters and knows what is going on at any point in time. This is illustrated in the first paragraph because the narrator talks about Mazie Holbrook, and uses words such as “she” and “her” to describe what is going on. 2.

Through characterization and vilification, Joyce Carol Oates emphasizes both the wickedness and vulnerability of her female characters. Although Oates’s writing is predominantly seen as feministic or through a feminist lens, Oates says she is "very sympathetic with most of the aims of feminism, but cannot write feminist literature because it is too narrow, too limited” (Chell). While Oates may not directly say she writes feministic literature, the topics she writes about include the recognition of the difficulties specific to a female writer according to Chell. In many of her novels, her writing can actually be seen as both feminist and antifeminist due to her use of diction and characterization.

In T. Coraghessan Boyle’s short story “The Hit Man”, underlying psychoanalytical themes are present that display an allusion to struggles in human life. The main themes present in this story are dysfunctional behavior, displacement, and an insecure sense of self. Readers see the main character, The Hit Man, go through his entire life struggling with insecurity and other dysfunctional behavior. During this timeline, his dysfunctional behavior represents common struggles and conflicts that occur in common day-to-day life. Relationships with his parents and classmates and also academic struggles seems to be the main contribution to the way this character is represented.

In the novel Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow tells a complex story where historical figures and fictional characters are woven together to make up the narrative. Evident themes include: race, class, and change and transformation. Throughout Ragtime, there are many characters who are influenced by certain people or encounters. Ragtime not only tells the individual struggles of each character throughout the novel but also shows how each character is affected by another. The different characters in Ragtime represent different responses to change - from encouraging change to responding to it, and from resisting change to accepting it.

Judith Butler’s Gender Troubles emphasizes gender as the constant repetition of non-existent ideals to uphold a masculine-dominant culture. Likewise, “Body Politics” highlights this belief within the overtly feminine qualities of city women. As a whole, the poem contrasts idealized feminine “city women” with a “real woman” who possesses both feminine and masculine qualities. The mother figure challenges both the gender binary and the patriarchal order by rejecting the feminine gender norms of the society. This feminist reading of the poem makes many valuable and probable claims, however the feminist approach contains some weaknesses.

This is a key point in understanding the narrator’s character and the overall meaning of the

Widely portrayed in literature, male dominance has restricted female freedom and progression, as women have been struggling to establish themselves as equal for ages. Male dominance suppresses ideals within society that respect a woman’s personal decisions and rights to her own body and mind. This struggle can be displayed through various scenarios. Being a major theme throughout “Hills Like White Elephants”, male dominance is an aspect also present in “The Unwanted Child” as they portray the struggle of oppression women undergo.

In Stephen Crane’s novel, Maggie Girl of the Streets, we see a girl’s development in a family drowned in alcoholism. As she evolves into a young woman, the abuse of alcohol in her parents’ lives presents itself throughout her downfall into prostitution and ultimately death. Critics typically read into Crane’s novel Maggie’s relationship with seduction as a part of her femininity, without discussing some major details. One of the missing pieces includes the exploration of the interconnectedness her family’s alcoholism has with her developing into a woman. The following essay will focus on this issue, applying Julia Kristeva’s theories on abjection with some thoughts on feminist theory regarding the male gaze from Bell Hooks.

There is a distinguished balance in the relationship of women and men and it is visible in coexisting and procreating beyond themselves. In making decisions that are influenced by mistakes sometimes, one person gets the short end of the stick. In Hills Like White Elephants, the feminine role is displayed by a woman named Jig, whose feelings and thoughts get pushed aside to cater to the main male character’s wants and needs. In this case the “operation,” that cannot even be called by it’s true name or else the objective to persuade would not be met and ruin their lives. Masculine and feminine attributes have been visible in literature from the beginning of language, with the response of love and forcing one’s self to put aside: “me” for “you.”

She has been brainwashed by the patriarchal society of her time to worship the man, her husband, and perform her duties and daily rituals as a means to please him. Welter outlines several characteristics that constitute the perfect or true woman; however, the most crucial and detrimental so-called “virtues” exhibited by Gilman`s the narrator are her submissiveness and domesticity. Although the artistic narrator clearly has her own desires to be free and write as she pleases, her desire to satisfy the patriarchal construct of the household by attending

My creative response to Toni Jordan’s novel Nine Days is an adaption intended to replicate the Key components of the original text. I employ the discourse specific to the time period whilst mirroring Jordan’s unique stylistic structure by Including key features like literary devices and character relationships. These features include extensive use of colloquialisms as well as key themes including women and reproductive rights, masculinity and global conflicts. Complementary of Jordan’s writing, I explore the idea of women and reproductive rights. I evaluate this concept by including the increased independence women had in the 1990s.

The narrator, an unnamed man is the most obvious protagonist of the story because he is the person telling the story and changes the most in that story. The narrators actions,

For Hirsch, feminist family romances are those novels where the development of female subjectivity and self-empowerment is determined by the continuation of the mother-daughter relationship, as opposed to the previous common rejection of the maternal figure theorised, among others, by Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. The bond between mother and daughter is re-evaluated and comes to be considered as an important site for female development, and a basis for a vision of gender difference and female specificity. In this type of narratives, women are represented as subjects capable of relating their own stories. However, despite the increased room for the subjective representations of consciousness, the maternal perspective is still silenced under the weight of the daughter 's emerging

One of the most significant works of feminist literary criticism, Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One`s Own”, explores both historical and contemporary literature written by women. Spending a day in the British Library, the narrator is disappointed that there are not enough books written by or even about women. Motivated by this lack of women’s literature and data about their lives, she decides to use her imagination and come up with her own characters and stories. After creating a tragic, but extraordinary gifted figure of Shakespeare’s sister and reflecting on the works of crucial 19th century women authors, the narrator moves on to the books by her contemporaries. So far, women were deprived of their own literary history, but now this heritage is starting to appear.