Introduction Giovanni Boccaccio’s medieval work of art The Decameron highlights both the righteous and sinful ways of humans, through the telling of short stories. Boccaccio’s tales cover a wide array of topics, including adultery, love, devotion, trickery, and attributes of selfish and selfless people. Many...
According to Jack Halberstam in his book The Queer Art of Failure, “the queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and...
Although Hannah Webster Foster names her book The Coquette, there is ambiguity in who the true coquette of the story is. Eliza Wharton, named the coquette by Foster and the other characters of the story, does not follow the rules of coquetry. Instead it is...
George Bernard Shaw exemplifies values of the “new woman” and “superhero” through the character of Vivie Warren, in the play Mrs. Warren’s Profession, in order to promote individualism and critical thinking amongst females. Even the male characters like Sir George Crofts and Frank Gardener are...
The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed significant strides in the upheaval of gender bias and patriarchal standards. Women gained many more liberties, such as with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, and the first wave of feminism was at its golden age. However, gender...
In the early twentieth century, many writers began to give a more complex, nuanced, and realistic portrayal of the issues that surround gender. Virginia Woolf, often heralded as one of the most important voices in feminist literature, wrote about this concept in a way that,...
“The term gender is commonly used to refer to the psychological, cultural, and social characteristics that distinguish the sexes” . From the idea of gender such notions as gender bias and stereotyping have developed. Stereotypes have lead society to believe that a male or female...
Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1948) is a dynamic film that attempts to reconstruct a post-war economy by teaching lessons about the importance of gender roles and a balanced family to the men and women in the theaters. Mildred Pierce illuminates “the historical need to reconstruct...
As its title suggests, “M. Butterfly” is essentially a play about metamorphosis. It is, firstly, the metamorphosis of Giacomo Puccini’s famous opera “Madame Butterfly” into a modern-day geopolitical argument for cultural understanding. Author David Henry Hwang shows, through a highly implausible love affair between a...
Although most men and women recognize how traditional gender roles dictate their actions in hopes of being accepted into society, very few can claim that they have been completely exiled from their community because they appear too “masculine” or vice-versa. In Light in August, the...
Written at a time where the conventions of marriage were being challenged and transformed, Le Bel Inconnu charts a tale of romance and self-discovery ultimately ending in the abandonment of true love and instead acceptance of a royally approved marriage. Given the relative power of...
The social constructs of gender are manifested through the forced institution of marriage in Kate Chopin’s “La Belle Zorade” and “The Story of an Hour.” The protagonists in each story experience suppressed emotions in response to the social institution of marriage, which limits their female...
“A sex symbol’s currency lies in her youth, her curves, in the suggestion that a sexual encounter lurks around the next corner.” (Sharon Krum, The Guardian) The power struggle between genders in society is something that can be seen every day, particularly in the media....
Gender roles and relationships in Islamic societies are best understood through historical and religious context. This is because social norms and customs that regulate the behaviours of Muslim men and women are rooted in sacred texts and pivotal events, that date back to the formative...
The emergent evolution in the traits of human personality, both physically and psychologically created a new and unique dimension to extend the nebulous boundaries of exploration. While grouting the breaches that occurred during the understanding of the intricacies of man as a social animal, several...
In Ali Smith’s “Free Love” while traveling abroad in Amsterdam, a teenage girl is able to explore something she has never been capable of before, her sexual orientation. Whereas, in Ernest Hemingway’s “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”, to society Cornelia and Hubert seem to be happily...
Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies is a book of philosophical and logical refutations and arguments. It is a direct response to several writings in which the male authors make claims against women’s purity. These books, according to de Pizan, slander...
The corruption of innocence and the gaining of experience are common aspects of Carter’s stories in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, which are applied to many themes such as sexuality in The Tiger’s Bride and The Bloody Chamber, self-awareness in Wolf-Alice and horror in the collection’s namesake....
Most literary representations of the sexes include implicit and binary differences between women and men. Women are typically written as pure archetypes who strive to find constancy in their relationships. In contrast, men as seen as libertines who seek multiplicity, novelty, and otherwise rakish desires....