Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale presents a disturbing future dystopia in which all power is stripped from women and left in a male-dominated power structure. Throughout the novel, betrayal remains the over-arching theme, seen in men’s betrayal of women as well as the reason behind...
First rule of Fight Club: “You do not talk about Fight Club. Second rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club” (Fight Club, 1999). David Fincher has directed many brilliant movies in his career, including Seven, Fight Club, and most recently, Zodiac....
Freedom is an interesting concept, especially in the context of relationships and marriages. No one wants to feel as though they are being controlled or restricted by another, but in most cases with time, marriages begin to have a constraining effect. Additionally, there are certain...
The differences between men and women have been distinguished since the beginning of time. Though traditional gender roles by circumstance often portray the niche best exuded by a gender, it is undeniable that the emblematic characteristics accredited to a specific sex are often false. For...
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, there is an undeniable chemistry between the two main characters, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. While some may see this relationship as just a strong friendship, there is evidence to believe that Nick felt something more than...
In the novel The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, the domination of women is a common theme that is manifested by each of the generation in the novel. Roy writes about the fraught social issues that plague Indian society; she wrote The God...
“Does this dress make me look fat?” It’s a common conception; women tell each other to wear black because the contrast is slimming. Politicians run attack ads on components to make themselves look better in comparison. The literary technique of contrast was evidently not unknown...
In many cultures, including Dominican culture, rigid and binary gender roles have shaped and reinforced the development of a mostly patriarchal society. Indeed, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao presents the traditional gender expectations of males and females in the Dominican Republic....
One poignant example of the misperceptions that women face in a male-dominated society is presented in the novel Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. The story takes place in the Dust Bowl era, when rough economic times made it hard to find work; two...
Come you spirit, Made-to-order essay as fast as you need it Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences + experts online Get my essay That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here. –Lady Macbeth More so than any other Shakespearean play, Macbeth...
Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a male dominated play. Most of the noticeable characters in Macbeth are male, including Macbeth, Macduff, Banquo, King Duncan, and Malcolm. Despite the lack of female power by numbers, Lady Macbeth proves to be a formidable force of influence. She accomplishes this...
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar opens with the concurrent celebrations of Caesar’s defeat of Pompey and the annual fertility festival of Lupercal. The coupling of the two historically separate events each celebrating distinct gender roles dramatically highlights the importance of gender characterization. Rome’s patriarchal society demands a...
In Harriet Jacobs’ historically renowned narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the story of Linda Brent’s struggles as a slave woman help to shed light on the unrealistic standards placed on women during the nineteenth century. As defined by Barbara Welter, the...
Beyond the brutalities that all slaves endured, females suffered the additional anguish of sexual exploitation and the deprivation of motherhood. In “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Harriet Jacobs focuses on racial subjugation but also gives voice to a different kind of captivity...
James Baldwin and Richard Wright focus most of their works on the suffering of blacks in opposition to the overwhelming and repressive nature of racism that contorts the very existence of black bodies, specifically men. Wright and Baldwin assert that there are various approaches to...
A Streetcar Named Desire is at its surface, an undoubtedly heterosexual play. Allan Grey, its unseen gay character, makes homosexuality a seemingly marginal topic within the play. But a deeper reading of the text suggests the opposite. Tennessee Williams uses heterosexual characters as surrogates to...
Through a focus upon gender, both Elia Kazan’s film of Tennessee Williams’ original play, A Streetcar Named Desire (Warner Bros, 1951) and Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (Vintage, 1986) effectively manage to mirror the concerns of both time and place. Despite differing contextual influences,...
Power is the underlying current that runs through both Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, a 17th century revenge tragedy, and Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, a 20th Century modern domestic tragedy. Both plays offer stark representations of power’s tendency to corrupt, a corruption that often...
Throughout scenes 1 and 2 of A Streetcar Named Desire, playwright Tennessee Williams presents Stanley as extremely powerful and authoritative through the use of dialogue as well as stage directions. The audience immediately learns how strong Stanley is in a physical sense; however, we soon...