A Quick Glance Into Joan Didion 's Life

“Marrying Absurd” is a short essay describing Las Vegas marriages on the strip. I feel as if Joan Didion ended the essay the way she did because she simply does not like actions that occur in Clark County, Nevada. Didion constantly talks about the weddings in such negative ways, such as, “one bride lent her veil to six others” and “I got it down from five to three minutes.” When reading the text, I noticed that Didion seems to be stating facts, but in a joking manner. Sometimes it sounds like she is discussing Las Vegas strip weddings as if she is above everyone else. When Didion stated “In Las Vegas I watched a bride in an orange mini dress and masses of flame colored hair stumble from the strip chapel on the arm of her bridegroom,” it makes

In her essay “The Importance of Work,” from The Feminine Mystique published in 1963, Betty Friedan confronts American women’s search for identity. Throughout the novel, Betty Friedan broke new ground by seeking the idea of women discovering personal fulfillment away from their original roles. She ponders on the idea of the Feminine Mystique as the cause for the majority of women during that time period to feel confined by their occupations around the house, restricting them from discovering who they are as women. Friedan’s novel is well known for creating a different kind of feminism and rousing various women across the nation.

There are many female writers, some known better than other. Female writes most of the time focused their stories in experiences or personal point of view on what is going on around them. Other women write fiction of unusual worlds and character that people can relate to with the struggle or experiences. Margaret Atwood the “Canadian nationalist poetess is a prominebt figure concerned with the need for a new language to explore relations between subjects and society“ (Omid, Pyeaam 1). Atwood wrote her first novel called, “The Edible Woman”; this first novel categorized her as feminist, based on the main character of a strong woman. In an interview with Emma Brockes, Atwood affirms, "First of all, what is feminism? Second, which branch of

It is important to note Joan Didion’s background because it helps the reader understand that “On Morality” consists of ideas that she commonly includes in each of her

Strong-willed, intelligent, and motivated are only some of the words we can use to describe Betty Friedan. Credited as being the mother of the second wave of feminism, Friedan was an influential women’s right activist during the twentieth century but her legacy has continued to strive well into the twenty-first century. Friedan is the author of a variety of books including The Feminine Mystique, which became a phenomenon because of its powerful message to women for self-exploration outside their traditional roles. This book helped to define Friedan’s role in the fight for women empowerment and equality. It evoked emotions in many women who agreed that they did not want to fulfil traditional roles, creating an atmosphere of change. She was also the cofounder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), serving as its first president and also helped to create the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws and the National Women’s Political Caucus. With these organizations, Friedan became the face of the women’s movement and encouraged women to take a stand against the pathological idealization of women by creating a sense of community

While it's a rather misleading title, the essay “On Keeping a Notebook” by Joan Didion doesn’t talk about how to keep a notebook, but rather why you should. She expresses her belief that a notebook is: “...something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker (Didion, 87)”. Which, in other words, means a notebook’s contents are information, often small “bits”, that would only make sense, or have meaning, to the person who wrote it.

While reading Joan Didion’s essay “On Going Home” one may be reminded of a sense of home and family. In this essay Didion recreates the feeling one gets when one visits a place from the past or while reminiscing about fond memories. This memory is marked by the reflective thought about the ability to be able to pass this same sense on to another. Didion’s “On Going Home” is like a flood of warm memories leaving you with a single reflective thought.

In Joan Didion’s “Good-Bye to All That”, Didion wrote about a woman’s process of pursuing her dream which was living in New York. Throughout the passage, Didion used many rhetorical devices to establish the storyline, which enhanced the reader’s understanding of the situations. She used many metaphors to represent the reality of the character’s life and what she had hope for. She had also foreshadowed some of the objects in the story that represented something bigger.

Analyzing the ways in which a piece of literature includes feminist ideologies can bring out the potential messages that the creators of these productions were attempting to portray, while allowing the reader to critique the literature from a feminist perspective.

Writer Joan Didion in her essay “On Self-Respect” describes the value of self-respect in regards to her own perspective of what it means. Didion’s purpose for this explanatory essay is to explain what self-respect means and its purposes to the intended audience, women. Women are the intended audience because when this essay was written in the 1960’s, expectations of women were developing in a way that was no longer related to their roles in society, but their actual character, specifically physical characteristics and abilities. Didion chooses to write about self-respect toward women because of a personal anecdote mentioned in the text, in which she receives a sudden realization of what self-respect truly means and decides to share it with other struggling women in the 60’s. Didion uses the rhetorical devices of personal anecdotes, allusions, and repetition in her essay often, which makes her essay overall strong by punctuating many different meanings of self-respect. These rhetorical devices also give her audience an easier understanding of self-respect by providing multiple perspectives and situations of self-respect, allowing the audience to make personal connections with the text.

During the early 1900s till now, women have been discriminated against and have been battling for equal rights in the United States. In 1960s America, the feminist movement was growing rapidly, bringing out influential women and protesters who were starting to get noticed by the majority of the population. One of those influential women, author Adrienne Rich, published an essay that talks about how women are treated differently. In the essay, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as a Re-vision”, Rich argues that a stereotypical and prejudiced male society represses women. She demonstrates these views through the use of literary history, her personal experience towards women’s discrimination, and the potential women have to

In the book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan brings attention to what she calls the feminine mystique, or “the problem that has no name”. Through the use of anecdotal narratives, her own personal experiences as a journalist, editor, mother, and the interviews of many women from different backgrounds in order to unveil the truth about the women of the 1950’s. The problem which sparked the second wave of feminism in the United States is one that focuses on the inequality between men and women and the undervaluing of women in both the social and private spheres. The women of the time gave up pursuing their passions, such as getting an education or careers in science or business in order to fit the image of the stereotypical stay-at-home mom whose main goal in life is to raise her children while providing a safe and comforting home for her husband. The Feminine Mystique, as she called it, was the idea of widespread unhappiness of women, despite the preconceived notion that women were happiest when they have a family. Throughout her work, she dives into many of the problems associated with the feminine mystique and builds a powerful concept of what would eventually be labeled feminism.

AUTHOR Joan Didion is an American journalist (born December 5, 1934) that was part and parcel of the so-called trend of literary journalism “New Journalism”. In the words of Tom Wolfe: “It is possible to write journalism that would read as a novel”. (Wolfe, Tom, and E.W. Johnson. The New Journalism.

In 2017 our thoughts and actions are guided and molded in large part by social media, reality television shows and pop culture. Without realizing the extent to which constructed reality and self-curated life exhibitions shape how we see the world, we form perceptions and establish standards of what our lives should look like based on stories and photos posted on Snapchat and Instagram and find ourselves reflexively belting out song lyrics that directly contradict our values. Joan Didion, a unique and relatable but brilliant author, seems to have an understanding that the challenges she faced as a freshman in college in the 1950s would still be relevant and problematic for college students almost 70 years later. In Didion’s essay, “On

wrong (Williams & Arrigo, 2012, p. 5). The role of morality in this film is not how moral values are used to guide a population in the direction of a "good life" but instead how moral values can be interpreted and exploited through various forms of rhetoric and propaganda to allow a justification for an act that is fundamentally understood to be immoral.