Analysis Of ' La Belle Dame Sans Merci '

Anne Sexton was a junior-college dropout who, inspired by emotional distress, became a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize as well as three honorary doctorates. Her poems usually dealt with intensely personal, often feminist, subject matter due to her tortured relationships with gender roles and the place of women in society. The movies, women’s magazines and even some women’s schools supported the notion that decent women took naturally to homemaking and mothering (Schulman). Like others of her generation, Sexton was frustrated by this fixed feminine role society was encouraging. Her poem “Cinderella” is an example of her views, and it also introduces a new topic of how out of touch with reality fairy tales often are. In “Cinderella”, Anne Sexton uses tone and symbolism to portray her attitude towards traditional gender roles and the unrealistic life of fairy tales.

Throughout history, women have constantly been objectified and forced into submission by the male dominated society. Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical work, The Second Sex, echoes the intense oppression of women and reflects the first wave feminist movement. Her existentialist decoding of genders resulted in the idea of the Other, which explores the phenomenon of women forced into the role of an object, while men are the subject. In the second chapter, “The Girl”, Beauvoir further studies the idea of this oppression during one’s transition from a girl into a woman. Beauvoir states that no matter how much freedom and sense of self a girl holds, she is always forced into the role of the Other in society. Beauvoir 's idea of the Other held

In the familiar more traditional version, Cinderella is a poor maid girl that, with the help of fairy godmother, gets a chance to meet prince charming. They fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after, and then what? What is a happily ever after? Is this even a realistic thought? In the dark comedic poem Cinderella, Anne Sexton forces the reader to examine this question. Utilizing literary devices such as tone, imagery, and style, Sexton encourages the reader to think about how silly and unlikely a fairy tale ending actually is.

Within the film, Ma Vie en Rose (Alain Berliner, France, 1997) we are encouraged to sympathize with the main character, Ludovic (Georges Du Fresne), a seven year old boy that insists that he is actually a girl. The importance of viewing this movie and being able to identify with the character of Ludovic shows us as an audience the absurdity of gender norms, while simultaneously encouraging us to have a more empathetic viewpoint in regards to such topics.

Marie is truly one of kind poet who displays a unique sense of awareness and ability in helping us understand what things were like in the twelfth century. Even though the heart of her poems is about courtly love, the way she depicts the characters is special in a sense that she can achieve a lot more than one would imagine. Examples of this can be seen in her poems, The Lay of the Honeysuckle and The Lay of the Nightingale, especially when we keen on the characters of these poems.

The extent to which the Lais of Marie de France can be categorized as fairy tales is dependent on the definition of “fairy tale.” Using various scholars’ definitions of “fairy tale” and conceptions of the fairy tale genre, criteria for “fairy tales” arises. Then, close-readings of three lais, “Guigemar”, “Lanval” and “Yonec”, are used as a mechanism for meeting or failing the criteria. This methodology is then evaluated and problematized. The criterion for fairy tales includes origin, form, content, style, and meaning. Etymologically, the word ‘fairy tale’ has disputed origins. Supposedly, it comes from the French “contes des fees” or “tales about fairies”, popular in French courts and salons in the seventeenth century. However, Jack Zipes argues that “conte féerique” actually translates to “fairy tales” and refers to narrative form, rather than content.

By analyzing the construction of gender roles and transformation within the poetic retelling of Snow White by Anne Sexton, we are able to think about these topics in a more honest way that reveals their troublesome nature. First, by connecting presents themes and elements in this modern day version that don’t appear in more classical versions, we are immediately given a more vivid depiction of how characters function. Descriptions of cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper, dwarfs being described as little hot dogs and czars, and the queen eating the boar's heart like a piece of cube steak, are just a few examples of the vivid descriptions that lace this poem. These descriptions pull meaning from more modern day topics, they objectify characters,

“The courtly lady…possesses a curiously hybrid gender. While maintaining stereotypically female sexuality, she also holds, in principle at least, the status of a feudal lord.” Burns’ statement insinuates a reversal of power dynamics between man and woman in the courtly love lyric, implying that the woman’s stereotypical beauty and sexuality in courtship, is a gateway to subverting and overpowering the lovesick male, making her a superior lord. The Amour Courtois lyric is deemed inconsistent with the representation of woman as an empowered “feudal lord” due to the sheer objectification of femininity and beauty. Poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Dunbar commend a woman’s aesthetic appeal or satirise the lack of it, thus elevating medieval misogynistic expectations of physical beauty as a feminine necessity that objectifies women under the control of man’s advances. Throughout courtly love lyrics female beauty is a purely frivolous and superficial trait lacking predominant depth, to render woman as a “lord” would be poetically conflicting as the only power exemplified by female subjects in courtship is through the idolisation and sexual lust of the male devotee.

Marie de France is concerned with living the good life which consists of following true love. In her story entitled “Lanval,” Marie de France describes a knight who is envied by many because of his “valour, generosity, beauty, and prowess” (295). Although many people are envious of Lanval and his

In Margaret Atwood’s poem “There Was Once”, Atwood uses irony to point out the societal problems within the genre of fairy tales. Charles Perrault, the author of the short story “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, writes about fantastic creatures, magic, and love, following the generic conventions of fairy tales. When compared to Perrault’s short story “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, Atwood’s poem both compliments and contrasts Perrault’s. These two texts, although similar, offer different views on the genre of fairy tales.

Angela Carter, an English writer, is best known for her feminist rewriting of classical fairy tales. In her stories she prominently uses themes, such as, virginity, the pornographic image, violence and sex, and many others. Degrading someone to the status of a mere object, in other words objectification, is a theme Angela Carter shows in many of her fairy tales, specifically the objectification of women. According to Carter, the objectification and subjugation of women is part of a “latent context” of fairy tales that she expressed simply by virtue of being a woman. Both “The Tiger’s Bride” and “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” are fairy tales intertextually linked with “Beauty and the Beast” and show the reader Carters’ views on femininity. Not

The following close reading concerns itself with the Middle English Breton Lay Sir Degaré, though speculative, the poem’s composition has been dated to the 14th Century and the poem survives in six manuscripts and three early printed editions, it is a romance of high antiquity, preserved in the Auchinleck MS. Some suggest that the poem takes clear inspiration from the Middle English translation of Marie de France’s Le Fresne: Lay le Freine. Moreover, some propose that Sir Degaré is more accurately described as an emulation, believing it to be more an imitation made up from a variety of stories, as it borrows not only motifs but direct phrasing from Lay Le Freine. Not only do both texts share a similar rhyming scheme, rhyming couplets, and semi-alliterative lines, they are also similar in relation to common genre conventions. In this respect, the Breton Lay has been understood by many to be the predecessor to the modern fairy-tale, and indeed, Sir Degaré is enveloped in themes such as love, the supernatural, and critically, the correlation between the two constructs of gender, which themselves are manifested in the modern day fairy-tale.

The first text we explore in this step is Bonaventure’s “On Seeing God in his Image”. Bonaventure shows us that through inward reflection we can see God. God can then lead us to God’s two most important laws, and the best ways for us to live in community with others; by loving God, and our neighbors.

The poem begins with the narrator's describing the poem as a 'dream' that ''was not at all a dream'', which already causes doubt and tension within the reader. The narrator then goes on to talk about

Tennyson portrays the isolation of women through the reoccurring theme of Romanticism, this is shown through the poet’s constant associations with nature being the centre of the poem. The poet focuses more on the surroundings of the main character as she lives “By the island in the river…And the silent isle embowers The Lady of Shalott.” Tennyson presents the speaker to hide the details of the actual lady, her imprisonment and the curse which leads us to believe she is a mystery as the nature around her seems overpowering and consuming her. Tennyson portrays the lady in the poem to be an embodiment of a typical woman of the contemporary culture as he describes ‘A charmed web’ which the woman is ‘weaving, either night or day’. The ‘web’ can be a symbol of slavery but also a symbol of creativity and possibility. When the woman tries to turn away from the web she refuses to be a slave and ultimately