Aphra Behn

‘Women’s roles are often tokenistic in dramatic comedy.’ To what extent do you believe this to be the case in relation to the play you are studying?

play was outrageous and not accepted. The image of women in plays and stories at the time were

In the early 1900´s women did not have the same rights as men and are not respected as much as men either. Women did not get their voting rights till 1920, four years after the play Trifles by Susan Glaspell. In the play women are suppressed by men and society, Mrs.Hale and Mrs.Peters prove that women are not constrained by society's rules and are in fact, the most astute characters in *Susan Glaspell’s play “Trifles”*.

The first essay, “The Roles of Women in British Drama,” represents my first exposure to a new genre of literature. The essay was also one of my first formal and interpretative essays at the college level. As a woman and a student of literature, I feel a special connection to this essay’s topic of women’s roles in literature. In addition, this essay shows my “knowledge of the social, political, philosophical, and religious forces that influence authors and the people they write about” (Oral/Portfolio). After reading some of the most prominent British plays of the twentieth century, I observed a discontinuity in the roles of women in this genre. Sadly, women’s roles in literature were very similar to their role in society. During the twentieth century, women were still trying and failing to emerge out of the roles they had been cast in by a male dominated society. Even though women were almost always portrayed as inferior to men, I found a strong exception to this stereotype through the role of Thomasina. I admire Thomasina’s intelligence and wit, but I truly admire Tom Stoppard for creating this character.

 In the plays female sexuality is not expressed variously through courtship, pregnancy, childbearing, and remarriage, as it is in the period.  Instead it is narrowly defined and contained by the conventions of Petrarchan love and cuckoldry.  The first idealizes women as a catalyst to male virtue, insisting on their absolute purity.  The second fears and mistrusts them for their

The theme for honour and fidelity apply for both men and women in Shakespeare’s play ‘much ado about nothing’. Honour and fidelity is represented very differently for men and women as it would have been for the people in Elizabethan times. In this first section of the essay, I will be exploring double standards and Shakespeare’s awareness of the double standards between sexes and his feminist approach, the differences of honour and fidelity for men and women and upper class and lower class comparisons.

In the late ninetieth and early twentieth centuries women were thought of as dolls, puppets, or property. In many cases, they weren’t allowed to make decisions for themselves. Women were only good at worrying about frivolous housework and lighthearted pleasantries. In the two plays “A Doll House” by Heinrich Ibsen, and “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell, there are several exploitations of this way of thinking.

The plot of both Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” and Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll House” provides scope for a few scenes that lack the presence of all or any men. These scenes, consisting of communication between the female characters, assist in developing the theme of women openly defying the fact that the society they live in is primarily run by men. All the power and authority in their society, no matter the situation, belongs to the men while the women are simply excluded. The women in these plays defy the norms set by society and manage to evade the expectations of their patriarchal societies.

In Willa Cather’s novel entitled My Antonia, she writes about several female characters that challenge the stereotypical role of women in a male-dominated society during the early 1900s. In Trifles, a play written by Susan Glaspell, her female characters are represented as crafty and bright and not mere intellectual inferiors to their male counterparts. Upon closer examination of these two separate and distinct stories, Cather and Glaspell establish that these female characters defy the existing typecast of women as being less capable than men.

The most prominent woman figure in this play is Linda, but the male characters in this play also give us insight into women’s roles and help feed the feminist analyses

By using a play by play of the scenes in the play, the article pays close attention to the “trifles” the women paid close attention to while the men ridiculed them for it. The article also mentions how, “women’s responsibilities and concerns tend to remain somewhat distinct from men’s.” Because of this

In the Middle Ages, if a woman wanted to express herself in writing, she was

Aphra Behn was one of the first English professional female literary writers and a playwright of English Restoration. She had proved to be the most humorous and entertaining writer with her play, “The Rover”. The play is set in the 17th century in the colonial reign of Spain. The play mainly focuses on female characters. The female characters are potrayed as strong and independent. The setting of the play is Carnival time in Venice which holds importance to the plot because of many reasons.

Between the classifications of "virgin" and "prostitute" lay a void, not a range; one could give "the entire freight or nothing". Performed in 1677, Aphra Behn 's play, The Rover addresses this twofold standard, which restricted her female companions ' sexual cravings to the domain of religious community, massage parlor, or home. Set free in the upside down universe of Festival, her characters show the dynamic, entangled amusement required of ladies looking to secure individual satisfaction. The perils of the pursuit and the play 's clean decision, then again, propose at how women neither could nor ought to stray too far into the manly parts of wooer and owner. In spite of the fact that ladies may desire higher degrees of self-sufficiency and sexual expression, their lives still fit inside of the limits of three parts: cloister adherent, whore, or wife.

What this actually meant in the culture’s sexual economy is perhaps more accurately suggested by meta-theatrical references in plays’ prologues and epilogues. The actress playing Flirt in Wycheley’s The Gentleman Dancing