Comparing Purity In Orlando And Tale Of Two Cities

The Modernist skepticism is vivid in Woolf's portrayal of a woman, Isabella, who has not conformed to society's accepted norms and would seem to be - at first glance - all the better for it.  But, upon closer inspection it is with a sigh of resignation that Virginia recognizes the illusion that her fanciful exploration created for her.  Isabella (possibly representative of Virginia herself or of womanhood in general) is elevated and

The diction in the excerpt is an essential component to the dramatization of the plot’s central incident. Jewett uses rich language to intensify the simple nature of the main character Sylvia’s journey up a “great pine-tree.” For example, in describing the tree, the narrator uses personification as he mentions the “huge tree asleep yet in the paling moonlight.” The use of personification harkens back to those universal moments in childhood in which everything alive had human feelings, and creates an emotional attachment between the reader and the tree. Jewett also uses other figurative language, like similes, to relate the grandeur of the tree to the audience. She writes, “It [the tree] was like a great main-mast to the voyaging earth…” In comparing the tree to the great mast of a ship, the author invokes feelings of awe at its size.

Ever since the days of World War I, women have been seen as second rate to men. They had to live up to many social standards that men didn’t have to and had strict guidelines on how to live their lives. This all changed when modernism deliberately tried to break away from Victorian Era standards in which women were subjugated to a lot more scrutiny. Ezra Pound, who was a large figure in the modernist movement, captured the spirit of the era in his famous line “Make it new!” Consequently, many writers started to experiment with many different and wild writing styles, which led to the short stories and poems we have today. The stories The Wife of His Youth and Mrs. Spring Fragrance were all written in this era of modernism. While they are written in a more traditional style of writing, both these stories have strong implications on feminism from the viewpoints of both male and female writers.

Into this atmosphere of spiritual paralysis the boy bears, with blind hopes and romantic dreams, his encounter with first love. In the face of ugly, drab reality-"amid the curses of laborers," "jostled by drunken men and bargaining women"-he carries his aunt's parcels as she shops in the market place, imagining that he bears, not parcels, but a "chalice through a throng of foes." The "noises converged in a single sensation of life" and in a blending of Romantic and Christian symbols he transforms in his mind a perfectly ordinary girl into an enchanted princess: untouchable, promising, saintly. Setting in this scene depicts the harsh, dirty reality of life which the boy blindly ignores. The contrast between the real and the boy's dreams is ironically drawn and clearly foreshadows the boy's inability to keep the dream, to remain blind.

Furthermore, the woman was never recognised as an equal in the world; with a “mane” for hair she is immediately relatable to an animal. When this connection is made, the woman is perceived as some strange creature; a mere mimicry of a real human. Harwood’s description of is a taste of how society views women; not quiet human. Now equipped with darker views of the flower filled day; the contemporary day reader is pondering to whether or not this vile practice is still belittling women of today.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton and The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot has similar recurring imagery. Both literary works portray two women in a way and compare these two women characters. Wharton’s portrayal of gender in the society of Old New York illustrates the “perfect” woman through May Welland along with the “imperfect” woman through Ellen Olenska, whereas in the poem The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, the role and sexuality of women is shown through the juxtaposition of two women in the section “A Game of Chess.”

More specifically this tale takes place in the Victorian Era, in which many of the characters do not reflect the values that were taught open them this time period. Where aggressive and dominating behavior is seen as masculine, and sensitive and submissive acts are considered feminine, Carroll paints a picture of a society where these qualities are switched. The Victorian Era was a strict time for women, where they were expected to act “proper” at all times, especially in public and in the presence of men, emphasizing that a woman was expected to be innocent and almost completely arrogant of intellectual opinion at all times. Additionally, Charles Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, demonstrates the traditional expectations upon males at the time, portraying masculine characteristics through the prince. He is shown as a power figure, as his relationship with sleeping beauty expresses his need for dominance as she is the damsel in distress. The tale reads, “A young and gallant prince is always brave, however; so he continued on his way, and presently reached a large forecourt” (Perrault 51). Due to the expectation of bravery, independence and assertiveness upon males, the prince had saved the princess from the 100-year slumber, satisfying his masculinity. Furthermore, an English poet named,

Our history illustrates the journey of human civilization. What we learned from history is that we grow and progress as a society because we learn from past mistakes and build off of them. Change is essential to this process of societal growth and development. Edith Wharton introduces the world to a special novel that targets the gender inequality and double standards present in America during the late 19th century. Specifically, she outlines the everyday life of New Yorkers during a period of fault where men majorly held the position of power in society. Newland Archer is the medium of which Wharton uses to show how sinister a patriarchal society can be. Most readers will see the book only as shame to sexism, but Wharton actually has a more profound conflict that she is trying to portray to the reader, and it is that very ubiquitous theme that helps facilitate the growth of humanity. In the novel The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton transcends the idea of patriarchal oppression and emphasizes a central motif of rejection to change because of the unforgiving nature of old New York society, which can be demonstrated by Newland Archer’s fiancee May Welland and the relationship between Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska.

As she is developing, she is tantalized by the societal norms he represents. She is ready to give up the backwoods (a symbol of herself) for all he (a symbol of society) has to offer. Convinced of that, she sets off to find the secret of the elusive white heron and in order to find the heron, she had to climb to what was literally the top of the world for her, the top of the pine tree. The world from the top was different than the city and it was different from the woods at ground level. From the top her perspective about the world changed, it was vast and awesome, and she understood her place in it more than before. She understood it to mean more than to sacrifice her own self for the gifts this man had to offer that were tantalizing but incapitable with her personality and true self.

In most early British literature a woman is often presented as only one thing: an object. They can be objects of desire, objects of beauty, or merely objects to be owned, but it is rare that a woman is anything more than that. It is even more uncommon to find a female character in literature that is presented as an equal to the men around her. In William Congreve's The Way of the World he plays on the similarities of both his female and male characters to establish just how much of an issue gender really is because though their actions might be similar, the consequences are not.

The relationship between the environment and characters in literature played a large role in Victorian novels. This relationship is extremely evident in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, where Jane’s journey to freedom is reflected by her environment. However, Jane’s goal of freedom and equality symbolizes Victorian women struggling to gain these same values. According to Jennifer D. Fuller in “Seeking Wild Eyre: Victorian Attitudes Towards Landscape and the Environment in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre”, Jane’s passion for freedom is reflects the passion for freedom in Victorian women who have not achieved equality yet. Although Jane’s environmental surroundings symbolize Jane’s future, Fuller effectively asserts that the weather instead symbolizes the harsh constraints of women’s gender roles in Victorian society.

In studying Jonathan Swift's poetry, I have been instantly drawn to his series of Stella's Birthday poems, one of which was written every year from 1719 until the death of their subject, and in this essay I will be examining how Swift has represented women and femininity in these poems, and several more of his works. My aim will be to ascertain this by examining his works in detail, and looking at what motivated Swift to represent women in the way he did, through looking both at the culture and literature at the time, and his own life and influences.

The opposition is apparent between the two constructs of gender, ‘man was glad a blithe’, (joyful) (155) whereas the princess ‘siked an sorewed swithe.’ (sickened and sorrowed) (156) This disparity underlines the attitudes that permeate this text, considering the atrocity that has occurred, it is sickening to comprehend. Alluringly,

Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea centers on the intersection of English and British colonial cultures through the union of Rochester and Antoinette Cosway. Rochester represents patriarchal and imperialist Victorian values, which Mary Lou Emery suggests thrive in part on “distinctions between...legitimate and illegitimate sexuality, madness and reason, primitive and civilized behavior, [and] fiction and fact” (428). Antoinette threatens these supposedly objective distinctions in her emotional (“‘Afraid of what?’...‘Of nothing, of everything!’” (Rhys 45)) and intellectual (“‘Not slaves. Something must have happened a long time ago. Nobody remembers now.’” (Rhys 39)) uncertainty, which reflect the ambivalence of colonial, specifically black, culture towards English reason and fact. Antoinette’s most glaring dualities, however, appear in her subversion of racial and sexual conventions, and Rochester ultimately perceives her as mad because these ambiguous identities confuse the essentialist binary systems that patriarchal and imperialist ideologies derive from, and with them his understanding of reality.

In Victorian England, “the bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation” (Engels). This upper middle class, the bourgeois, was divided into separate spheres determined by their “natural characteristics” such as being male or female (Gender 1). The bourgeois society’s main concern was their outward appearance and materialism while gaining respectability among their social class. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, criticizes Victorian bourgeois society and their strict adherence to gender roles. As Nora Helmer walked away from her family, she generated a “door slam heard around the world” (“A Doll’s House” 1).