Comparison of The Seduction by Eileen McAuley and Cousin Kate by Christina Rossetti

Richardson explains how this confusion was relevant of the historical and cultural context of Austen’s era. Both the Gothic and the sentimental genres were regularly criticised for influencing readers to project fictional elements into real life. As Richardson explains, the Gothic was singled out for condemnation through its ‘thematics of female constraint and persecution and its fictive indulgence in forbidden lusts and passions, and the sentimental novel, with its ideal or ‘romantic’ picture of life and its over-valuation of erotic love as the key to female happiness (Richardson 2005:399). This projection is reflected in Northanger Abbey when Catherine is invited to Northanger Abbey: ‘Northanger Abbey! These were thrilling words, and wound up Catherine’s feelings to the highest point of ecstasy’ ( Austen pp.99-100). The use of ‘ecstasy’ reflects Catherine’s excessive personality and self-transcendence. Catherine’s gothic idealist vision of the abbey and her pursuit of pleasure, signifies her lack of self-directedness in which she dismisses her own control of life and puts herself in the position of the gothic heroine as portrayed in her reading of Radcliffe’s ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’. The prominent role of ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ in Northanger Abbey is highly symbolic in representing Austen’s concerns of the excesses of sensibility and the gothic and how they can distort the reader’s interpretation of life. Barker-Benfield (p.111) highlights how ‘Radcliffe’s Mysteries typically hinted at its apparent dangers but continued to convey its tenets. And no one could prevent readers from identifying with figures the author intended as warnings against sensibility’s ‘excesses’.

Male seducers are represented as boys sowing their oats -- part of normal living. Seduced females are viewed as weak and treacherous --  a treachery that woman in her "frailty" is unable to avoid. This is a very bizarre message.

while or was it all just a game to him? He used her and made her

Jane Austen’s novel, Northanger Abbey, seeks to explore the effect of wealth on society. Throughout the novel, this portrayal of wealth assumes an increasingly critical tone, and is thus used to suggest the negative impact of financial goals in a relationship. This is shown in the contrast between Catherine’s relationship with Mr. Tilney, and Isabella’s promiscuous ways. In this dynamic, Catherine remains pure, engaged to a poor clergyman, whereas her friend Isabella ensnares men in the hopes of gaining wealth and societal status. Through this dynamic, Austen provides an example of the British Romantic ideal that both love and the individual are only pure and righteous when freed from the constraints of society and affluence. Ironically, the Gothic novels that were prevalent in the later part of the British Romantic Period are frequently cited as a source of misfortune throughout the novel. Catherine, who is portrayed as good and pure, is misled into believing that the stories spun in Gothic novels are applicable to her own life. Her friend, Isabella, is also portrayed as a lover of the genre, which is Austen’s way of hinting at Isabella’s future sins. Although the Gothics influence both Catherine and Isabella, Austen portrays the characters as opposites-one the promiscuous villain and one the victim of the heroic tale. Austen continuously comments on the nature of heroism, and thus mocks the timid Catherine while ironically branding her a

Both the poems have the theme of love, written from a man’s point of view, and explores the way men treat woman in relationships. The former does this by a male narrator writing a poem to a female, using imagery to entice her. The latter by using a duke, explaining the story of what happened to his previous wife whilst looking at her picture. Both the poems use imagery and other poetic devices but in different ways. The first uses them more often to impress her. The second uses them in a

Robert Browning is an amazing poet. He wrote many poems in the late 1800’s that are connected with storylines, characters and plot. “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover” are examples of Browning’s connected poems. Both are considered to be dramatic monologues in which the character narrates his story of love. The Duke from “My Last Duchess” and the speaker from “Porphyria’s Lover” are known as “brothers in character and action”. They share many similar personality traits and the make many of the same actions. Both the Duke and speaker manipulate other characters from the poem. They are both possessive over women and objects, love the feeling of power are both over confident. Manipulation is a very important action of both the

Henry’s shocked, “dearest Miss Moreland, what ideas have you been admitting?” not only crushes Catherine’s “visions of romance” and humiliates her of all the gothic tendencies she had entertained throughout the novel, but it also serves to humble the reader; who presumably acted as eagerly as Catherine did in seeing the superficial and assuming that General Tilney was a terrible villain. However this overt satire of gothic literature and its heroines, who “plain as any” Catherine openly defies, also acts as a platform where Austen can criticise her society and how they value texts that openly objectify and demean women to superficial creatures. When Austen says, “gentlemen read better books,” in Miss Austen Regrets, the intertextual link in her words and the use of lighting and shadow elongates her face and emphasise the bitterness of her words. Allowing the responder to understand Austen’s own awareness of the confines that she as a female author experienced in the patriarchal and classist society of 19th Century England. This translates to Northanger Abbey when the mockable Catherine says, “if I could not be persuaded into doing what I thought wrong, I never will be tricked into it.” Revealing a deep level of integrity and honesty that the more socially accepted Isabella seems to lack. Austen mocks Catherine as a means of openly addressing the contemptuous nature of gothic literature, however she imbues Catherine with qualities integral to a wholesome human being to showcase to the responder, especially in the context of 19th Century England, that society’s gender roles not only shapes female relationships negatively but also shapes the characterisation of women in literature which contributes to the misogynistic mindset of the time and the

In Jane Austen “Love and Friendship” she illustrates the gender disparity of power and rebellion. The Romantics feature prominently the ideals of rebellion and revolution. In William Wordsworth essay “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” he describes the poet “He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind” (pg 299) However, Jane Austen uses parody and satire as a way to show the sexism behind the Romanticism particularly the sensibility novels. That the portrayals of rebellion in “Love and Friendship” were just as important as our heroines pursuit for love and friendship. “Love and Friendship” is a perfect parody of sentimental genre and shows the sexism in England at the time and how the exaggeration of the middle-upper class characters to show how ridiculous the depictions of women are fiction at the time.

“In order to gain his power back, he feels he must kill this seductress. In order to gain control over Porphyria, the speaker must take advantage of her at her weakest moment” (Marcus). During the Victorian era, the Patriarchy still lead a majority of the moral laws for individuals to follow. The rules, so to speak, are simply that the women are placed in a lower class than men and are to remain there and accept their place. Robert Browning is the author of two poems that are highly controversial to the modern reader for the sheer fact that the works of literature emphasis men overpowering women. While there are many types of ways for men to ruin female lives, and the ways keep expanding by the day, the poems My Last Duchess and Porphyria’s

In To His Coy Mistress, the speaker quickly makes it clear that he wants sex from a woman he is talking to. He uses pretty language to veil the fact that he is impatient and somewhat disrespectful towards her. In My Last Duchess, a Duke is talking about his late Duchess, and explains that he wanted something that he had lost – her full attention. He further describes that he didn’t use any language towards her at all, but simply gave orders and commands to attempt to gain her attention back instead of talking to her. The speakers of To His Coy Mistress and My Last Duchess use different words and methods, but are both trying to gain something they think they deserve from their respective women.

The two stories that I chose to write about is ‘’ The Lady with the pet dog” by Anton Chiehov and ‘’ The Wish” by Roald Dahl. These two stories are complete opposites on the surface but when you read between the lines, however they both share the same message. The tone of the ‘’ Lady with the pet dog’’ is paint as gray and lifeless. The characters in this story have no sense of innocent. For example the author writes ‘’He had been unfaithful to her long ago—had been unfaithful to her often, or when the author writes ‘’ I have been tormented by curiosity, I want something better. These two line tells the reader that Anna and Guov do not see any harm in commencing adultery with each other. And in “The Wish’’ the authors tone of the story is

The Victorian Era is a time in history in which societal expectations of men and women were formidably difficult to meet. Societal expectations made it harder for one to succeed in a relationship, causing many people of the time to criticize the societal norm. Among these people were authors Jane Austen and Christina Rossetti, who each wrote a unique piece criticizing these beliefs. The two authors expressed their opposing views to the time’s expectations of male to female relations in their literature pieces “The Goblin Market” and “Love and Friendship.” Christina Rossetti wrote “The Goblin Market:” a piece in which the lives of two independent women are depicted to be ruined by loathsome creatures representative of males and relationships. Similarly, Jane Austen wrote “Love and Friendship:” a tale that depicts two females whose lives come to a sudden decline due to the loss of their husbands and their naive nature towards true love. Within both pieces, Rossetti and Austen expose the hardship in attaining the highest profound connection in male to female relationships through the barriers of power relations, social class, and the fantasy of true love.

‘To His Coy Mistress’ Is a love poem by Andrew Marvel. The poem is ‘carpe diem’ which translates to seize the day, this means the poem does not take its time its blunt and straight to the point. The poem contains a thesis, antithesis and synthesis, the main argument points of the poem. The poem is split into three stanza’s which are used to persuade the woman to give up her virginity before her beauty dies. It is a conventional poem for its time in the 17th century.

Amongst the three love poems examined in this essay, the theme of male or female power in relationships pervades throughout. The views of the speakers are expressed and defined through literary and poetic techniques. This gives the reader an insight into the speaker's problems and dissatisfaction of a relationship, due to an imbalance of power. However there are dissimilarities between the poems - for example where in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" the female displays supernatural power and dominance over a knight, the Duke in "My Last Duchess" desires psychological power over his Duchess

Typically, Romantic literature is read as male, which possesses a high subjectivity and portrays traditions, ideologies and an understanding of an individual’s place in society. Female writers in the Romantic period bring about new interests and ideals and deviate from the masculine Romanticism. Jane Austen writes in Sense and Sensibility (Austen and Johnson, 2002) of the temperament of women and displays within her character Marianne, the abundance of passion and lack of pragmatic mindset. Similarly, in Maria Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies (Edgeworth, 1994), the epistolary form is used to convey struggles of Caroline and Julia to attempt to prove either trait as domineering. The OED defines the words sense as ‘a reasonable or comprehensible rationale’ (Stevenson, 2010, p. 939) and sensibility as ‘the quality of being able to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences’ (p. 940). Using these concepts, this essay will explore how sensibility can affect future happiness. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, she states how women are made the ‘creatures of sensation’ and how ‘this overstretched sensibility naturally relaxes other powers of the mind, and prevents intellect’ (Wollstonecraft, 1972, p. 64). Using this assertion, this essay will seek to argue how Austen’s Marianne and Edgeworth’s Julia having excessive sensibility leads to their ultimate unhappiness and self-destruction and how they cannot obtain contentment