Fall of Man Depicted in Atwood's Backdrop Addresses Cowboy Essay

The presentation of femininity in Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times is a strong departure from the heroine of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage. Through the metaphor of the gun as the embodiment of masculinity, both authors closely examine the complexities of the sexualized relationship of a frontierswoman to the men of her society. Doctorow mirrors the tensions present in Grey's novel though Molly acts as an extraordinarily different vision of what the West required of a woman than Jane Withersteen. Both novels reach a sexual climax as the heroine engages the men of her society in a violent action of blood and birth.

The life of a ranch girl is unknown to many people across America. In Maile Meloy’s Ranch Girl, a female narrator brings the reader into her hard life being raised as a ranch girl. Through many different literary devices including, tone, mood, and characterization, the writer set the reader to feel everything the narrator depicts and the reader ingested with a heavier impact than the reader anticipates. The obligation to the community for the ranch girl is to break all stereotypes, thus showing her community and all ranch girls alike that she can be successful and break free of the ranch girl life.

In an influential essay, Melody Graulich notes how “rigid dichotomizing of sex roles” in most frontier myths has “often handicapped and confused male as well as female writers,” (Graulich 187). Graulich wonders if a “universal mythology” might emerge which would be less confining for both men and women. In Bruce Mason, Wallace Stegner experiments with this idea by acknowledging the power of Bo’s male fantasies and Elsa’s ability to teach her son to feel; this is his strength. On the other hand, Bruce’s brother Chet, who dies young, lost, and broken, seems doomed because he lacked sufficient measure of both the feminine and masculine. Stegner observes that Chet had “enough of the old man to spoil him, enough of his mother to soften him,

First, it is critical to understand the conventional, prescribed positions of men and women within the Western genre. According to John G. Cawelti’s The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel, most Westerns follow specific character setup. The hero (man), the savage (bad guy), and the woman characters form a figurative, triangular relationship. The woman often comes between the dichotomous, battling relationship of hero and savage. There is also the underlying threat that the woman could be captured and raped by the savage, but the hero will eventually defeat the savage to protect her. It is also worth noting that the woman represents civilization. The man, at his core, is always caught between the monogamous, repressive life that the woman and town

The male hero could be said to be portrayed in Atwood’s poem “Backdrop addresses cowboy” by the cowboy. The cowboy is a clichéd symbol of masculinity made famous by the Western film industry of America. One can immediately conjure him up, square-jawed and handsomely rugged in Stetson and spurred boots, galloping around on his trusty steed rescuing damsels in distress with whom he intends on riding off romantically into the sunset with. This is however not the cowboy that we are confronted with in the poem.

As he is escaping through the swamp, he hears ‘nothing’, for the first ever time. He then realises that the silence is coming from a girl, she is the first girl Todd has ever seen. Both novels show the hierarchy of men and women and how gender inequality and sexism is something that is so recent, but has also been a really big problem and debate for a very long time, and that maybe we haven’t addressed the problem completely. They both show us difficult relationships, with all the blame usually being put on the woman even if she had done nothing wrong. Section

In the opening scene of Jane Martin’s “Rodeo,” there are many stereotypical props used to portray the beer-drinking, hard-working, cowboy image with the characteristic country music playing as an added touch. Most people are familiar with this type of scene in their minds, with a man as the character, but not this time – we find a tough, smart, opinionated woman with a distinctively country name of Lurlene, and the typical cowboy kind of nickname, Big Eight. The reader will dive deeper into the true character of this unusual woman and realize that she is no different from the average woman in today’s workforce. She is feeling the frustration of discrimination and the push out of the only lifestyle that she knows, by “Them” (1667).

The raison d’etre of the Western is arguably to celebrate masculinity, but Brokeback Mountain is a revisionary Western that challenges definitions of masculinity. Discuss this statement with reference to Jane Marie Gaines’s and Charlotte Cornelia Herzog’s comments on the homoeroticism of the Western.

Akin to the barrenness that Poe was obviously feeling at the time he wrote this poem, most detail is stripped away except for the most basic imagery of the sea, the shore and the heavens.

“Hills like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway and “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood share a gender-oriented theme. They both show women struggling to attain equality against their male partners. This theme is depicted through the use of symbolism, point of view and plot conflict.

In the short story “Indian Camp”, by Ernest Hemingway, many controversies arise about the idea of feminism in the text. Feminism is a general term used to describe advocating women’s rights socially, politically, and making equal rights to those of men. Feminist criticism is looked through a “lens” along the line of gender roles in literature, the value of female characters within the text, and interpreting the perspective from which the text is written. Many of Hemingway’s female characters display anti-feminist attributes due to the role that women play or how they are referred to within a text by him or other characters. There are many assumptions that go along with the

The poem’s diction reflects the context and a confident, assertive tone. The speaker expresses a high level of self-respect and assurance. It includes

First of all, Margaret Atwood is well known for writing fiction with strong female characters that critics categorize her as feminist. Her initial works, ”The Edible Woman”, “Dancing Girls”, “The Robber Bride”, and “The Handmaid’s Tale” are some of examples of her works that are categorize as feminist. Those novels of strong woman describe, “The main characters variously indulge in self-invention, self-mythologising, role-playing, and self-division, while identity is presented as unstable and duplicitous throughout the novels” (McCarthy 3). Atwood has that unique style to describe her characters. She elucidates the woman as their own self to invent their life and their environment through the entire novel. Atwood has a twisted technique for giving her work a jubilant name when the words describe the opposite. One example of that is her short story collection, “Dancing Girls”, Atwood, “bears a surprisingly joyful title for a series of narratives shot through with anxiety and fear, with images of death, deformity, lifelessness and contained rage” (Murray 1). Atwood has an incredible way to write stories where the characters go through gruesome obstacles or experiences that define

The final stanza, the symbolism “The blacksmith’s boy hung the rainbow on his shoulder, instead of his broken gun” once again reflects on the human capability of change and adaptation as well as marking independency. Hyperbole, “and the rainbow shone as brightly

Throughout American Literature, women have been depicted in many different ways. The portrayal of women in American Literature is often influenced by an author's personal experience or a frequent societal stereotype of women and their position. Often times, male authors interpret society’s views of women in a completely different nature than a female author would. While F. Scott Fitzgerald may represent his main female character as a victim in the 1920’s, Zora Neale Hurston portrays hers as a strong, free-spirited, and independent woman only a decade later in the 1930’s.