Male Patriarche And Patriarchy In The Girl With The Pearl Earring

Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ attempts to change this ideal by re-establishing the feminine narrative through her story. Although the view of female as a commodity is far older than psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory has consistently re-enforced the ideals of women as objects and of a lower status than men (Loftus). In ‘The Bloody Chamber’ Carter works to discredit the concept of the female as a commodity. When reflecting on the Marquis’ previous wives, the narrator of ‘The Bloody Chamber’ references the portrait model saying “her face was common property” (pg. 5). From the surface, this is an allusion to the fact that she allowed herself to be painted,

The people had been fertilized in tubes and divided into five classes. They all satisfied with their conditions and lived all their lives as what they had been conditioned to be. Just under this “brave new world”, human had lost their personal emotions, lost their love—sex had replaced love, lost their religions, lost their right to think and their creativities. I like this book better than Girl with a Pearl Earring is not only because of the edification it gives to me but its philosophical property and the great imaginary space it provides which the other one does not have. Although its writing style might seems dull and harder to understand compared to the other, but the various topics it involved such as art, science, religion, common sense, solitary, reflection, moral, stimulation, sex and suffering would make you get more than what you read. The story of Girl with a Pearl Earring described an obscure love story between maid Griet and the painter Vermeer. “I felt as if my parents had pushed me into the street, that a deal had been made and I was being passed into the hands of a man. At least he is a good man, I thought, even if his hands are not as clean as they could be.” The delicate descriptions about the character’s inner activity made this book more beautiful and mysterious. The weakness of the book is just the

When considering Mulvey’s theory of the “male gaze” and patriarchal domination, this film clearly demonstrates this notion. While the film opens with the main protagonist, Nola Darling, defending her actions to what seems to be a documentary camera crew. As the film progresses, the male counterparts are afforded more instances of “gaze” than Nola Darling is. Viewers are often subjected to watching the men watch Nola. When the audience does watch Nola’s “gaze” it is when she is discussing things with the camera crew. In a reading of the film, viewers are looking through male subjects “gaze” more often than that of Nola, proving Mulvey’s theory in this

Looking back on history men’s and women’s roles haven’t always been divided; both genders were needed to work and provide and until the fourteen hundreds, they wore the same clothing. Men’s fashion developed to show the reality of their bodies with apparel such as tights, while women’s bodies were accentuated in tight bodices. Bordo shows us that as men’s clothing became more comfortable and utilitarian their role in society followed suit. Men today are supposed to be active; they are workers, the penetrators, the ones in control. Advertisements in the essay show us men continually portrayed as “rocks,” aggressively facing the camera or actively working. When women appear, they are simply to be gazed at and admired for their beauty. The images of men acting coincide with society’s standard of men being the

As Griet begins work as a maid in the Vermeer household, she has extensive responsibilities thrust upon her both from the Vermeers and her family. While there, Griet encounters many obstacles; the first being her relationship with her new mistress Catharina. “Catharina remained on the threshold. I did not dare enter before her. After an awkward moment she ordered, ‘Open the shutters, then. Not the window on the left. Just the middle and far windows. And only the lower part of the middle window’” (Chevalier, 32). Catharina’s instruction from Johannes creates a lot of tension between Griet and herself; beginning Catharina’s resentment of Griet. Catharina does not like the fact that Johannes allows a maid in his studio, but not her. As Griet’s time in the Vermeer household continues, Vermeer eventually chooses to paint Griet, even though she does not wish to be painted because of her class and position. For Griet, that means giving up the only thing she has left- her identity- for the sake of Vermeer’s painting. “He seemed to be waiting for something. My face began to strain with the fear that I was not giving him what he wanted. ‘Griet’, he added

In Hurston's “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, men and women inhabit separate roles. Not only are the women portrayed as the more fragile sex, Hurston essentially defines them by their relationships to and with the men. Thus, marriage is paramount in this story. The message sent here is that women can and do only obtain power through marrying powerful or, at least, motivated men. By the use of tradition, women are limited to the confines of positions of piteousness, passiveness, domesticity, and of course as sexual objectivity. The men consistently silence the women's voices, limit their actions with proprietary notions and insult their appearance and sexuality. In contrasts, when the women exhibit any traditionally male characteristics such as authority, intelligence or ambition, men deem them as unattractive and masculine. The male characters set out to prove to their peers that they are masculine by showing their wives who is in charge. This was not always due to personal desire, but also by society and at large as well as environmental pressures.

In the novel Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, Griet faces many challenges which causes her identity to change. Though Griet starts out as an innocent maid who has to follow orders, she starts developing her own opinion and the ability to make decisions. Griet changes from an household servant to having the courage to share her opinion to a mature lady, capable of making her own decisions. Many factors contribute to the change in Griet’s identity, but the main factor is Vermeer, her master.

Women were raised to fit into gender roles, but that would not translate into a “man’s society”. The only solution was to make a hybrid role. As seen with Rosie the Riveter, “she is strong and at the same time beautiful.” (Hall, Orzada, and Lopez-Gydosh) This was a major distinction of the time- there was a mental image of elegant women, but also a hard reality that required women to abandon traditional views. While the definition of women had to change, so did their outward appearances.

Several film theorists have used a variety of tactics and view points to analyze feature films since their inception. One of the most prominent theorists of those that analyze films from a feminist perspective is Laura Mulvey. Mulvey is famous for her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which presents an array of theories involving the treatment of women in films. Arguably the most notable idea presented in Mulvey’s work is the existence of the “male gaze” in films. This essay will examine Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze in relation to Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo. Vertigo does not fit the criteria of a film that

Today’s filmmakers have three areas to focus on: the event or theme of the film, the audience who will be watching the film, and lastly, the individual characters and the roles they play and how they are portrayed and interpreted. Many of these films bottom line objectives are to focus on the “erotic needs of the male ego.” The focus on fetishistic scopophilia tend to slant the view such that we see the world as being dominated by men and that woman are

Girl with a Pearl Earring is a fictional book that is based off of the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring. It gives the painting a background story and a makes up personas for Vermeer and the model in the photo. The Girl with a Pearl Earring is a very historical painting and is sometimes referred to as the Dutch Mona Lisa. It is very well known for highlighting the artistic achievements of the Dutch Golden Age. This book is an interesting interpretation on the backstory of the painting; it also gives insight on the time period and the artistic style of the Dutch Golden Age.

Theorist, E. Ann Kaplan in her work, “Is the Gaze Male?”, analyses the portrayal of women in film using Laura Mulvey’s “Gaze’ theory and psychoanalysis. In addition, Kaplan states that historically, females have been the central focus on only the melodrama genre, and while melodrama exposes the constraints and limitations that the family places on women, at the same time, gets women to accept those constraints as inevitable and normal. Kaplan argues that our culture is deeply rooted in “masculine” and “feminine, and dominance-submission patterns. In the end, she concludes that the exclusion from male culture provides an avenue to affect change in film and society. I partially agree with Kaplan that some women take pleasure from being the object of the male gaze as I think that is not entirely true, and specifically, this generalization does not apply to lesbians.

The male gaze puts his fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled, in a unique sort of way. In this traditional exhibitionist, role women are continuously being looked at and their appearance is delivered to the male gaze in such a way as a strong visual and erotic impact and provides male desire. The presence of a woman in a normal narrative film is the key of the movie. However, the key of the narrative film works against the development of the story-line and stops the action due to the erotic gaze. Butt Boetticher said: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance”.

Since its humble beginnings in the later years of the nineteenth century, film has undergone many changes. One thing that has never changed is the filmmaker’s interest in representing society in the present day. For better or worse, film has a habit of showing the world just what it values the most. In recent years, scholars have begun to pay attention to what kinds of ideas films are portraying (Stern, Steven E. and Handel, 284). Alarmingly, viewers, especially young women, are increasingly influenced by the lifestyle choices and attitudes that they learn from watching these films (Steele, 331). An example of this can be seen in a popular trope of the “romantic comedy” genre in this day and age: the powerful man doing something to help, or “save” the less powerful woman, representing a troubling “sexual double standard” (Smith, Stacy L, Pieper, Granados, Choueiti, 783).

The presentation of women on screen is another highlighted issue in many of the gathered sources. Because men were ultimately in control of what went on the screen much of what the audience perceived were women from the male imagination or fantasy. Bernard Beck elaborates in his article Where the Boys Are: The Contender and other Movies about Women in a Man’s World that, “…women have been used to dress up a male story or motivate a male character” (Beck 15). Women were often insignificant and trivial characters. Although, Kathe Davis disagrees to a point. In her article, Davis offers a dissonant opinion to the fore-mentioned insignificance of the female character. She instead describes many female characters as “predators,” and analyzes the roles of lead women in three prominent films of the nineteenth century. In each film, she finds parallels and similarities of cases of “female emasculation” and instances where “women are turned into objects of male desire” (Davis 47-48). Davis does not perceive female characters as being insignificant, just stripped of their power and misrepresented. She discusses how females of power are often portrayed as crazy