Portrayal of Women in James Joyce's Ulysses Essay

Nick describes that the abundant sky must look alien to Gatsby, lacking the familiar optimism Gatsby saw in everything. The the leaves must be frightening due to the notion of dreams dying and the world changing into one where one breathes “dreams like air”. Then, the rose, a symbol of beauty, will appear grotesque as all the meaningful objects that inspired hope in Gatsby would become painful reminders of a dream lost. The absence of Daisy’s call must shift Gatsby’s entire perspective; the sky to the roses are changed to reflect the inevitable failure of an ambitious

Throughout literature women are often displayed as idealized characters. Women in the eyes of society are plagued with the stereotype of being kind, nurturing, and tender individuals while men are established as ambitious, assertive, and tough. However, when the time comes for women to possess the qualities of men and men of women, a turnaround of events can occur. Women were the individuals that then shape the males into their ending personna. Shakespeare's Macbeth, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby demonstrated the reversal of gender roles through portraying women as the instigator of the male character’s ultimate demise.

Fitzgerald incorporates solemn and flowery diction into his writing to convey his dynamic views on Daisy. In the novel, Nick describes how Daisy is undecided on who she should spend the rest of her life with. From her confusion and indecision, she begins to face a period of depression

For example, Fitzgerald descriptively paints Gatsby’s flashback with emotional diction like “perishable”or “incomparable”. These words tag this emotional moment with an innocent and truly passionate tone and describe the moment to be fleeting yet extremely precious to both him and Daisy. The scene Fitzgerald creates induces a “mysterious excitement” in Gatsby, thus, revealing his pure, unadulterated mood. The words signify a truthful love for Daisy, not yet corrupted by his obsessions. Additionally, the use of vivid imagery continues to build upon the pure intimacy of the moment. Fitzgerald carefully illustrates how “Daisy blossomed for [Gatsby] like a flower”. This descriptive imagery of the blossoming flower shows how passionate and pure the moment is for Gatsby. Only the exquisiteness and simplicity of a flower finally spreading its petals expresses Gatsby’s feelings. In fact, he refuses to climb “to a secret place above the trees” where he “could suck on the pap of life”(110), and, instead, he opts to remain with Daisy. This location above the trees describes a heavenly place which Gatsby knowingly ignores because of his love for Daisy. This powerful imagery and diction reveals the true innocents and beauty of Gatsby’s initial dream of Daisy. The moods which Fitzgerald creates from these two scenes differ greatly to reveal the change of Gatsby’s

Symbolism, a technique sprinkled through the book, is heavily used with organic material, such as flowers, gardens, settings, etc. gives characters a more natural feel and being more organic themselves. Each scene that is given a natural setting, where it isn’t forced, shows the realist and most raw form of the character.  Gatsby and Daisy are the subjects that can be examples as two people that act differently in different settings of natural surroundings. The main focus is how they act in the most natural setting possible. Daisy and Gatsby knew each other before, sharing intimate moments, the first moment “...he kisse[s] her.  At his lips’ touched she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” (117). Fitzgerald's vocabulary use in the quote is saturated with liveliness and beauty. The words give a feeling that the book is alive. Gatsby is opening Daisy up as a person. For him she can be a real person, not fake in a world where status matters. For Gatsby, she has

At the beginning of The Great Gatsby, flowers represent purity, but later comes to represent the masking of moral corruption. When Gatsby first meets Daisy after five long years, he brings “an excessive, unnecessary amount of flowers as an offering,” (84). Gatsby brings flowers as a reminder to the innocent love Daisy and him back in the day. This artificial replacement is suffocating, and represents how Gatsby thinks the appearance of purity will actually influence the situation he and Daisy are in. What Gatsby wants is not pure, it is an affair. Similarly, “I could only remember, without resentment, that Daisy hadn’t sent a message or flower” (174). After Gatsby’s death, at this point, Daisy stops caring. The socialite does not send flowers, a sign of compassion, because of her new, total devotion to Tom. Although Daisy still may love Gatsby after his passing, her financial security is more important, “For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery” (151). Flowers, a sign of wealth and purity, have always been apart of Daisy’s life and identity. However the reader knows the woman has a corrupt, money-driven heart, the artificial world Daisy lives in makes her seem pure to outsiders, which makes them desire her. Fitzgerald uses flowers, which represent sweetness and purity, to mask less desired things

pg 35 just for the thought that she will be better seen by others if

Throughout many pays and novels, women have had important roles of helping form the main characters, in the way they think, move or change the story. Women have always been subordinate to men all through history, but in plays, novels, short stories, etc, they have been given large enforcing roles, showing the power within women. William Shakespeare and Sophocles use guilt, pride, and influence to demonstrate the importance of the women’s role to support the main characters in both the plays of Macbeth and Antigone.

Joyce’s construction of the female is thought-provoking and striking, especially within the novel. Although Ulysses is a male-dominated novel, the focus on female characters are often highly sexualized. For instance, in the episode, “Nausicca,” Gerty MacDowell has adapted to the constructed gender roles that are prevalent in society. Not only that, the omniscient narrator speaks of Gerty and her friends at the beach in a sarcastic tone, likely mocking the female stereotype, and ultimately, subjugating these women to speak in a womanly fashion while they “chat beside the sparkling waves and discusses matters feminine…” (Joyce 284). When the narrator shifts from Gerty’s friends’ to Gerty, the reader notices that the narrator is pointing out her features and what she is likely feeling and she sits upon the rocks in the sand. The narrator states, “Gerty MacDowell might easily have held her own besides any lady in the land and have seen herself exquisitely gowned with jewels on her brow and patrician suitors at her feet vying with one another to pay their devoirs to her. Mayhap it was this, the love that might have been, that lent to her softlyfeatured face at whiles a look, tense with suppressed meaning, that imparted a strange yearning tendency to the beautiful eyes, a charm few could resist” (Joyce 286). The narrator quickly points out that Gerty has a constructed view of herself in society and for her suitor. While she is

James Joyce structured Ulysses to correspond with events in Homer's Odyssey. The relationship between two principle characters in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom as a sonless father and Stephen Dedalus as a fatherless son parallels the circumstances of Odysseus and Telemachus. This interpretation of the relationship between Bloom and Stephen, however, does not account for a significant theme of Ulysses, that of motherhood. Despite the idea that Bloom is a father looking for a son and that Stephen is a son looking for a father, the desires of both of these characters go beyond that of a father and son relationship. Although Joyce makes it evident that Bloom is, in face, in search of a son, Bloom is more suited to assuming the role of a mother than a

In Dubliners, women are victims indeed. They are victims of home, of the recognized virtues by society, of classes of life, of religious doctrines, and of women themselves. In this essay, we are going to analyze the portrayal of women in Dubliners in terms of the aforementioned aspects, namely home, the recognized virtues by society, classes of life, religious doctrines and women themselves.

James Joyce’s book of short stories entitled Dubliners examines feminism and the role of women in Irish society. The author is ahead of his time by bringing women to the forefront of his stories and using them to show major roles and flaws in Irish society, specifically in “Eveline” and “The Boarding House”. James Joyce portrays women as victims who are forced to assume a leading and somewhat patriarchal role in their families. He uses them to show the paralysis of his native land Ireland, and the disruption in social order that is caused by the constant cycle of abuse that he finds commonplace in Ireland. Joyce is trying to end the Victorian and archaic view of

For many years, men have always held and desired power, especially when pitted against the fairer sex. The struggle for men to assert power is prevalent in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as the mentally-ill patients, led by Randle McMurphy, strive to remove Nurse Ratched’s subordination. Furthermore, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises explores the role reversal of power in the sexes, through the adventures of expatriates in post-WWI Europe. Despite being written decades apart, Kesey and Hemingway both explore the concept of sexual empowerment and degradation in both sexes. This is seen through the dominating role women partake in both novels, the notion of male insecurity, and the symbolic representation of the main

The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin and Eveline by James Joyce are the two short stories that will be analyzed using feminist criticism in this essay. Both short stories share a lot in common about what the role of women’s was perceived within the time they were written.

Overall, anyone who reads Ulysses knows the difficulty of understanding but also know that Bloom is a laughable hero in Joyce’s book with all his sexual, perverted moments with different women and conversations with other characters in the book that enables readers to give a better sense on the kind of character he is. According