Secretary Chant As A Metaphor

In the opening, she shares her childhood encounters with women in prose with the children’s rhyme “a little girl who had a curl”. This personal anecdote introduces the topic of the portrayal of women in literature, as well as establishes a connection with her audience.

Lena’s Clothes The character Lena Lingard in Willa Cather’s novel, My Àntonia, achieves success through the means of making clothes. Further, the clothes Lena wears throughout the novel mirror her growth towards independence. Her lack of adequate clothing suggests that she is out of her element while on the prairie among her cattle.

In the poem “The Secretary Chant,” the poet, Marge Piercy, uses figurative language to develop the argument of how society has produced a stereotype that women should be secretaries, because being a secretary is not always the ideal job because just like every other jobs, there may be emotional conflicts. The way Piercy uses comprehensive imagery about the speaker’s body and figurative language to depict  a woman's perspective of being a secretary interested me. Aftering reading the poem thoroughly, each imagery and figurative language conveys how women are stereotyped to be secretaries and why it is not always the ultimate jobs for women.

Susan Glaspell’s one-act play covers issues regarding female oppression and patriarchal domination. The play still exists as a fascinating hybrid of murder mystery and social commentary on the oppression of women. When Margaret Hossack was charged with the murder of her sixty year old husband John, the man she had been married to for thirty three years. Killed by two blows to his head with an ax, John Hossack was thought to be a cold mannered and difficult man to be married to, but he didn’t deserve his

Many people describe the role as a mother and a wife as something that is to be welcomed, a natural stage for women. However for the narrator, it changed from something seemingly beautiful to “old foul, bad...” Motherhood to her is then what creative women were to other people during the 19th century. Creativity was natural for the narrator, unlike motherhood; it was part of her being. Motherhood however, was a prison of domestic

In 1882, Susan Glaspell was born in Davenport, Iowa. She graduated from Drake University in 1899 and later worked as a reporter, then a freelance writer, composing several pieces (Kirsner and Mandell 1124). Later Glaspell and her husband, Cram Cook, founded the Provincetown Players for which Glaspell wrote plays (1124). Many of her works conveyed the problems early-twentieth-century women encountered in society. She wrote the play Trifles based on a murder trial she covered as a courthouse reporter (1124). “Glaspell later rewrote Trifles as a short story called ‘A Jury of Her Peer’” (1125). This piece introduces sisterhood between characters and retaliates against the superiority of the male. In “A Jury of Her Peers,” Glaspell uses setting, symbols, and irony to support the theme of gender roles.

During the late 1800’s and early 1900’s women were not treated as equals and had extremely low expectations on them.All their existences consisted of was cleaning,cooking,and taking care of their husband and kids.With these types of duties expected on to them you could imagine how it would eventually cause them to feel empty ,unfulfilled,and restricted in their life.These types of emotions are expressed through the main character in Mrs. Mallard in the book ‘ Story of An Hour’ ,and is the main reason why She rejoices when her husband is said to be dead.

The author of A Pair of Silk Stockings explores female roles based on what other people believe due to stereotypes. In this short story Mrs. Sommers finds $15 which is a sizable about of money to her in New York. She and her family are on the poorer side of New York. At first Mrs. Sommers has no clue on what she should do the money she had just come to. She is thinking about her children and that they could use new skirls because she had seen a beautiful new pattern in a market window, or caps for her boys and sailor-caps for her girls (Chopin 1). She thought of them due to the fact that that is what mothers and wives do in the 1800’s, they but their children and husband before thinking of themselves. She thought back to the time when she wasn’t

“A Jury of Her Peers” is a short story written by Susan Glaspell in 1917 illustrates early feminist literature. The two female characters, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, is able to solve the mystery of who the murderer of John Wright while their male counterparts could not. This short story had been adapted from Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles written the previous year. The play consists of the same characters and plotline as the story. In both works, Glaspell depicts how the men, Sheriff Peters and Mr. Hale, disregard the most important area in the house, the kitchen, when it comes to their investigation. In the end, the women are the ones who find clues that lead to the conclusion of Minnie Wright, John Wright’s wife, is the one who murdered him. Both of Glaspell’s female characters illustrate the ability to step into a male dominated profession by taking on the role of detective. According to Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, written by Lois Tyson, a reader-response critique “focuses on readers’ response to literary texts” and it’s a diverse area (169). Through a reader-response criticism from a feminist lens, we are able to analyze how “A Jury of Her Peers” and Trifles depict how a patriarchal society oppresses women in the early twentieth century, gender stereotypes confined both men and women and the emergence of the New Woman is illustrated.

In the next six lines the speaker changes it up some, it seems like her frusturation is increasing. The speaker tells the readers to “Press my fingers and in my eyes appear credit and debit.”(11) I am not sure I understand what this part means, it seems to be comparing her to a cash register, but I don’t think I understand that if she is a secretary. The next line is composed of sounds again “Zing. Tinkle.”(15) This again could be sounds that she repeatedly hears over and over in her head. The next line the speaker says “My navel is a reject button.”(15) This can mean that in her job she constantly has to reject people, and or be rejected. This might be backed up by “From my mouth issue canceled reams.”(16) My interpretation of this sentence is that, she is repeatedly saying issue canceled. I don’t seem to have a good grasp on what these few sentences mean.

In the late ninetieth and early twentieth centuries women were thought of as dolls, puppets, or property. In many cases, they weren’t allowed to make decisions for themselves. Women were only good at worrying about frivolous housework and lighthearted pleasantries. In the two plays “A Doll House” by Heinrich Ibsen, and “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell, there are several exploitations of this way of thinking.

Susan Glaspell uses a variety of symbols in her play to demonstrate the stereotypical view and treatment of women by men during the start of the twentieth century. She intricately portrays the female characters in her story as intelligent, but passive due to the fact that males dismiss their ideas and conversations as unimportant. The play, Trifles, uses multiple symbols to show how men fail to recognize the intelligence of women, and oppress the feminists’ way of thinking throughout society.

In Trifles, Susan Glaspell debates the roles between men and women during a period where a debate was not widely conducted. Glaspell wrote Trifles in the early 1900s—a time when feminism was just getting started. In this play, Glaspell shows us her perspective on the roles of men and women and how she believes the situation would play out. Trifles seems like another murder mystery on the surface, but the play has a much more profound meaning behind it. Glaspell presents the idea that men and women analyze situations differently, and how these situations are resolved based on how we interpret them. Research shows that women’s brains “may be optimized for combining analytical and intuitive thinking.” On the other hand, male brains are predominately “optimized for motor skills and actions” (Lewis). In the play, this research shows true when the women, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, analyze details rather than looking at the apparent, physical evidence, and they find out the motive of the murder. The men, on the other hand, look at broader evidence that does not lead to any substantial conclusion. When Glaspell was writing this play, she wanted the women to be the real instigators, the ones that would end up solving the mystery. While the men in the story laugh at the ‘trifles’ that women worry about, these details mean a great deal in Glaspell’s eyes. Glaspell presents the idea what men and women are different in the way they live their lives through detail.

“Trifles” a play by Susan Glaspell, emphasizes the thought that women were kept in their homes and their contributions to the home and family went unappreciated and unnoticed. The play gives readers a view of how women were view and treated during the 1900’s. As a female analyzing the play, Mrs. Wright’s motive for killing Mr. Wright was quite clear. Susan Glaspell gives her readers a feminist approach, to demonstrate how Mrs. Wright’s murdering of her husband is justified.

The first poem in the collection is called ‘Body of a Woman’ and being the opening poem, it holds the responsibility of giving the reader an overall appearance of the collection as a whole. This is because this is the first impression the reader sees when opening the book and that imprints itself into the reader’s mind. The persona of the poem is presented as possessive and dominant. This is