Summary Of I, Being Born A Woman And Distressed

Sexual drives are the basis of human behaviour because the goal of most humans is to find a sexual partner for comfort and reproduction. When the narrator visits his lover’s grave, he reminisces about the times with his lover and is overwhelmed by grief. The narrator longs to be loved as he says, “Then I saw it was getting dark, and a strange, mad wish, the wish of a despairing lover, seized me” (Maupassant 151). The loss of his lover penetrates his mental anguish as it is human nature to desire to be loved. Thus, he is greatly affected by the loss of his sexual partner, as sexual drives often dictate behaviour.

“In men, in general, sexual desire is inherent and spontaneous” whereas “in the other sex, the desire is dormant, if not non-existent, till excited” (457). Greg’s terminology is extremely power-laden. “Spontaneous” has the connotation of energy and activity, whereas “dormant” and “victim” imply inactivity. An important concept is the assumption that men, the “coarser sex,” act on women, the “weaker sex” (457).

Freud’s theory of personality examined the interplay between the primitive, instinctual urges—the ‘id’; the practical and rational ‘ego’; and the morally attuned ‘superego’; ‘object relations’ refer to the "object" of an instinct”, which is “the agent through which the instinctual aim is achieved”—most often a person and, according to Freud, most often the mother (Ainsworth 1969, p. 1). The psychosexual development theory that Freud launched reduces our behaviour to mechanistic responses to an instinctive need for pleasure fueled by the ‘libido’ and barriers or distortions to the gratification of the libido at various delineated stages of development were responsible for later problems in life (Kail & Zolner 2012, p. 5). Erik Erikson later added depth to the approach by including more humanistic elements to Freud’s stages and including more periods of development (p.

Written in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, one could hardly mistake it for anything so pleasant. Sonnets being traditionally used for beautiful, appealing topics, already there is contradiction between

This sonnet has a simple and straightforward meaning. It is short, yet powerful with the perfect use of metaphors. If a partner suddenly becomes aware of impediments of the

The poem’s structure as a sonnet allows the speaker’s feelings of distrust and heartache to gradually manifest themselves as the poem’s plot progresses. Each quatrain develops and intensifies the speaker’s misery, giving the reader a deeper insight into his convoluted emotions. In the first quatrain, the speaker advises his former partner to not be surprised when she “see[s] him holding [his] louring head so low” (2). His refusal to look at her not only highlights his unhappiness but also establishes the gloomy tone of the poem. The speaker then uses the second and third quatrains to justify his remoteness; he explains how he feels betrayed by her and reveals how his distrust has led him

My mother never told me the complications of becoming a woman in this world. Maybe she thought I was strong enough to figure them out on my own. Or quite possibly, she couldn't tell me, because she never really knew how to face the complications herself.

In the opening lines of Millay’s poem, it seems as if she is speaking to a lover. The tone of the poem is set in the first line, “in some quite casual way” (1). Throughout the sonnet, one senses a frighteningly casual tone, something very matter of fact, as if these fourteen lines are a passing thought in Millay’s head. The alliteration of “quite casual” supports the plain-spoken tone, giving a feel of simple, everyday speech. Millay imagines that as she is on the subway, she casually glances over and notices on “the back-page of a paper, say / Held by a neighbor” (3-4) her lover is gone and not to return.

“the sonnet-ballad” by Gwendolyn Brooks is a Shakespearean sonnet that uses imagery to paint a picture of death/war stealing a lover’s happiness by portraying that the man is seduced away. This passage portrays that the lover cannot be happy for her significant other has been taken away by death/war. War has a negative effect on women, and the relationships with their lovers. When death takes away a woman’s lover, they must overcome sorrow and anguish of their loss.

Edna Millay, in her sonnet, “What Lips,” describes her solitude after spending her life searching for love by having romances with several men. Firstly, Millay asks a rhetorical question: “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” to explain that she has forgotten her past lovers and the reasons they were together; secondly, to provide a visual image of the speaker’s lonely, quiet, and empty state caused by not finding love, Millay states that “the rain / Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh”; thirdly, Millay uses an oxymoron, “quiet pain,” to explain that although the speaker does not remember her past lovers, the hurt from not finding love still lingers in her; fourthly, Millay provides the image of a “lonely tree” as another

I would like to analyze the short story “No Woman Born” with regard to questions of gender and gender performance. As Judith Butler suggests, gender identities are a “kind of imitation of which there is no original” (Fuss 21), she believes that gender identities are socially constructed and social acts that we perform and imitate in order to fall into one of the gender categories to be perceived a certain way. This underlying idea is what happens in No Woman Born, to the character of Deirdre. In the story, when Deirdre is fixed by a doctor, he implants her brain into a robotic body and after doing that, he struggles throughout the story to make peace with what is now Deirdre’s new body and her ability to perform the characteristics of the female gender perfectly. This is because the doctor feels that by reconstructing her with a metal body that

Freud argued that an individual’s instinctual drive was sexually orientated. In the same way that “hunger seeks nutrition,

Although it could be easy for the reader of Shakespeare’s sonnet “O how I faint when I of you do write” to take pity on the speaker’s unreciprocated love and fault the subject of the poem for enticing multiple suiters, this is not a fair assessment of the subject’s character. When evaluating the poem on a closer level, the use of the word “appear” in line 8 makes it evident that the speaker’s attention is unsolicited, thus not within the subject’s influence.

In his paper “Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality” (Freud, 1962) brings nourishment and sexuality firmly together suggesting eating was a substitute for sexual activity and therefore not eating was a way of repressing sexual urges. In conjunction with this girls could avoid development of an adult body- hold off/extinguish menstruation, avoid breast, hips and other womanly features further delaying independence from the mother. This mentality is clearly evident in Alice in her avoidance of sexual exploration- by self or other in conjunction with focus on and loathing of body parts associated with womanhood - “impossibly wide hips, obnoxious bosom and boxy curves.” Alice 's first restriction of food correlated with the onset of puberty and her father infidelity/parents separation, this loss of control over changes to body and changes to family system caused Alice ego to create defenses and manifests itself in a control of food and weight to return to a time previous to the offending event(s).

Throughout the sonnet, the connotations of the word “truth” manipulate the perceptions of the relationship. In the first quatrain, the poet’s love “swears that she is made of truth,” (1). Immediately, the reader speculates upon the meaning of truth. It could mean that the narrator's love swears she is honest with him or the word “truth” can also be seen to suggest fidelity. Through the second quatrain, the poet exaggerates upon “truth” (fidelity) in the relationship through two other connotations of the word.