The, A Venetian Nun And Early Modern Italian Author

As illustrated in A Husband’s Defense, women were dominated by men. From birth until death their lives were dictated by their fathers and husbands. In a civilization famed for its democracy, women were voiceless. Throughout the entire testimony, Euphiletus wife is

Does being a female put every woman at a disadvantage in a patriarchal society? In The Marquise of O, Heinrich von Kleist tells the story of a woman named Giulietta who lost her husband, but continues to take care of her children. This almost perfect life of hers came to an end when she was raped and found out she was pregnant without any knowledge of the incident. As a woman living in the 18th century, she was put at a disadvantage because she now had to now find a father for the child in order for her and the child to avoid public scrutiny in the patriarchal society where having a father figure or more so his name was crucial. In this paper, I will be looking at the problem of feminine passivity in the Marquise of O and how this is shown

Feminists argue that women have had to struggle to overcome the patriarchally structured churches. While scholars in ecclesiastical history and related fields have undoubtedly been influenced by the huge developments in both women’s history and gender history in the larger arena of historical scholarship, they have also been influenced by the questions raised by feminist theologians about the viability of women remaining within the Churches and the outworking of Christian doctrine in the women’s lives.

Because Marinella could complete her formal education, she was exposed to the popularized literature, art, and political climate of Venice in the early renaissance. This allowed her to directly experience the misogynist arguments that would influence her feminist ideas. The Nobility and its respective advocacy for women serves as a direct response to Passi’s Defects of Women. In Lucrezia Marinella and the ‘Querelle des Femmes’ in Seventeenth Century Italy written by Paola Malpezzi Price and Christine M. Ristaino, Passi’s treatise is analyzed: Passi satirizes intellectual women, and comes to close to suggesting that women are different species. He asserts that women are like animals because both women and animals are devoid of reason and virtue (Malpezzi Price and Ristaino, 108). These claims of Passi set a precedent for the argument of Marinella in The Nobility. She focused primarily on the nature of women and argued that women were superiority of men. Commenting on the extreme nobility and virtue of women, Marinella contends that because women are the nobler sex, they inevitably perform their duties better

Presenting literature to the public that is meant to be a commentary on social or political issues, masked under the guise of entertaining and fictional, is a tool implemented by authors and activists for centuries. While not all satire is as overt as Jonathan Swift’s suggestion that we eat the babies, it does not diminish the eyebrow raising suggestions that are conveyed once the meaning has been discovered. In Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun and Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina, the established expectations of the female role within society are brought into question then directly rejected. These expectations establish that women should be deferential to men, morally unblemished, and virtuous at all times. Men, however, are not held to these expectations in the same way. The masculine roles assumed by Isabella and Fantomina demonstrate a private rebellion against the established patriarchal society as it warns against the under-estimation of women and proves that women exist independently.

In the Spanish debate about women, male defenders were demonstrating what they as the authors described as honorable and chivalrous behavior. While most defenses utilized the same rhetoric used to defame women, they focused on glorifying women. The authors of various defenses targeted writers such as Giovanni Boccaccio on the dualities of defamation and defense, along with other defamers like Pere Torrellas who wrote an apology after writing his diatribe. I propose that the rhetoric in defenses of women became a catalyst for those who were eager to equate behavior with religion. They used this duplicitous behavior as justification for defining what "good Christian behavior" should be and justified assigning nobility only to members of chivalry

Gillian Clark’s book on, Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles is a patchwork constructed from the legal and medical texts of the era. Clark makes it abundantly clear; that this book is like a kaleidoscope of the somewhat colorful and comical limited written knowledge of women of the period. In most cases the history was recorded by the biased slant of the male-dominated society. Clark points out in her introduction,

In the community that Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron is set in, females are held at a lower social ranking than males. As with most communities up till relatively recently in the past, women were not permitted to have a significant role in the community, other than that of a wife and matriarch. In The Decameron, Boccaccio shows that while they may not have notable social ranking, females do have an advantage in most aspects of the male-female relationship. Even though the tales deal with a range of subjects, when Boccaccio makes a comparison between men and women, it is apparent that he advocates women as the superior sex in terms of both right and wrong. When studying tales where Boccaccio features male-female relationships, it appears that females are dominant, more licentious, and more guileful. Moreover, on the occasions where the male character attains victory or outshines the female, the male typically reach success through deceitful means. For the most part, it is fair to say that Boccaccio does depict women as surpassing men in many aspects−some favorable, and some in the negative.

The role of women in Othello by William Shakespeare is undeniably cliché and expected as a sign of time the play was written. However, the exposure and analysis of the marginalization of women in literature although seemingly unnecessary, is essential in order to completely eliminate the societal norm that was once unquestioned. Characterized for the most part as submissive weaklings, there are characters such as Emilia who deteriorate the social and implicative barriers created by gender stereotypes in one way or another.

The opening chapter briefly introduces the social background of this novel and roughly analyses the social atmosphere of the Eighteenth Century English society and the position of females in the community and literary field. The second chapter analyses the patriarchal phenomenon that females could be traded as commodities and the male could be the absolute authority in the family. The last chapter analyses the definite life path and the certain miserable destiny of females under the social pressure.

Firstly, in Brandt’s poem “missionary position (2),” she writes “there was a great crashing in my / ears the day God became man & the / last heavy link of the great command / came tumbling to earth i became my / own mother” (29). This connects to Irigaray’s ideas that because man is separate as a gender to women, he and God are not defined by the female. Moreover, because there is no woman God, women’s connection to the infinite is tied to the virgin mother and that she can only become divine through her son’s inherent perfection (Medd, March 20). Furthermore, Sawai’s short story, “The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sun Deck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts,” explores the imagination and what is seen to be impossible in the world as a possibility in a fictive text. That is, words have multiple meanings and truths (Medd, March 24). Irigaray discusses how the imaginary stage is essential in how women define experiences. While the symbolic stage – the law of the father – centres male-embodied experiences into language, the imaginary stage emphasizes the body and experimenting with the impossible (Medd, March 17). As well, this narrative redefines the self within the existing symbolic order, adding a shock factor with the beliefs that we have internalized (Medd, March 27). For example, Sawai writes Jesus with sexually charged imagery and with intertextuality of Christian verses, such as “He kissed me on my mouth. Then He flicked my nipple with His finger” (31). This shock, utilized with other literary techniques, demonstrates that Irigaray’s ideas of the symbolic order and the imaginary stage are crucial in order for women writers to project their identities and

Throughout history, there have been social hierarchies imposed upon society. Perhaps one of the most influential was the imposition upon women during the Renaissance era. Women during the Renaissance patriarchy were expected to be proper, pure, and above all else, mindful of the men in their life. In her essay, “Women in Othello”, Farah Karim-Cooper argues that William Shakespeare’s play, Othello, creates complicated dynamics and roles for the women within it, due to the fact that Shakespeare himself did not believe that women fit easily within the roles that they had been assigned. This essay will seek to prove, in agreeance with Karim-Cooper, that Desdemona and Emilia do not, in fact, fit neatly into the boxes that the Renaissance

During the Middle Ages, there were strict gender roles for men and women; men were seen as active figures of authority in both the household and society, whereas women were largely confined to the domestic realm and expected to submit passively to men. These gender roles resulted in a strict gender binary which held the belief that each sex was born with a set of traits that made them distinctly masculine or feminine. Accordingly, the society in the thirteenth-century old French fabliau “La Dame Escoillée” upholds these medieval attitudes towards men and women. Throughout the fabliau, the speaker portrays a patriarchal society which privileges men over women and is governed by prescribed gender roles that men and women are expected to adhere to. In the beginning of the story, the knight is feminized through his obedience to his wife, while his wife assumes a traditional male gender role of dominance and authority. The wife’s rejection of a traditional female role is later passed on to their daughter, who attempts to gain authority over her husband in her own marriage. As a whole, the fabliau is driven by challenges of masculine social authority, with a central focus on violence against women as means of asserting masculine dominance. Moreover, the story’s theatrical excess of male and female gender roles calls attention to the performativity of gender, in which gendered behaviour is learned and enforced to shape individuals into idealized masculine and feminine subjects. In

Tobias Foster Gittes says that: “Boccaccio’s ideal society is not an orgiastic colony dedicated to serving the senses nor is it found on the upper reaches of Mount Asinaio where Filippo Balducci preaches his austere creed of abstinence from all worldly pleasures”. (Gittes,29) Marilyn Migiel asserts that: “Boccaccio provides women with the opportunity to speak their desire but the voice of female desire appears to emerge more clearly when female desire is consistent with male desire”. The centrality of sexual difference is emphasized through the gendering of the narrators in Boccaccio’s masterpiece, which depicts how social and discursive power is divided between sexes. The fictional storytellers of the Decameron are marked by their gender and by their express views on sexuality and sexual difference”.(Migiel,82) Migiel makes the case that the stories also“Appear to open up the possibility of the expression of female desire at the same time that they describe severe limits placed on the way in which women can speak out”.

Giovanni Boccaccio sets The Decameron in a time period when women are regarded as holding lower social position than men in a community. In the Biblical text, the roles of women are almost always severely restricted. Women are not allowed to hold power or have a significant position in a society, but to maintain in the positions of wives and mothers, who only care about family. In The Decameron, Boccaccio reveals that women could hold an upper hand role in the relationship of male and female. Boccaccio exceeds the roles of women, contrary to church teaching, by emphasizing their humanity as a mean of increasing acceptance to women’s dignity.