The Left Hand Of Darkness

The speech that I chose to analyze is called, “A Left-Handed Commencement Address” by Ursula K. Le Guin who was a science fiction writer, and has many honorary and awards. She was offered to give this speech for the Mills college class of 1983 for a way to speak in public in the language of women. As I chose my speech, I often thought of why this speech was called a, “left-handed commencement address”. It comes from one of the novels that this specific person wrote called, “The left-hand of darkness”. This novel was known as one of her best works and she is also known as being one of the era’s best female feminist thinkers.

In “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin, we have a world like no other. The reader gets the picture of this first hand from the writer herself in her introduction. She prepares us for a world that not only expands our imagination, but that of our religious and social beliefs themselves with an androgynous world with no war. This world is cold and has its own political as well as natural dangers in of itself.

The role of the patriarchal society and its impact on the oppression of female characters

Since she is speaking on abstract thoughts, such as equality and success, symbolism is a crucial tool in this speech. One of Le Guin's most prominent symbols is “Machoman”. Ursula makes reference in her speech to “Machoman” three times. The use of this symbol is important because it helps to give a name to an abstract concept, inequality. Le Guin uses this concrete form of an non concrete idea to connect with the graduates a feeling of a common enemy. Another example of the way Ursula uses symbolism is to show how challenging attempting to blend in with the male culture can be. She creates this symbolic analogy by comparing adaptation to masculine society with the need to put on a mask in order to breath the air, “We can’t even breathe the air there without masks,” Le Guin then goes on to mention, “And if you put the mask on you’ll have a hard time getting it off,” This implies her opinion that once you have joined the male culture, as women you will lose your sense of

Reading literature, at first, might seem like simple stories. However, in works like William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily,” Katherine Mansfield's “Miss Brill,” and Kate Chopin's “The Storm,” the female protagonists are examples of how society has oppressive expectations of women simply because of their gender.

The advancement of women in society is a remarkable achievement, and the first step to true equality in the world. Despite the tremendous progress, oppression faced in the past should not be forgotten, largely because it is present modern society as well. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, both female relationships and identities are explored to determine the purpose of women. Society's historic tendency to undervalue women is seen more in The Handmaid's Tale than in The Color Purple.

In the late nineteenth century, women were beginning to take a stand for their equal rights in society. The term “new woman” was used to describe these women, openly proclaiming their independence from men. It was a woman’s way to threaten the conventional ideas of society, and to bring about their own changes (Buzwell). Following their well-known suffrage movement, women claimed their freedom sexually, physically, and in the workplace. For many years’ prior, women were expected to be the typical housewife, watching over the house, cooking, and cleaning. They were property of their husbands. During their equal rights revolution, women pursued careers like doctors or lawyers and fulfilling their sexual desires for purposes other than bearing children. As today’s society may never know the struggles and misfortunes during the Victorian era, Dracula leaves a time capsule behind to elaborate on the realities during such a prominent generation (Podonsky). Considering this given criteria, a new woman comes in a variety of forms; some women represent a stronger sexual desire while others demonstrate character traits on equality in work and education. In the case of Dracula, the two main female characters take two different forms; one blatantly sexual and one chaste (Humphrey). Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula portrays the ideas of a “new woman” in a modern society, utilizing Mina’s and Lucy’s characters to display opposite characteristics of the feminist movement which draw attention to

In the modern world women work, vote, run for office and the list goes on. In most aspects, women are equal to men. However, this was not always the case. In centuries past, women were not viewed as being equal to men socially, intellectually, or politically and were thought incapable of accomplishing anything of value. Consequently, many cultures held the view that women were possessions whose only purpose was to be subservient to men. The view of women as mere objects is evident in various works of literature throughout the ages. Two classic works of literature that exemplify this are The Thousand and One Nights and Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of

In his Literary Theory: The Basics, H. Bertens classifies stereotypes of women in literature into a number of categories; dangerous seductress, self-sacrificing angel, dissatisfied shrew, and defenseless lamb, completely incapable of self-sufficiency, or self-control, and dependent on male intervention. Bertens concludes that the primary objective of these women – or “constructions” – is to serve a “not-so-hidden purpose: the continued cultural and social domination of males”. One such novel that came under feminist scrutiny for these particular reasons was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, although this perlustration didn’t occur until 70 years after Stoker originally penned his masterpiece. However, during the mid-1960s, the rise of the feminist

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopian novel The Dispossessed, gender roles are one of the main theme in the novel. The author uses two planets, Anarres and Urras to represent the different form of society, to understand gender roles. In Urras, which is an Earth like world, women are treated as if owned by men. However, in Anarres, a person’s sex is irrelevant to the society, therefore there was an equality of gender. Le Guin’s purpose for this was to make her audience subconsciously think about how society view gender roles by uses the affinity of a visitor, shevek to an Earth-like world to illustrate the disunity of the Earth-like customs. By comparing the two twin planets, Le Guin uses gender role in the novel to critique our society by using

DB 9: Feminism Feminism, or the idea of equality, is currently one of the most controversial topics in our society. Although many groups, especially women, have been attempting to gain equal treatment, recognition, and rights for centuries, complete egalitarianism is still a status yet to be met. However, the past efforts made by individuals who devoted their lives to working towards a just world are not diminished by the fact that we are still on the journey towards equality. Movies such as Shrek and works by authors such as Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft are often considered in discussions about feminism.

In Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market, Laura is saved from death through the bond of Sisterhood: a female power that embodies both traditionally feminine and masculine characteristics and values. Ross Murfin’s essay “What is Feminist Criticism?” feminist criticism, in the study of literature, is described as a criticism that examines how the values and attitudes of patriarchal societies affect the portrayal and expression of women in text (186-194). French feminists have focused on analyzing the way meaning is produced and have concluded that a gender binary is formed by language (186-187). Meaning is created by what a thing is not; for example, men are men because they are not women. The gender binary determines what things are masculine and what are feminine. This essay will adopt a feminist perspective and examine the gender roles (the behaviours, expectations, characteristics and values assigned to each gender by a society’s gender binary) depicted in Goblin Market. The primary focus will be on how gender roles affect the actions and decisions made by Laura and Lizzie throughout the poem and how sisterhood, a construct that blurs the gender binary, is the means that saves Laura’s life.

Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is the story of Genly Ai’s travels to a strange planet called Gethen, or Winter. His mission there is to persuade the nations of Gethen to join an alliance Genly Ai represents called the “Ekumen”. However, his journey is rather difficult due to the great difference in societies from Genly Ai’s home planet, Earth, and this new one. In Gethen, he learns that the people are completely unsexed for the majority of their days. When they are sexed, it is only for a few days and each person is either male or female during this time. The different governments use Genly Ai as a pawn, but in the end they join the alliance. Unfortunately, it comes with the price of his friend’s life.

“Gerald’s Game,” an adaptation of a Stephen King novel by the same title, can be analyzed from the Female Gothic lens, suggesting that the gothic literature mechanisms can also be applied to contemporary tales of female strength and

Lastly, “femininity” refers to behavioural activities or interests that are assigned to the female sex, such as cleaning and cooking (Beauvoir, 617). Although many critics have read her text and become confused due to her stylistic choice to fuse her voice with the voices of famous men, it can be said that the text ultimately leads the reader to begin to question what society sees as a woman (Zerilli, 1-2). Despite Beauvoir’s The Second Sex appearing to recognize the oppression of women throughout the world without giving an actual solution, I will argue that Beauvoir’s evaluation of each “natural” aspect of female oppression allows readers to recognize that the only thing holding themselves back as a woman is society’s unnatural definition of their body, relation to men, and personal freedoms. Of course, when it comes to one's freedom, it is difficult to obtain when your body feels like a