The Mountain Lion And August Recital

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.

This novel “is a book that truly speaks to adolescents in contemporary language and with teenage characters about adolescent sexuality” (Kaplan 27). Katherine is learning about her sexuality in the novel.

In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls,” there is a time line in a young girl’s life when she leaves childhood and its freedoms behind to become a woman. The story depicts hardships in which the protagonist and her younger brother, Laird, experience in order to find their own rite of passage. The main character, who is nameless, faces difficulties and implications on her way to womanhood because of gender stereotyping. Initially, she tries to prevent her initiation into womanhood by resisting her parent’s efforts to make her more “lady-like”. The story ends with the girl socially positioned and accepted as a girl, which she accepts with some unease.

This trait of a submissive female is reversed within Rrap’s exhibition; Persona and Shadow: Puberty 1984. This piece is an appropriation and deconstruction of Edvard Munch’s work; Puberty 1894 which

In today’s society, young girls are often depicted as petty, immature, and helpless. One cause may be because the stereotype is encouraged and supported through the literature that is read. This stereotype is perpetuated in the following literary works. In Katherine Howe’s Conversion, the local private school for girls, St. Joan’s Academy, is overcome with a mysterious sickness. The sickness is thought to be because of an element in the environment, but it is simply caused by substantial amounts of stress.

Being on the verge of adulthood and having just left the simplicity of childhood, teenagers have always been particularly complex and enigmatic individuals. While most people struggle to see things from an adolescent perspective, Canadian playwright Joan MacLeod is well-known for her accurate portrayal of teenagers. In 2002, she published The Shape of a Girl, a play related to the dramatic story of a young girl named Reena Virk who was tragically affected by bullying, a characteristic behavior of adolescent development. Throughout The Shape of a Girl, MacLeod effectively exploits the Aristotelian dramatic elements and she uses Reena Virk’s story as well as the thoughts that it produces in the antagonist’s mind to portray both adolescent character traits and behavioral patterns.

Arizona seventh-grader Olivia Vella choked up as she stood in front of her last week, delivering a powerful six-minute monologue about the reality of being a teenage girl today.The 13-year-old openly discussed the struggles young people face during those "awkward" middle school years. The peer pressure to look and act a certain way, the bullying ,all the challenges of transitioning into adulthood.

Sexuality has an inherent connection to human nature. Yet, even in regards to something so natural, societies throughout times have imposed expectations and gender roles upon it. Ultimately, these come to oppress women, and confine them within the limits that the world has set for them. However, society is constantly evolving, and within the past 200 years, the role of women has changed. These changes in society can be seen within the intricacies of literature in each era. Specifically, through analyzing The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, one can observe the dynamics of society in regards to the role of women through the lens of the theme of sexuality. In both novels, the confinement and oppression of women can be visibly seen as a result of these gender roles. Yet, from the time The Scarlet Letter was published to the time The Bell Jar was written, the place of women in society ultimately changed as well. Hence when evaluating the gender roles that are derived from sexuality, the difference between the portrayals of women’s oppression in each novel becomes apparent, and shows how the subjugation of women has evolved. The guiding question of this investigation is to what extent does the theme of sexuality reflect the expectations for women in society at the time each novel was written. The essay will explore how the literary elements that form each novel demonstrate each author’s independent vision which questions the

In this essay we will discuss how both this poem and short fiction story, allows us to see how even though these women were put into or were involved in a bad situation, they took power over their bodies and carried on with their lives. “The Girl” by Olds is different from “The Tale of Little Red Riding Hood” by Carter because in “The Girl” is a poem about the power of survival of sexual violence, whereas “The Tale of Little Red Riding Hood” is a short fiction story which talks about a girl embracing her sexuality and taking control; but both this poem and short story address the fact about how both girls, took control of their body. “The Girl” is a poem where Olds tells us about “the outrage at sexual violence yet chronicles the power of survival.” (Old 558) The graphic poem tells us about two girls who were raped in the woods, one of

Angela Carter, an English writer, is best known for her feminist rewriting of classical fairy tales. In her stories she prominently uses themes, such as, virginity, the pornographic image, violence and sex, and many others. Degrading someone to the status of a mere object, in other words objectification, is a theme Angela Carter shows in many of her fairy tales, specifically the objectification of women. According to Carter, the objectification and subjugation of women is part of a “latent context” of fairy tales that she expressed simply by virtue of being a woman. Both “The Tiger’s Bride” and “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” are fairy tales intertextually linked with “Beauty and the Beast” and show the reader Carters’ views on femininity. Not only does Carter use the theme of the

In Lives of Girls and Women, people grow out of reading. As the protagonist Del says, reading “persisted mostly in unmarried ladies, would have been shameful in a man” (Munro, 117). As in The Bell Jar, women in Lives of Girls and Women who are educated and who are professionals are seen as masculine and immature. Mature and marriageable women learn to use make-up and to flaunt their physical beauty. Del overturns this rule by memorizing poetry and doing well academically. Both Esther and Del feel that academic achievements best define and express their sexuality, though not necessarily enhancing their sexual lives. While the bored, rich girls in The Bell Jar spend most of their time painting their nails and getting a tan, Esther feels out of place among the idle and the fashion-conscious. Her friend Doreen admits that at her college, all the girls “had pocket-book covers made out of the same material as their dresses”(Plath, 5). The night that Doreen returns drunken from the apartment of a stranger named Lenny, Esther closes her door on her friend but does not have the heart to lock it. Thus, Esther successfully shuts out the false societal values of female sexuality for a while, but acknowledges that her form of sexuality must co-exist with that of Doreen and of other females in her society.

Hildebrand’s “The Masculine Sea” is found within the journal American Literary Realism; therefore, it can be concluded that her intended audience is: readers of American literature, realist literature, late 19th- and early 20th-century literature, and any overlaps of these. In this essay, Hildebrand uses The Awakening and other sources to argue for her thesis: Edna’s self-identifications of gender, race, and class contribute to how and why she commits suicide. There are two main themes of Hildebrand’s argument for gender identity influencing Edna’s death: Edna’s relationship with Adele, Madame Reisz, and the Colonel, and Edna’s understanding of art and the world. In exploring the gendered expectations and realities of The Awakening and of 19th-and 20th-century women, Hildebrand is engaging with a gender criticism perspective; similarly, because Hildebrand’s arguments are all about deconstructing binaries and unearthing hierarchies, there is also some poststructuralism going on. A final literary criticism that Hildebrand draws on, though more lightly than others, is postcolonialism; because Hildebrand makes connections between the racial and class expectations of masculinity that Edna possesses.

In the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof there are three main women in the play they include Margaret (usually called Maggie), Mae and Big Mama. These three women play an intricate roll in the play but also have to deal with very misogynistic attitudes toward them. The relationships between almost all of the characters in the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has very misogynistic under tones and overall lack of respect for women. In this essay I will firstly express what the common role of the women was in the 1950’s. Secondly, I will discuss the misogynistic attitudes towards the women. And Finally I will discuss the misogynistic attitudes between the women themselves in this play.

Lastly, the act of “becoming a little woman” can also be evaluated under a feminist critical approach. The implications for what is means to be a little woman are given at the start of the novel. According to Mr. March, becoming a little woman does not simply happen, it is active, “The verbal definition of “little womanhood” begins with Mr. March….the implications are constricting rather than expanding, but the military terminology adds an androgynous note” (Anderson, Here Little and Hereafter Bliss). Mr. March wants his girls to be strong like

The short story collection of Lives of Girls and Women includes eight chapters through which Munro goes through the details of women’s ordinary life and makes this ordinariness extra ordinary to confirm that a woman can reach mental maturity through the observation of other women around her and her vital experience of the events. Munro embedded this fact in the protagonist Del who gains maturity at the end and becomes a creative writer.