The Portrayal Of Women In 'Young Goodman Brown'

The mother being a local beauty was raised in a fishermen family. She believed everything should be spotless and in order, the way her brothers ran their ships. She was a typical fishermen house wife; she grew beautiful gardens and raised broods of ducks and hens and would go digging in the mud for clams. At one point she might have loved her husband but it was quite evident that she despised him and his books. There were moments when they clashed fiercely with each other and she was disgusted with his inability to retain his children in the fishermen lifestyle. The mother was very ignorant and closed-minded towards other traditions. This is proven when the daughters marry men from different lifestyles and the mother wants nothing to do with them. She believes that they are lazy, dishonest, and the unknown in which she

In "A Sorrowful Woman" the wife is depressed with her life, so much so, "The sight of them made her so sad and sick she did not want to see them ever again"(p.1). This wife and mother has come to detest her life, the sight of her family,

Mary begins the story as a doting housewife going through her daily routine with her husband. She is content to sit in his company silently until he begins a conversation. Everything is going as usual until he goes “ slowly to get himself another drink” while telling Mary to “sit down” (Dahl 1). This shocks Mary as she is used to getting things for him. After downing his second drink, her husband coldly informs her that he is leaving her and the child. This brutal news prompts the first change in Mary, from loving wife to emotionless and detached from everything.

“A Sorrowful Woman” features a superficially simple narration style. “Now the days were too short. She was always busy,” Stylistically clipped, with a clear passive, detached, voice the narration style seems to be a banal, unimportant feature of the text. Yet the exact mendacity that prompts this description actually serves as a prerequisite to developing an understanding for the principal character’s mindset, and consequently the theme of the text. The last passage contains numerous examples of detached narration but the clearest occurs when “She was always busy. She woke with the first bird. Worked till the sun set. No time for hair brushing. Her fingers raced the hours.” The concise, third person narration in this segment allows the reader to experience the slightly off viewpoint of ‘the mother.’ Specifically, given the lack of motivation present through the text coupled with the concluding suicide it becomes evident in the text that ‘the mother’ is suffering from depression. Given the societal stigma surrounding mental illness authors generally face an uphill

The short story “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathanial Hawthorne is a story in which the main character, Goodman Brown goes into the forest with an evil purpose and later finds out that it appears to be a meeting with the devil. In “The Man in the Black Suit” by Stephen King, the story is an autobiography about a young boy named Gary who has a frightening encounter with the devil while going on a fishing trip. In both short stories the main character are religious, but a significant difference between them is the way they handle their encounter with the devil. In “The Man in the Black Suit” family plays an important role in Gary’s live and is a big part of his motivation, and in “Young Goodman Brown” his family name, the way the people of Salem look at him and his wife Faith play the most important roles in his lives. Both short stories are very interesting to read and immediately grab your attention. In the short story “Young Goodman Brown”, the story takes place in Salem, which is known for it’s which trials. The short story “The Man in the Black Suit” takes place in the year 1914, in the town of Motton, not long before the First World War. In “young Goodman Brown”, the devil appears to be the figure of a normal old man, but in “The Man in the Black Suit” for example the reader can tell right away that this is not a human being. The main characters both have a different way of dealing with their encounter believes, and that may have been a difference in the outcome of the

Victoria Roubideaux is a seventeen year old girl, who finds out that she is pregnant. She and her mother had a fight in the morning and in the evening, after work, she starts to walk home. “The evening wasn’t cold yet when the girl left the café. But the air was turning sharp with a fall feeling of loneliness coming. Something unaccountable pending in the air.” (31). In that line we see the foreshadowing of her feelings and her mother throwing her out of the house.

The next main factor in the story is society's attitude towards illegitimacy. Any woman who bore a child out of wedlock was treated with disgust and held an air of shame and disgrace. This caused those who did happen to have their children out of wedlock to give them up and send them off to orphanages in hope their child would be alright. A lot of these single mothers tried to send their children to one such orphanage called "The Coram Hospital". An example is when Melissa, a young girl just found out she was pregnant and says "'And Mama? What about Mama? The disgrace. We'll both be thrown out. Destitute." This is a good example of the consequences of illegitimacy. If anybody found out about such circumstances the mother and her acquaintances would be thrown out and homeless. The writer includes this factual information in the story and it entwines

‘The role of women in the gothic genre is as victims always subjected to male authority’, compare and contrast to which this interpretation is relevant to your three chosen texts.

During the story I have come to understand the mother best. She becomes too afraid to take a stand against her husband's tyrannical outburst's, she's happy and content with so little to say and nothing of meager value to prove to her children. The mother has been ravaged by her husband's constant complaining about the smallest of burdens for years, she has adapted to his behavior and has allowed her children to become victims of the insanity.

The common theme is that women are weak and cannot continue to live their life without families in 19th century. From “The Story of an Hour” we can see that the main character, Louise Mallard was happy after knowing her husband was dead. She was celebrating the freedom she obtained because of the death of her husband. In fact, she could divorce with her husband if she did not love him anymore. Somehow, she did not dare to ask for divorcing. Besides, in “Desiree’s Baby”, the main character, Desiree was weak as she cannot stand for her husband’s mental abuse towards her that he changed his attitude towards her, he talked to her with averted eyes, losing all his love towards her because she was potentially a black. Thus, she went away from L’ Abri with her baby, risking her life and her baby’s

The Gothic genre is an increasingly popular area for feminist studies, showing contrasts in society at the time and the expectations of women within it. In pre industrial times, women were expected to play a subservient role to men, they were expected to marry young and bare children, they would simply care for their husbands and support the family, they were denied the right to vote or own property and were expected to be the innocently silent, supportive backbone behind patriarchal society. It is noted that female characters in Gothic novels and plays often fall into one of two categories: innocent victims, subservient to the strong and powerful

This story is about a wife named Louise Mallard who has heart trouble, so she must be informed carefully about her husband’s death. Her sister, Josephine, is unfortunately the one who has to break the news to newly widowed wife. One of her husband’s friends, Richard, learned about her husband’s death when he was reading the newspaper and heard about the crashing of a train that Brently was on. Louise is devastated when she learns of her husband’s death and runs upstairs to be alone. Louise sits down and ponders about life while looking out the window and hears a vendor yelling what he is selling. Still crying, she looks into the distance wondering what’s next. She is nervous for her life ahead and doesn’t know what she is going to do without her husband. She starts to think about what life is going to be like without having anyone telling her what to do, when to do it, or how to do it. She starts to feel warm inside knowing she is finally free. Louise knows she will become overcome with emotions when she is forced to see Brently’s body. She imagines the years

The short story heavily revolves around the protagonist woman Mary and her depressed son. The two are driving home from the hospital and the tension between them is very high. The reader is told that Mary and her husband Seamus was married for 20 years before conceiving David which resulted in the two being older parents and even more importantly not expected to become parents. Mary can’t comprehend what has made David so depressed though she realises that she may could have been there for him more often when he was growing up. The primary themes in the story is depression and the journey from life to death, furthermore motherly love and family dynamic plays an important role in the story “She smiled at the idea that now she would have two of them for company” (P.3, L. 84). The story is narrated by a third person omniscient narrator, this is evident by the narrator knowing the different character’s thoughts and furthermore the story begins with in media res “Mammy, how do people die?” he had asked, and Mary explained

Gothic Literature is a style of literature popularized during the late 18th century and the early 19th century with the publication of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. This style usually portrays fantastic tales dealing with the horror, despair, the grotesque and other “dark” subjects. Characteristics of gothic literature includes the presence of victims and their victimizers who usually hold immense powers along with their evil purpose. The setting of this kind of literature generally takes place within impenetrable walls, whether physical or mental. This setting creates a sense of hopeless isolation within the victim. The summarization of the characters and situation creates an atmosphere pervaded by a sense of mystery, darkness, oppressiveness, fear, and doom.

Women in the 18th and 19th century were expected to follow the orders of the males in their lives. They were forced into arranged marriages to connect families in a pursuit for social power and they were expected to abide by anything the males in their lives asked of them. Free will was nonexistent. Much gothic literature effectively highlights the women’s expected role of the time. However, another aspect that seems to surface in gothic literature is whenever there is a woman who is not following the social norms, they seem to be the driving conflict behind the plotline and ultimately lead to any present happy ending.