The Professor 's House By Willa Cather

By investigating the gender roles of the Victorian Era in Jane Eyre and looking at the more modern presentation of gender roles in The Eyre Affair, a clear understanding of these author’s intentions to expose the gender issues can be seen. Jane Eyre is a classic novel in which orphan Jane opposes societal expectations by becoming an intelligent,

In the story “The Student’s Wife” written Raymond Carver tells about the difficulties and problem in the relationship between Nan and Mike. Carson descriptively describes Nan, the wife, who is a mother that is full of responsibilities for taking care of her family and be the financial supporter in the family, and Mike, the husband, who is a student and in need of receiving enough sleep for the next day. The author explained that the character's are facing their own difficulties because Nan is going through a rough time and stressing about life since she wantss a luxurious, easy going life; meanwhile Mike is trying to his best to satisfy his wife and be there for her, but at the same time he wants to get enough rest. In the short story, the characters life encompasses confinement, desperation, and powerlessness.

A dream is something not actually present to our senses, but rather mentally through our mind. A large number of people dream about the outcome of life rather than facing upon the challenges coming their way. Dreams over power people's sense of the world and in this case the protagonists’ from the two texts “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant and “The Landlady” by Margaret Atwood, spend a fair amount of time dreaming of their prosperities while having a difficult time achieving it.

Cather's “The Garden Lodge” is about a woman named Caroline Noble whose husband, Howard, asked her if she would like to demolish their old garden lodge and replace it with a summer house. The conflict in the story is Caroline is not sure if she wants to knock down the old garden lodge because it brings back memories of when opera singer Raymond d'Esquerre, spent a month at their place. The resolution is that Caroline decides to go on with building the summer house and demolishing the garden lodge. The author uses flashback to explain how Caroline grew up and also when she reminiscences about her time with Raymond.

While becoming a valedictorian can be an honor to those who receive the title, others are debating whether or not valedictorians should continue to exist, or if it should switch from being exclusive to one person in a high school senior class to multiple high-achieving students with similar scores, GPAs, and effort shown throughout their high school tenure. In “Best in Class” by Margaret Talbot, the author emphasizes the idea that having only one valedictorian motivates students due to the prestige associated with the title, as shown through her use of logos and ethos throughout her essay.

Top students across the nation compete for the title of valedictorian each year, although very few actually receive it. Much to the detriment of the students, the competition can become sophomoric and pointless yet remaining intense and cut throat. In her article, “Best In Class”, Margaret Talbot conveys the message that the competition of valedictorian has unfavorable consequences through her use of diction and testimonies.

As Willa Cather’s novel unfolds, it highlights the prejudice that society holds of women during this time period. My Antonia defies gender roles by depicting women as stronger and independent, whilst men are shown to be weaker individuals. Throughout the novel, it is seen that Antonia and Jim do not meet societal expectations. The author paints her female characters — such as Antonia — as strong and decisive and Jim as passive and indecisive.

Considering I am one of the only two males in the Intro to Women’s Literature class, I felt moved to touch on Willa Cather’s flipping of the gender roles in the book O Pioneers! I will be using my own opinion in this essay, along with textual evidence to back up my claims. I will also be establishing connections between Cather’s portrayals of herself within the themes and characters in the book.

In the novel My Antonia author Willa Cather appealingly portrays characters that disregard stereotypical gender roles. Not only in the main characters, Antonia Shimerdas and Jim Burden, but also in many of the lesser characters presented in the novel. The relevance of these non stereotypical gender roles become apparent in the unfolding of the characters through Jim’s narration. This novel analyzes the changes in young women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries towards traditional roles. In this novel we can assume that women like to make their own choices, rather than to follow their expected roles. We see the typical gender role again when Antonia is surviving on her own while still being able to take care of her family. Her hard work and sincere concerns allow forgiveness of her masculinity at home.

My Antonia is a novel published in 1918 by Willa Cather. This novel tells the story of Antonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant in Nebraska in the late 1800s. Although My Antonia is fictional, it is based on Willa Cather’s youth in Nebraska. As Jim Burden did in the book, Willa Cather moved from Virginia to Nebraska as a child to live with her grandparents. The town of Black Hawk symbolized Red Cloud in Cather’s youth. Willa Cather also attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

In her stories Lost Lady and My Antonia, Willa Cather explores the ‘woman problem’. She does this by exploring the lives of women through the lens of men who grew up around them. Doing this allows her to highlight how society treats women and men differently, and subtly show this distinction to readers in order to call out the patriarchal double standard that existed in her time, and continues to exist today. In the stories of Marian Forrester and Antonia Shimerida, Willa Cather highlights struggles women face when they deal with both financial and sexual ruin. Marian Forrester faces financial ruin when she and her husband find themselves deep in debt. Niel watches – and judges her – as she tries to keep herself afloat. Antonia deals with

“The end is nothing; the road is all” is a quote by Willa Cather. It basically means, don’t worry about your destiny, enjoy the journey. I agree with this quote 100% because of some of my own personal experiences that have taught me that the end result is far less important than everything it takes to get there.

Willa Cather imaginatively went against the “norms” of the society that she lived in, in her famous work My Antonia, she expressed ideas that were very different than what was universally believed regarding the roles of women; Cather redefines women through her exploration of conflict, setting, and characterization.

Jane Eyre, often interpreted as a bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age story, goes further than the traditional “happy ending,” commonly represented by getting married. Instead, the novel continues beyond this romantic expectation to tell full the story of Jane’s life, revealing her continual dissatisfaction with conventional expectations of her social era; as a result, many literary critics have taken it upon themselves to interpret this novel as a critique of the rigid class system present in 19th century Victorian society. One literary critic in particular, Chris R. Vanden Bossche, analyzes Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre through a Marxist lens, asserting the importance of class structure and social ideology as historical context and attributing this to the shaping of the novel as a whole. This approach of analysis properly addresses Brontë’s purposeful contrast of submission and rebellion used to emphasize Jane’s determined will for recognition as an equal individual.

In the two excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” she compares a daily meal at a men’s college to a meal at a women’s college. In the Woolf “Two Cafeterias” there is an underlying attitude towards women’s place in society that is made evident by Woolf in the two passages. Her support of women’s equality is blatantly seen in her writing.