While Ishiguro’S Seminal Novel Never Let Me Go Explores

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.

Contemporary novels have imposed upon the love tribulations of women, throughout the exploration of genre and the romantic quest. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their eyes were watching God (1978) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (2000) interplay on the various tribulations of women, throughout the conventions of the romantic quest and the search for identity. The protagonists of both texts are women and experience tribulations of their own, however, unique from the conventional romantic novels of their predecessors. Such tribulations include the submission of women and the male desire for dominance when they explore the romantic quest and furthermore, the inner struggles of women. Both texts display graphic imagery of the women’s inner experiences through confronting and engaging literary techniques, which enhance the audiences’ reading experience. Hurston’s reconstructions of the genre are demonstrated through a Southern context, which is the exploration of womanhood and innocence. Whilst Woolf’s interpretation of the romantic quest is shown through modernity and an intimate connection with the persona Clarissa Dalloway, within a patriarchal society.

Charlotte Mew explores the theme of lack of intimacy during the course of her poem, The Farmers Bride. Various techniques are used to represent the stilted relationship the speaker and his ‘maid’ succumb to. Likewise, The Manhunt, written by Simon Armitage uses various metaphors and semantic fields of war and anguish to illustrate the speaker’s yearning to ‘feel the hurt’ her partner is experiencing and take the pain away. Although, the ambiguous ending doesn’t satisfy this.

The theme of education is strong in all the past readings and research throughout the class. Institutionalized learning versus self-learning and the fact that education through institutions can sometimes fail the individual in the sense of systematic learning compared to academic knowledge. In Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, the institution of Hailsham helps shelter the clones, yet inhibits them. In Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Creature learns languages from his neighbors. The lack of an academic system causes a form of self-teaching. While self-learning is a form of self-realization as mentioned in Walter Kirn’s article “Lost In Meritocracy” Kirn learns from his experiences, Ellison from Invisible Man learns “street smarts” similar to the clones in Never Let Me Go in which the clones are also self-taught. In Frankenstein, the Creature learns from Victor, who is a selfish man who never loves the Creature. A cultured education is stemming from a higher self of education, which is self-experience enlightenment, instead of academic institution whose instructors do not know how to convey the information correctly in the example in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, the guardians not being able to teach the clones of their origins or properly educate them to be human. Consequently, producing the clones have a wrapped sense of information and education which makes them unnatural in mannerisms.

Gwen Harwood’s poetry is very powerful for its ability to question the social conventions of its time, positioning the reader to see things in new ways. During the 1960’s, a wave of feminism swept across Australian society, challenging the dominant patriarchal ideologies of the time. Gwen Harwood’s poems ‘Burning Sappho’ and ‘Suburban Sonnet’ are two texts that challenge the dominant image of the happy, gentle, but ultimately subservient housewife. Instead, ‘Burning Sappho’ is powerful in constructing the mother as violent to reject the restraints placed on her by society, whilst Suburban Sonnet addresses the mental impact of the female gender’s confinement to the maternal and domestic sphere. Harwood employs a range of language and

In Charlotte Mew’s ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ and Simon Armitage’s ‘The Manhunt’, difficult relationships are presented by speakers who are dealing with an emotionally closed partner. Both poems explore how relationships are affected by mental health issues.

Thorough examination of the character's perspective, themes of insecurity, and the authors implicated message from text to reality reveals that "They're not my husband" by Raymond Carver is bleak and weak in comparison to Dino Buzzati's “The Falling Girl” when discussing the adversity of women to uphold appearances in society.

Many wifes throughout the years have endured countless amounts of persecution from their husbands, but some men take it to a whole new level. Two male authors, Henrik Ibsen and Robert Browning, brought female hardships to light in the nineteenth century. Ibsen’s 1879 play, A Doll’s House, was so controversial at the time that he was forced to write a more pleasant ending in which Nora returned after having left Torvald. Browning’s poem, “My Last Duchess”, written in 1842, showed the immoral perspective of a Duke who had his wife murdered merely because she did not preserve her pleasant personality singularly for him. It was influential writers such as these who eventually gave feminism a kick start. The two husbands in these stories share a vast amount of similar characteristics. Despite the fact that Torvald loved his wife, and Duke had murdered his, both of them exhibit extreme authoritative and egoistic behaviors.

Through rich imagery and a comic context Shakespeare uses characters to explore his ideas about love and marriage, using relationships to show the trials of love. In his play Shakespeare makes Beatrice and Benedick the critics of love and through them the modern audience is shown how Elizabethan society maltreats the female role and how the male code of honour and pride can lead to devastation.

The novel The House on Mango Street is filled to the brim with women who are unhappy and unsatisfied with their lives. Readers meet wives who are destined to spend their lives in the kitchen, mothers who waste away cleaning up after their kids, and girls who are stuck in a hole that they can’t escape. Through Sandra Cisneros’s use of literary devices such as motifs, symbolism, and imagery, we are able to learn that the women end up in these situations by conforming to femininity, and we find the theme of women are often held back by their own gender roles.

There is a similar theme running through both of the poems, in which both mistresses are refusing to partake in sexual intercourse with both of the poets. The way in which both poets present their argument is quite

A mother teaches her daughter at an early age about values and morals. Most lessons reflect society’s expectations about what it means to be a woman. Throughout Kincaid’s poem titled Girl, I noticed the use of “how to”, followed by “duties” of a woman. Kincaid’s poem is flooded with variety of emotions, and I feel a personal connection to it. Reading the poem the time setting was in the past days. Women did not take a stand, and felt

“The Devil’s Wife” by Carol Ann Duffy is a tragic and powerful poem. Written in the form of a dramatic monologue, Duffy adopts the persona of Myra Hindley, the notorious Moors Murderer. The poem consists of five individually titled sections, each describing an individual part of Hindley’s experiences from meeting Brady to feeling sorry for herself while sitting in her prison cell. At the end of her life. Themes relating to avoiding responsibility, self-pity and her fear of society’s reaction to her crimes are explored as Duffy creates an effective persona.

‘The World’s Wife’ is a collection of poems by Carol Anne Duffy published in 1999. Throughout Duffy’s collection of the poems she represents women from history, myths and fairy tales, particularly those whose stories tend to be defined by men, or who have only a cameo appearance in male-dominated scenarios. ‘The Worlds Wife’ collection explores the themes of sexism, inequality and stereotypes, which women, sadly still face in modern society. In Duffy’s collection some poems look at the story of the man from a woman’s perspective, such as the poem ‘Mrs Aesop’. Other poem’s stories have been slightly altered like ‘The Kray Sisters.’ As we already know the Kray Twins are two male English gangsters from the East End of London during the

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” comments Lysander of love’s complications in an exchange with Hermia (Shakespeare I.i.136). Although the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream certainly deals with the difficulty of romance, it is not considered a true love story like Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare, as he unfolds the story, intentionally distances the audience from the emotions of the characters so he can caricature the anguish and burdens endured by the lovers. Through his masterful use of figurative language, Shakespeare examines the theme of the capricious and irrational nature of love.