Creating a Nonpatriarchal Lineage in Bertha Harris’s Lover

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Christine Godfrey
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Lesbian Identity ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Familial Relations ◽  
Critical Investigation

Bertha Harris' 1976 novel Lover garnered critical attention for its postmodern style, its commentary on lesbian identity, its use of nonlinear time in narration, and its redefinition of familial relations. Yet, one stylistic choice that is most apparent in reading the novel is absent from most critical investigation. Throughout the novel, Harris prefaces each chapter with an epigraph about a female saint, usually consisting of a few sentences on her life and death, yet these prominent pieces have been overlooked by all but one critic in the small pantheon of Lover criticism. This chapter proposes that Harris uses saints' narratives to provide alternative biological and familial connections in her creation of a nonpatriarchal lineage for women who seek to escape the confines of traditional gender roles.

scholarly journals Female Authority And The Representation of Womanhood In H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 322-332
Author(s):  
Shokhan Rasool Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
English Department ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
African Culture ◽  
Postgraduate Students ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Sequential Structure ◽  
History Of ◽  
The New Woman

Haggard’s Ayesha is the continuation of the Victorian dream novel She. H. Rider Haggard's She, subtitled A History of Adventure, is figured to be among top rated books at any point distributed: it had sold exactly 83 million duplicates by 1965. Ayesha (really articulated 'Assha'), subtitled The Return of She, who takes after She in the book, is an amazing and puzzling white sovereign who administers the African Amahagger individuals. Ayesha has enchantment controls and is undying, which makes She a dream experience book. Despite the fact that She and Ayesha were distributed almost twenty years separated, H. Rider Haggard stated that Ayesha was a decision to a two-section book, not a continuation. There is likewise a "prequel," She and Allan (1921). In the two books, an imaginary manager shows an original copy portrayal by Ludwig Horace Holly. In Haggard’s She, considering that some parts of the novel are so comfortable, readers might feel compelled into thinking that they are going through Haggard’s tour in Africa. Fortunately, in any event, when the plot eases back to a nearly gastropod pace, the way Haggard's depicts the African culture and scene conveys the reader along. Ayesha, known as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, first showed up in sequential structure from 1896 to 1897 in the novel She. Ayesha is one of the marvelous, kick-ass lady characters in Victorian writing who represents the misogynist construction of femininity and embodies the femme fatale. This paper is principally concerned about the representation of feminine power and the representation of womanhood in Haggard’s Ayesha. Some questions will be investigated here. Can one consider Ayesha as a “conclusion” or a “sequel” to She since the whole novel replicates the same thematic and structural maneuvers of She? Does Haggard revive Ayesha, the “new woman”, in The Return of She respond to the threat to traditional gender roles? The findings of this study will be beneficial for the researchers, and all the undergraduate and postgraduate students of English department. 

scholarly journals Exploration of Gender Role in Bisheswar Prasad Koirala's Tinghumti

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-24
Author(s):  
Asmita Bista
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Gender Role ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
Traditional Gender Role ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles

Bisheshwar Prasad Koirala’s novel Tinghumti is always tempting for the reader as it still reflects the relevant picture of Nepali society. In this novel the characters defy as well as define the gender roles. Influenced with revolutionary thought they defy the prescribed gender roles; but chained in age old thought they, time and again, define the traditional gender role. This article aims to identify the reasons that drive these characters to defy and define the traditional gender roles. For that Judith Butler’s and Connell’s idea of gender theory has been used. The significance of this study is to contribute a different perspective for the reader to see the novel Tinghumti showing that traditional gender roles are meddled and confirmed in it. The study concludes that in the novel, the characters defy as well as define the socially prescribed gender role because gender is socio-political construction that achieves legitimacy and naturality via perpetual observation and repetition.

Women and Nature in BP Koirala's Sumnima: An Ecofeminist Study

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-142
Author(s):  
Indira Acharya Mishra
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Social Order ◽  
World View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles

The article aims to analyze the connections between women and nature in Bisheshwar Parsad Koirala's novel Sumnima. To examine the relation between women and nature in the novel, the theory of eco feminism has been used. Eco feminism deals with the relationships between women and nature that particularly deals with the domination of women and exploitation of nature in a patriarchal social order. Eco feminist critics believe that issues of women and ecology are interrelated. They critique that the domination of nature by human beings is guided by the patriarchal world view, the same world view that justifies the domination of women. Thus, they resist the exploitation of women and nature. Koirala's Sumnima underscores the patriarchal structure based on dualisms like men/woman, masculine/ feminine, culture/nature, and spiritual/material, which destabilizes the system based on the hierarchy of the traditional gender roles. Thus, the article argues that the novel is written from the perspective of eco feminism. The analysis of the study centers on the depiction of women and nature in the novel. The finding of the article shows that, in patriarchy, women and nature are treated as feminine and they are dominated and exploited. The analysis is significant as it helps to understand the importance of feminine to maintain harmonious relation between men, women and nature.

Ecofeminism and Post-Apocalyptic Environments in Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talia Gukert
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Indigenous Women ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Apocalyptic Literature ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Complete Reversal ◽  
And Gender

This paper examines the significance of post-apocalyptic narratives as a means of expressing deep-seated anxieties about colonialism, capitalism, and cultural erasure in Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning. By viewing the novel through an ecofeminist lens, I seek to illuminate and explain the political changes Roanhorse’s post-apocalyptic world, and how this new environment allows for the transformation of social and gender structures of power. The theory of ecofeminism relies upon the belief that both women and nature are equally compromised and exploited by the patriarchy, constrained by the masculine forces of colonialization and capitalism. By situating her novel in a post-apocalyptic environment, Roanhorse implies that just as the earth has asserted its power over the effects of unrestricted capitalism through the consequences of global warming, Indigenous women have similarly taken back their powers of autonomy, liberating themselves from traditional gender roles. This paper shows how the connection between women and nature is most evident in the novel’s female protagonist, Maggie, who has been able to aggressively deviate from traditional gender norms and expectations due to the apocalypse. Through this complete reversal of common gender tropes in post-apocalyptic literature, Roanhorse demonstrates that the apocalypse has proven to be instrumental in freeing women from the constraints of gender roles, advocating the ecofeminist view that cooperation between women and nature is necessary for the liberation of both.

scholarly journals The Play of Gender Roles in Sheeba Shah’s Facing My Phantoms

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-135
Author(s):  
Asmita Bista
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Document ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Maoist Movement ◽  
Human Attributes

Setting the novel in different time-periods (Rana regime, Panchayat System and Maoist movement), Sheeba Shah’s Facing my Phantoms has depicted the condition of Nepali males and is considered a historical document. This article aims to examine the factors that constrain the male characters to traditional and anti-traditional gender roles. It also studies the consequences faced by the characters while performing and defying gender stereotypes. To address this objective, Butler’s and Connell’s ideas have been used as they have claimed that masculinity and femininity like any other human attributes are fluid; in fact, it is constantly reconstructed in response to socio-political changes under the pressure of social norms. According to Butler, gender is something that is not a corporeal thing, but it is reproducing, changing, and moving. The significance of this article is to find insights in understanding the condition of males in the Nepali society. It concludes that the male characters of Shah’s novel oscillate between traditional and anti-traditional gender roles. Under the social pressure, they perform the roles of an assertive and authoritative father, aggressive and ruthless lover/husband, and rational and responsible son. Likewise, when they get influenced by socio-political changes, they fail to stick to stereotypical gender roles. Consequently, they appear in the emotional, docile, dependent, confused, and unassertive roles.

scholarly journals Women Entrapment and Flight in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”

2016 ◽  
pp. 113
Author(s):  
Azra Ghandeharion ◽  
Milad Mazari
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Ecriture Feminine ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
The Yellow Wallpaper

This paper attempts to yield a critical reading of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), which is one of the pioneering feminist works of American literature. Attempts have been made at finding affinities between the specific characterization of the story and the stereotypical male and female figures as defined by patriarchy and in terms of traditional gender roles. The paper tries to draw on Lacan’s conceptions of language, Cixous’ ideas about écriture féminine, and Freud’s misconception about women’s conditions. Drawing critical attention to this information, the paper focuses on the main unnamed female character and the fact that her anonymity helps the readers, specifically female readers, to identify themselves with her.

scholarly journals Decorating the Performative Body in Tender Is the Night

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alyssa Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Tender Is The Night ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
Societal Changes ◽  
The Way

In Tender Is the Night (1934), Fitzgerald uses clothing and fashion to heighten the sense of time period as well as to enhance the ways in which the world, on both sides of the Atlantic, was changing. However, changes on the surface frequently do not reveal a change in underlying motivations for dress. In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald uses clothing in symbolic ways that allow characters to perform roles to achieve their goals. Through the ways bodies are shaped in the novel, Fitzgerald reveals that clothing, shopping, and perfectly bronzed skin have the power to make great economic statements about oneself. Additionally, clothing in Tender Is the Night demonstrates ways in which traditional gender roles and stereotypes were changing during the modernist era. Though many things had changed during the 1920s, characters continued to use their bodies as blank tablets upon which to write, enacting powerful and purposeful performances that always have rhetorical ends. Fitzgerald’s use of clothing in Tender Is the Night reflects the way that clothing, particularly for those abroad, had the power to demonstrate societal changes in gender roles as well as social class.

Profaning Jewish Mores in Chochana Boukhobza's Un été à Jérusalem

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-91
Author(s):  
Nancy M. Arenberg
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Complex Problem ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
The City ◽  
Traditional Roles

As a transnational Israeli writer, Chochana Boukhobza delves into the complex problem of crossing borders in Un été à Jérusalem (1986), a text which focuses on the unnamed protagonist's trip from Paris to visit her family during the summer months in Jerusalem. Although the narrator had resided in Israel previously, she is forced to grapple with her ‘Otherness’ in Jerusalem, especially as a Jew originally from Tunisia. The narrator's crisis of exile is defined by her sense of disconnection to her family, the city, Israeli politics, and women's traditional roles. In this essay, particular emphasis will be placed on the protagonist's penchant for profaning Jewish cultural and religious practices, which is articulated through a series of corporeal transgressions. To launch this revolt against the patriarchal structure of the nation in Israel, the narrator rejects the submissive role assigned to Jewish-Tunisian women, and, in so doing, dismantles traditional gender roles.

The Shop-Girl Revolutionary in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Mullin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Change ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Local Color ◽  
Literary Naturalism ◽  
Public House ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Marginal Characters

Abstract This essay argues that the complex political resonances of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) can be further elucidated through closer critical attention to one of its more marginal characters, the shop-girl Millicent Henning. Ebullient, assertive, and, for many early reviewers, the novel's sole redeeming feature, Millicent supplies the novel with far more than local color. Instead, James seizes on a sexual persona already well established within literary naturalism and popular culture alike to explore a rival mode of insurrection to that more obviously offered elsewhere. While the modes of revolution contemplated by Hyacinth Robinson and his comrades in the Sun and Moon public house are revealed to be anachronistic and ineffectual, Millicent's canny manipulation of her sexuality supplies her with an alternative, effective, and unmistakably modern mode of transformation. The novel's portrait of ““revolutionary politics of a hole-and-corner sort”” is thus set against Millicent's brand of quotidian yet inexorable social change.

Homosexuality in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams: Demythologising the Imaginings and Universalising the Reality

Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adetunji Kazeem Adebiyi-Adelabu
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Black African ◽  
Sex Preference ◽  
National Allegory ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Sex Orientation ◽  
The Right

Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams offers an extensive treatment of homosexuality, a preoccupation which, until recently, is rare in black African fiction. On this account, as well as its depth and openness, the work has attracted some critical attention. It has been read from a masculinity perspective, as a coming-out novel, as a national allegory, as a work that challenges the notion of fixed sexuality, as a work that normalises same-sex sexuality, and so forth. Unlike these studies, this article examines the representation and disquisition around same-sex preference in the novel, with a view to demonstrating how some myths about homosexuality are exploded in the groundbreaking work, and showing that the narrative could also be apprehended as intellectual advocacy for the right to same-sex orientation.

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