scholarly journals Deux figures féminines hors normes de la fin du XIXe siècle – Raoule de Rachilde et Selma de Benedictson

Nordlit ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Cecilia Carlander
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Young Women ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Xixe Siecle ◽  
Xixe Siècle

A year after the French success scandal that Rachilde had with her decadent novel Monsieur Vénus, a novel by the Swedish writer Victoria Benedictsson, Money [Pengar], is published in Sweden in 1885. The two novels focus on young women having to find their identities within society's new possibilities, as well as the new gender roles; developed by the new society. In their relations with both conventional and non-conventional male characters, the two female characters transgress society's former established and given norms. In this article, the aim is to present how two female protagonists, the French Raoule and the Swedish Selma, are given different background conditions and qualities that finally can contribute to picture and explain their outstanding independence. Moreover, the new gender roles and their impact on the two female characters are discussed within themes and terms such as the "new woman", androgynity, sexuality and other explicite ingredients and symbols often discussed in a decadent context. Through the comparisons, this article shows how the two female portraits express the decadent transgressivity, in several aspects similarly, with individual voices, despite their two separate literary milieux.

scholarly journals Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society: Female Protest against Patriarchy

NUTA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 10-17
Author(s):  
Arjun Dev Bhatta
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Patriarchal Power ◽  
The Voice

This study explores social relationship between male and female in Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Pillars of Society”. The first part of the study analyzes a sexist society in which male characters subjugate females through their hegemonic power. The female characters appear meek, submissive and voiceless. The second part of this study examines the revolutionary role of the female characters who raise their voice against all-pervasive patriarchal power. They protest against male formulated institutions which have kept women voiceless and marginalized. Being dissatisfied with the defenders of patriarchal status quo, Ibsen’s female protagonists come to the fore to challenge prevailing social conviction about femininity and domesticity. They lead a crusade to establish their position and identity as human beings equal to men. In this play, the female characters Lona, Martha and Dina hold a revolutionary banner to protest against male domination of female. In their constant struggle, they win while the male characters become loser. This study analyses the voice of these leading female characters in the light of feminist theory proposed by scholars such as Kete Millett and Sylvia Walby.

scholarly journals Normative Model Of New-Woman: A Discourse Of Ten Female Protagonists Of Urdu TV Drama Serials (2010-2019)

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-138
Author(s):  
Saleem Abbas ◽  
Firasat Jabeen ◽  
Muhammad Askari
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Representation ◽  
Normative Model ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Predominant Form ◽  
Cultural Conservatism

This paper examines the normative model of ‘new woman’ (Dutoya 2018) in Pakistani dramas from the perspective of gender, class, and culture. TV drama is a predominant form of entertainment in Pakistani media. In early Urdu dramas, female characters are infrequently depicted in a progressive way but now, educated, independent, and urban middle-class women can generally be observed in lead and supporting roles. Along with a shift of female representation in Pakistani Urdu dramas, the study discusses the construction of a Pakistani normative model of ‘new womanhood.’ Through a qualitative content analysis of ten female protagonists from Pakistani Urdu TV dramas of last decade (2010 through 2019), I argue that Dutoya’s socially permissible model of ‘new woman’ can be noticed in the majority of contemporary Urdu dramas. In other words, female protagonists are portrayed with diverse attributes of modesty and modernity. I further argue that the idea of ‘new woman’ is not a new phenomenon for the Pakistani society. Unlike a colonial idea of ‘super wife’ and Victorian concept of ‘super woman,’ my assertion is that Pakistani version of ‘new woman’ is a response to western wave of feminism, religious orthodoxy at home, and cultural conservatism prevalent in Pakistan.

“Trust no one”: Narrative Complexity and Character Opacity in Damages

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Michael Butter
Keyword(s):  
Female Characters ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Withholding Information

Abstract This article analyzes the first season of Damages (2007) as an early example of the representation of ‘difficult’ women on television. More specifically, I investigate the relationship between the show’s character conception and its complex narration. I argue that all the major male and female characters on the show are ‘difficult’ in the sense that the audience experiences close alignment but troubled allegiance to them. However, the two female protagonists – top-notch lawyer Patty Hewes and her young and initially idealistic associate Ellen Parsons – are also opaque characters about whose thoughts and plans the audience is largely left in the dark. This opacity is mirrored and enhanced by the narration, which constantly teases the audience by withholding information about the plot, suggests inferences that then turn out to be wrong, and generally provides far more insight into the male characters than into the female characters.

scholarly journals Performing the Female Alternative in Victorian Popular Drama: The “Girl of the Period” and the “Fast Girl”

2021 ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Victoria Puchal Terol
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Women's Movements ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Popular Drama

During the nineteenth century, theatregoing became the favoured entertainment of both the lower and upper classes in London. As Davis (1994, 307) suggests, the plays were a “mirrored reflection” of society, and they had the ability to reflect important socio-political issues on stage, while also influencing people’s opinion about them. Thus, by turning to the popular stage of the mid-century we can better understand social issues like the Woman Question, or the tensions around imperial policies, among others. As such, this article scrutinises the ways in which Victorian popular drama influenced the period’s ideal of femininity by using stock characters inspired by real women’s movements. Two such cases are the “Girl of the Period” and the “Fast Girl”, protofeminists that would go on to influence the New Woman of the fin-de-siècle. We analyse two plays from the mid-century: the Adelphi’s Our Female American Cousin (1860), by Charles Gayler, and the Strand’s My New Place (1863), by Arthur Wood. As this article attests, popular plays like these would inadvertently bring into the mainstream the ongoing political fight for female rights through their use of transgressive female characters and promotion of scenarios where alternative feminine identities could be performed and imagined.

scholarly journals Otcovia, milenci a kamionisti: mužské postavy v prozaickom svete Ivany Dobrakovovej

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zuzana Bariaková
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Specific Role ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Intimate Partners ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Strong Focus

The paper analyses the depiction of male characters in the select texts of the Slovak writer Ivana Dobrakovová. Although male protagonists are not rare in her prose, little attention is paid to them. This literary approach to their depiction is determined by the writer’s strong focus on the main female protagonists – the female characters make the majority in Dobrakovová’s short stories. However, men regularly appear as fathers or intimate partners of her female characters, and these relationships – ranging from informal to institutional – play a specific role in her works.

scholarly journals Engendering New Motherhood: Tactile Exchange in George Egerton’s Keynotes (1893) and Flies in Amber (1905)

2021 ◽  
pp. 68-82
Author(s):  
Isobel Sigley
Keyword(s):  
Short Fiction ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Woman Movement

George Egerton’s Keynotes (1893) is a seminal text of the New Woman movement at the fin de siècle and has garnered significant critical attention over the last four decades. Egerton went on to publish four more volumes of short fiction, with decreasing popularity, the last being Flies in Amber (1905). This article addresses the shortage of scholarship on Egerton’s later writing by assessing the consistency with which she invokes moments of touch and object exchange as a means to radicalise motherhood in two popular and well-known early stories, “A Cross Line” and “The Spell of the White Elf” (Keynotes), and a less-known later story “Mammy” (Flies in Amber). Through tactile exchange, Egerton’s female protagonists establish a maternal network that challenges patriarchal hypocrisy and preserves their New Womanhood. By understanding Egerton’s valorisation of maternity as a “New Motherhood,” this article challenges claims of essentialism and accusations of conventionality in Egerton’s writing while reinstating the cultural value of her later publications.

CASTLE, COFFIN, STOMACH: DRACULA AND THE BANALITY OF THE OCCULT

2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 469-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Holden
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Bram Stoker ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
History Of ◽  
The New Woman

Fools, Fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?— Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)Art is completion; not merely a history of endeavour.— Stoker, Personal Reminiscences (1906)“HE CAN, WHEN ONCE HE FIND HIS WAY,” says Van Helsing of Dracula, “come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it be bound” (211; ch. 18). Recent criticism has claimed similar powers for Stoker’s text, and its relationship to late-Victorian social formations. A wide territory has been staked out. Moving beyond earlier universalizing Freudian readings, Carol Senf sees the anxiety the novel expresses about gender roles as indicative of Stoker’s difficulty in accepting the rise of the New Woman. Talia Schaffer and Christopher Craft read the homosocial relations in the novel in the light of sexological discourses of inversion and the emergence of the homosexual as a “type of life” (Foucault 43); Stephen Arata, noting Stoker’s frequent use of racial metaphors, has seen the text as expressive of a “reverse colonization” in which “the spectacle of the primitive and the atavistic” (“Occidental Tourist” 624) is brought back to a town house near Piccadilly Circus, the hub of the empire.

scholarly journals New Woman as Seen in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Lexicon ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 224
Author(s):  
Rheavanya Winandhini ◽  
Rahmawan Jatmiko
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The 19Th Century

This paper discusses the influence of feminism in the classic Victorian novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The New Woman is a feminist ideal that appeared in the 19th century, more specifically amidst the rise of the first wave of feminism. The method of research used in this study covers close reading of the source material and analyzing the characters of the novel through the perspective of the New Woman ideals. The female characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula portrayed the New Woman characteristic to some degree. Women’s independence, intellect, hyperfemininity, and hypersexuality, are some of the aspects of the movement that go against the norm and values of women in Victorian Britain, such as Mina’s “man’s brain” and Lucy’s hyperfemininity, while the Brides of Dracula provide contrast as the oppressed women with their submissive and compliant attitude towards him. Without erasing their representation of these New Woman ideals, Mina and Lucy also portrayed the complexity and dimensionality of being a woman in the Victorian era; their beauty and appeal were praised while their more “unwomanly” aspects present some threats towards men.

scholarly journals Gender Issues and Intricacies in Shobha De’s Select Novels

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-104
Author(s):  
Ollala Srinivas
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
The Other ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
Sexually Active ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Female Figures

Shobha De, a feminist writer, depicts her female protagonists in a forceful way and uses the plot to emphasize her point that personal is not private but political. The protagonists in her works were outspoken critics of conventional society and its rules. They are not the typical women who accept abusive, unsatisfying, or uncomfortable relationships (in all aspects). It could be male dominance, objectification, sexual discontent, passion, or something else entirely. They don't keep it hidden because they believe it is taboo. On the other hand, the male characters are not shown as villains, but it is evident from the plot that they are products of patriarchal society. Gender issues in her works aren't about female oppression in terms of domestic violence; rather, they are about the sexual vacuum that all of the female characters experience. Male characters were traditionally assigned duties such as sexually active, powerful, and have self-identity, but these female figures defy such stereotypes. They represent women by demonstrating that they too have sexual wants, power, and a need for self-identity. As a result, this research focuses on Shobha De’s novels Socialite Evenings (1989), Sisters (1992), Starry Nights (1991), Second Thoughts (1996), which all deal with gender issues. The study not only examines issues but sheds light on the protagonists' struggles to find self-identity.

scholarly journals New Woman as Seen in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Lexicon ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 207
Author(s):  
Rheavanya Winandhini ◽  
Rahmawan Jatmiko
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The 19Th Century

This paper discusses the influence of feminism in the classic Victorian novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The New Woman is a feminist ideal that appeared in the 19th century, more specifically amidst the rise of the first wave of feminism. The method of research used in this study covers close reading of the source material and analyzing the characters of the novel through the perspective of the New Woman ideals. The female characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula portrayed the New Woman characteristic to some degree. Women’s independence, intellect, hyperfemininity, and hypersexuality, are some of the aspects of the movement that go against the norm and values of women in Victorian Britain, such as Mina’s “man’s brain” and Lucy’s hyperfemininity, while the Brides of Dracula provide contrast as the oppressed women with their submissive and compliant attitude towards him. Without erasing their representation of these New Woman ideals, Mina and Lucy also portrayed the complexity and dimensionality of being a woman in the Victorian era; their beauty and appeal were praised while their more “unwomanly” aspects present some threats towards men.

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