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Buried Child Analysis

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Recommended: Gender Issues In Literature

Abstract: Both the authors George Eliot and Sam Shepard have created women characters with certain flaws in them. Though centuries apart, their characters especially women have displayed some immoral act that has brought shame to their families and the society. Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede ends up committing the act of infanticide due to immaturity and lack of guidance while on the other hand Halie in Buried Child is a modern woman who enters into an incestuous act with her son, that results in the murder of the infant that had been just born. Eliot has embodied the personality of Hetty born out of a chasm of insignificance to a place of significance with the aid of an unlawful relation with someone of a superior rank. Hetty eventually gains maturity at the time of her pregnancy. She finally confesses to the crime with the aid of Dinah. Halie searches for another man power …show more content…

Her situation is similar to Dodge fighting for her position and finally she withdraws back to her realm upstairs, a sign of her dominance which stand for her seclusion. Halie accomplishes those female stereotypes that build up the patriarchal power and provide oneself the thematic position to women According to Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch,“Halie represents as female stereotypes, “[s]he is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all women. She is of neither sex, for she has herself no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence. ” (67) Halie in the play has been represented as a sexual entity for men, a woman of unrestrained and subdued sexual cravings owing to the reality that her spouse Dodge according to Ann C. Hall in A Kind of Alaska: Women in the Plays of O’Neill, Pinter and Shepard is, “ old, feeble, and impotent” (56). Halie relates her one of the past experiences with the

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John Updike’s “A&P” demonstrates through several methods the struggle that unwritten principle can place on women in their search for individuality and personal freedom from oppression. Sammy’s thoughts demonstrate this very concept, as well as Queenie’s actions as an independent woman, and the unfair and morally unjust establishment of a woman’s place by the oppressive male characters. With these ideas, Queenie is clearly represented as an innocent feminist who is ultimately shunned by her male oppressors. Sammy, the typical male totalitarian, is very much condescending towards the story’s female characters, automatically assuming ignorance on the part of them.

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