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Gender Norms In 19th Century Literature

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Men are better, stronger, powerful, and more educated—at least that’s what the 19th century would claim. Clearly, a re-occurring theme throughout these works of literature from the 19th century is women/gender rules/roles in society. Gender norms is something that highly interests me, and focusing on this theme throughout literature is interesting because we see the common idea of women being inferior, while men get to live life as being superior. While many works of literature focus on following this theme, there are occasional breaks in the pattern that makes a reader question how an independent woman is possible for that time period. Focusing on Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, we see (or can argue) that this book demonstrates the need …show more content…

In a different article, another quote reads, “The ideology of Separate Spheres rested on a definition of the ‘natural’ characteristics of women and men. Women were considered physically weaker yet morally superior to men, which meant that they were best suited to the domestic sphere” (Hughes). Analyzing these two quotes side-by-side is interesting because a reader can begin to realize that there is no escape from gender norms and expectations; a woman can’t escape marriage—she has to get married or be disowned. Even though the church required a “yes,” it was a forced “yes” because a woman knew what would happen if she said “no.” On the other hand, after she is married, she had a life of being a housewife to live for, which can be awful on its own. The idea of separate spheres is interesting because it shows how little interaction a couple can have, and it makes someone question if they actually love each other, or if they’re married because that was expected of them because of their gender

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I think the portrayal of woman in popular literature does not change much in the thirty years. In both the book The Natural and Christine, woman are used as a tool to depict the characteristics of the male main characters. In The Natural, the role of Memo Paris is to reveal the naïve and innocence of the main character Roy Hobbs. Memo represents evilness in the book and it affects Roy negatively. In Christine, the “strange car” Christine is presented as a female character.

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Hester Prynne goes against her society 's look on gender. When she has Pearl which is another man 's daughter. Hester keeps her daughter even though it went against what God said back in that time but she gave her daughter everything she needed. She never gave up on herself she kept on giving everything she had so she wouldn 't cave into what people thought. Her and Dimmsdale found something special in each other and went on to move to England together with Pearl.

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1061 Words | 5 Pages

In the 19th century, the cult of domesticity reigned sovereign in the homes of white middle and upper-class citizens. A woman’s place in society was to stay at home and play the role of the devoted, upstanding housewife. The woman was expected to keep order in the home, remain quiet and submissive, and provide the moral backbone of society. This phenomenon fueled the men’s argument, citing that since a woman’s place was in the home, she was innately more delicate and clearly unfit to receive the same rights as a man. Truth dispels the idea of “true womanhood” by repeating her titular phrase “and ain’t I a woman?”

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1811 Words | 8 Pages

Women have fought for ages in order to be able to gain the same rights and freedoms as men for years dating all the way back to the 1700s. Then, leading up to the 1800’s the Victorian era began when women were assigned their position in society of cleaning the house, taking care of the children, and keeping to themselves and the household running. This can be seen as a direct correlation between women and how they are portrayed in the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott. The women in this novella are seen as the lowest class of society and have little to no intelligence. They are meant to stay at home and keep things in order while the men go out and work and live in the flatland.

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644 Words | 3 Pages

Often times in Anglo- Saxon literature, the main story revolves around the male characters not because of any other reason than that men were considered to be more powerful and important. This just shows the importance of the male gender back in 1000 A.D. Although not central to the plot, Hygd, Grendel’s Mother, and Hildeburh all have influential roles throughout the poem.

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283 Words | 2 Pages

1. In Victorian society women for better understanding were living in man’s world. While they no longer had to stay home and clean and cook all day, their presence in working society came with no real voice. For that reason many of them were underpaid and treated unfairly compared to their male counterparts.

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447 Words | 2 Pages

A woman was controlled by her parents throughout her childhood, and then handed directly into the hands of a husband, whom she most likely had no chosen herself. Women who did not marry for whatever reason were likewise granted no independence of thought and action, living under subjugation in the home of a male relative or in a convent, where a woman could become a nun, the only career accessible to the gender. Women were frequently discouraged from participating in the arts and sciences, and thus the world will never know the full literacy and artistic potential of an age in which the spirit of expressions was perhaps the defining characteristic. Only women of the highest class were given the chance to distinguish themselves, and this is only rarely. For the most part, the wives of powerful men were regulated to the tasks of sewing, cooking, and entertaining.

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272 Words | 2 Pages

In nineteenth century, a tremendous movement start to appear which has changed the life of many women around the world. The feminist movement gave an oppression women that were stripped of their simplest right by a patriarchal society. Thus, they gained equal gender rights and their writing start to be appreciated, their context contained the suffering that they lived, equality, and many topics related to the miserable and hard life they lived. Indeed, literature was the mirror of this oppression, women in their writing discussed a various aspects of women life, feelings, thinking, their perspectives, and intelligence. Therefore, in my opinion, I think women cannot read literature without adopting a militant feminist position.

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1285 Words | 6 Pages

Religion is a major part in the people's lives in this time era, and is an extremely powerful means to manipulate the human's thinking and actions. Churches took the lead in making up social rules and standards, and supervise that people follow them. The society's fundamentals are laid down by the church and are seen as the morally truthful guidelines of life. In the 19th century, the church taught that women had to submit to men, and therefore, strengthen the structure of the patriarchal society. As Sarah explains herself to the minister, she also reveals her standpoint to the society that as long as what she does doesn't go against God's will, other people has no right preventing her.

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1483 Words | 6 Pages

These women can outrun, outsmart and reproduce asexually better than men. So, why are the men in power in the late 19th century refusing rights to women if in fact women are the superior of the genders. To those men, they “do not allow our women to work. Women are loved—idolized—honored—kept in the home to care for the children.” Gilman shows that women are capable of more than that and can exceed the capabilities of means that they can function without them.

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1498 Words | 6 Pages

In our present generation, the idea of a separation between men and women really is not considered. We live in a culture where a person gets to choose sexual orientation, sexual preference, and even alter sex chromosomes. Due to of the advancement in our science, sociology, and psychology, sexism is arguably obsolete. I say all of that and an educated reader may be thinking “This girl is so wrong and has no clue what she is talking about because sexism does exist.” Well, it does, but not in the same way that it existed in medieval times.

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1613 Words | 7 Pages

The portrayal of Women as the Weaker Sex Throughout Literary Works The portrayal of the female gender in literary works has changed considerably over the years. Nowadays, it is unacceptable to talk about women as if they were secondary citizens, it is such a touchy subject that if you make a wrong comment you could get into deep trouble. However, portraying women as a weaker sex has been a normative thing for books written before the 21st century. Being books from past centuries, the 20th and 19th respectively, 5th business and Pride and Prejudice give us a good idea on how society had set standards and expectations for women. Although, these novels were written almost a hundred years apart, both share similarities in their women characters being treated as objects.

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1633 Words | 7 Pages

In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft expressed what would be the constant struggle of women for the following centuries to come: “I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves”. This quotation, taken from in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, strongly illustrates how difficult it was for women to emancipate themselves from men with no ability to act upon their futures. However, when changes happened to improve the daily lives of women in Britain, one might think that those progresses meant the beginning of equality and thus, the end of difference –of being treated otherwise. Yet, difference remained. Therefore, in order to understand this phenomenon, we shall answer to the following question: Why women kept being marginalized despite the adjustments made to establish equality between men and women?

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1058 Words | 5 Pages

If we have a look at the morality of the nineteenth century in England, we can observe how the differences between men and women became even more defined. Wives, daughters and sisters were left at home all day to manage the domestic duties. In a society absorbed and caught in the morality imposed by Queen Victoria, the two sexes lived in “separate spheres” where women and men lived their own lives. Women were considered weaker to men, so they were sent to take care of the domestic “sphere”. They used the fact that women had such a big amount of work at home as an argument against women’s right to vote.

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2036 Words | 9 Pages

Society’s view on women of was, “Men were thought to have natures suited to the public world, women to the private.” (Radek) During the eighteenth hundreds, everything married women owned, which Nora was, legally belonged to the husband; therefore, a married woman remained completely reliant on their husbands. During those times, women did not get married for love, but for economic security. (Grear)

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