Gender Role Lense In The Dinner Party

“The Dinner Party” Analysis “The Dinner Party” is a very intriguing short story. It is about a party in India with many important guests and an American naturalist. They are having a spirited discussion about men have more nerve control than women, when the American naturalist notices that the hostess and servant find something unfavorable in the dining room. The servant then silently puts out a bowl of milk-snake bait. The observant naturalist finds the room to be empty, so assumes that the only spot the snake can be is under the table. After that, he challenges the guests to stay still for 5 minutes and in the last 20 seconds he sees the cobra emerge out of the corner of the table and once it is out of the door, he locked it outside. After the snake was out the naturalist asks the hostess how she knew the snake was under the table, and she answers, “Because it was crawling across my foot”. Now that you know what the story is about, I will be analyzing “The Dinner Party” through 2 lenses: the New Criticism Lense and the Gender Role Lense. First I

First, the author conveys how much more power the men have than the women in this time period. It states, “army officers and government attaches and their wifes…”. This shows that the men seem to have more power because they have position in the workforce while the women are just labeled as “their wives”. Next, this story doesn’t make women seem like objects, but the characters make the women seem like they are less superior than men. The characters conversations they seem to have a lot of sexism in them. Lastly. In “The Dinner Party”, women are socialized to be scared of the smallest things while men have more nerve control. In the beginning of the story this was how women were perceived to be, but at the end we find out that the most courageous person around the table was actually the hostess, who kept calm even with the snake on her