Similarities Between The Shawshank Redemption And The Silence Of The Girls

Cultural context refers to the world of the text, the structures and the values that characterise a particular culture or environment. The characters in narrative texts are often defined and shaped by the world they inhabit, promoting or inhibiting their actions and identities and whether they respond by accepting the world they occupy or rejecting it the plot often focuses on the complex relationships a character forms with the culture they find themselves in. The two stories I have studied are 'The Shawshank Redemption' (TSR) by Frank Darabont and the intertextual novel The Silence of the Girls (SG) by Pat Barker.

Although the historical setting in both TSR and SG is different, the physical setting in the two texts is quite similar. At the

One of the most brutal doings we see at the start of TSR is a “Fat-Ass” being beaten to death by Captain Byron Hadley to showcase who’s in charge here and who’s just a pathetic prisoner. The male rape is constantly mentioned throughout the opening of TSR and we see Andy Dufresne being beaten brutally by The Sisters. In SG the theme of war imposes the excessive existence of violence in the book. Briseis observes how her brothers are being viciously killed by Achilles and all these bloody images stay on her mind. She comes back to these brutal memories again and again throughout the whole story. Although Andy and Briseis favour a cold-minded attitude to what’s happening, violence has affected both central figures

Throughout both SG and TSR women are portrayed as less important than men. The presence of women is highly neglected in TSR, they are sexualised and are shown as unfaithful. We meet only four (three, excluding Andy’s wife) alive women throughout the 2-hour movie and none of them plays a valuable enough role to be remembered. At the same time, SG is written fully from the female perspective, but we still can observe the unfair treatment from other men regarding absolutely every female character in the book. Some of them are ‘privileged’ enough to be personal ‘satisfiers’ and servants to the ‘heroes’. However, most of them are thrown out on the streets to cruel and absolutely ruthless