Women And Modernism In Othello

For a long time, men defined women. The world was male orientated and dominated. Male philosophers and social thinkers were the ones who identified women with disorders and evilness. The term evil is another trait that has attached itself to women for centuries, a characteristic that dates to the biblical allusion of Eve’s temptation of Adam in the garden of Eden. When a female character is said to be wearing red, why does the reader automatically think that she’s nothing but trouble and dangerous? Why was it so easy for Othello to believe Iago’s lies that Desdemona was in a web of affairs? Its due to the connotations that have been lingering around women in literature until the earliest twentieth century, and it is until then that these characteristics

The central character of this movement was known as the ‘New Woman’ who was sovereign and educated, sexually liberated, concerned with a more creative life. (The Cambridge Companion to Modernism p.174) There are also abstract reasons, as well as the history of how readers read modernism and understand it is necessarily gendered as well. Style of high modernism seemed as typically more masculine and male authored. So, women have traditionally been excluded or marginalised in discussions of modernism with exception of Virginia Woolf. Marianne Dekoven states ‘Modernism has mother as well as fathers’

Tarr states some advice with force that the generalisation that love gets in the way of art, so that the artist must be content himself with ‘low grade’ affairs, rather than grand passions. And conduct a mean emotional life. He implies that the artist cannot afford to fall in love; though sex has nothing to do with this equation. Tarr’s self-serving asceticism may reflect ideals about the inadvisability of enquiring into the lives of artists who have similar ideals. This shows that Lewis is unable to think independently about sex. ‘…What is love. He began reasoning. It’s either a possession or possessive madness… such contact as he has with Bertha was particularly risky’.(Tarr, p. ) This is Tarr’s answer to the question of love for this tells the reader something about himself and his art. What this may suggest in correlation to Lewis’s views on women is that Tarr is an artist therefore he is unable to be with someone he desires. Therefore, he chooses Bertha who in his eyes is ‘low grade’ so that his and her relationship doesn’t get in the way of his art. Bertha is merely a tool to relieve him of his sexual pleasures. This dehumanises her into something of which can be identified as a tool. He doesn’t view her as an equal but merely lower and ultimately not someone of his actual