Abstract
Love and revenge are eternal motifs in literature, on which numerous renowned works are written in almost all times. In this paper, two characters, namely Medea in Euripides’ Medea and Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, are chosen to explore the female images in love and revenge stories. Seen from the perspective of feminism, their images are undeniably special and even subversive in comparison with common female characters. A prominent revelation of it lies in their independence from their male spouses named Jason and Rochester respectively. With the superiority in power, Medea and Mason are able to extricate themselves largely from the reliance of their husbands, thus gaining the courage to pursue their happiness in love as well as the determination to defend their dignity by taking revenge. However, limitations do exist due to the male dominance in the patriarchal society. For one thing, the depersonalization of women under male’s visual angle has made Medea and Mason turned into men’s tools, which has predestined the tragic ending of their love; for another, the dominant status of male discourse has victimized them. In the society where men firmly grasp the power of discourse, their voices are “muted” and their acts of revenge “magnified” to the extreme. Consequently, in reflection of their love and revenge tragedies, Medea and Bertha Mason are both subversive characters and unfortunate victims in a male dominating world.
Highlights
Humanity is not an animal species, it is a historical reality [1]
Despite the substantial breakthroughs in female consciousness, the images of Medea and Mason still fail to evade the fate of being haunted by the overwhelming dominance of male power, which has kept almost invariant through human history since the shift from the matriarchal society to the patriarchal one
From ancient Greece to the Victorian Age in Britain, female consciousness has always made it appearance, which contains the demand on gender equality and represents the trend of the advancement of times
Summary
Humanity is not an animal species, it is a historical reality [1]. The development of productive forces has triggered the transition from the matriarchal society to the patriarchal society, and women are in turn transferred from the position of the dominating to that of being dominated. Distinguished from people’s former recognition of them as murderesses or mad women, they have been regarded nowadays as “icon (s) of feminism” [12] These researches fail to further discover the limitations of the two female images: despite their determined resistance, they are in nature victimized by the world dominated by men. This paper, by exploring the subversiveness and limitations of Medea and Bertha Mason, aims to reveal the clashes between female consciousness and the ideology of male dominance in the patriarchal society. On rereading and studying the Minghua Yao: Subversive Characters and Unfortunate Victims: A Feminist Study of Medea and Bertha Mason in Love & Revenge Tragedies classic love and revenge stories, the paper will discuss some enlightenment from the two female images on realizing gender equality in the modern world today
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