Portrayal Of Female Characters Research Articles

Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

Edgar Allan Poe’da “Yeniden Canlandırmanın Korkunç Dramı”: Dişi Vampirlerde Anneyi Canlandırma

This paper aims to analyze Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction and poems from a psychoanalytic perspective. The Romantic writer’s short tragic life was governed by his Oedipus complex and a strong death drive as the result of his traumatic experiences at an early age. He witnessed his mother’s battle with tuberculosis, which was followed by her death. Throughout his entire life, he has searched for a mother figure. In his works, Poe revives his mother in his portrayals of female characters in the forms of vampires. These characters and all their experiences in his writings appear as uncanny reflections from his unconscious, which he had a strong grasp on long before Sigmund Freud researched and theorized these terms. Resulting from a strong death wish, Poe’s narrators, who are mere reflections of himself, create dark, tomb-like settings where they isolate themselves from reality or consciousness, focusing on the female vampire figures who they admire. However, these figures also horrify Poe as they are the embodiments of death itself. In creating these undead women, Poe expresses his strong desire to reunite with his dead mother and endeavors to uncover the link between life and death, a secret that the female holds. This research focuses on Poe’s short stories “Berenice,” “Ligeia,” “Morella,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in addition to various of his poems.

Animal Farm Is a World of Man

In the beginning of the 20th century, feminist literary theory was concerned mainly
 with the social and political role of women, as well as women’s role in literature. In
 the second half of the century, it is tried to study women’s social positions and their
 rights compared to the male counterpart. One of the most explored themes since
 then was gender and patriarchy. The aim of this paper is to show how women were
 depicted in literature after half a century of the struggle of the first wave feminist
 towards equality and stress the importance of theorizing the concept of patriarchy, as a
 first step to understanding women’s subjugation. This unfolds through a re-visitation of
 George Orwell’s fiction novels. Orwell is better known by his political writing. Although
 he has never used the word “Feminism”, in any of his fictional works, two decades
 after his death, the radical feminist, Daphne Patai accused him that he is anti-feminist,
 fundamentally because of his deprecatory stands towards women through his female
 characters. The selected texts reinforce patriarchal ideology, through the way Orwell
 portrayed his male and female characters. A feminist analytical approach will be
 adopted in the realization of this research, in order to analyse the novel in depth, with
 a focus on Orwell’s portrayal of female characters. Observing and commenting how he
 debases, mistreats and degrades them. Further, it sheds the light on how he portrays
 his male characters by analysing female and male protagonists. The significant of the
 study is to show the social and political context of the time regarding the role and the
 identity of women in the British society in the 20th century, and how women were
 treated under patriarch society and still until our days. Moreover, it sheds light on how
 patriarchy the concept of women oppression helped in the development of feminist
 theories.

Brian Moore: An Ambassador of Feminism

The present research paper explores the significance of Brian Moore as an angel of feminism through the study of his portrayal of female characters with special context of Irish novels in the 20th century Ireland. He is grown up in a Catholic family. He is one of his parent’s nine children. This paper studies his depiction of women characters with special context to the novels The Feast of Lupercal and Lies of Silence. He has raised the true voice of women of contemporary society at Belfast in Ireland through his fiction. The Feast of Lupercalis the story of a Catholic school teacher, Diarmuid Devine and his girlfriend a Protestant girl, Una Clarke. She is the main female character in this novel. She has been exploited mentally and physically by her ex-boyfriend Michael who was a married man. Later she meets Diarmuid Devine who plays with her emotions and leaves her due to Catholic restrictions. Moore in his next novel Lies of Silence (1990) presents the struggle among the Catholicism, the Protestantism and political uncertainty in Belfast. The main characters in this novel are Michael Dillon and his wife Moira Dillon. Moira Dillon is an innocent, beautiful and well educated unemployed woman. Her husband deceives her and wants to divorce her. She accepts the reality of life and emerges as liberal, bold and patriotic. This paper brings out Brian Moore’s true ability to reveal the world of women through his Irish fiction.

Gender(ed) Identities: Critical Rereadings of Gender in Children's and Young Adult Literature ed. by Tricia Clasen and Holly Hassel

Reviewed by: Gender(ed) Identities: Critical Rereadings of Gender in Children's and Young Adult Literature ed. by Tricia Clasen and Holly Hassel Sara K. Day (bio) Gender(ed) Identities: Critical Rereadings of Gender in Children's and Young Adult Literature, edited by Tricia Clasen and Holly Hassel. Routledge 2017. Twenty-two years ago, Roberta Seelinger Trites's Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels (1997) actively reframed the manner in which scholars approached both traditional and contemporary texts for young audiences, encouraging readers to consider the possibilities of inclusivity. While Trites's book was certainly not the first scholarly work to engage with gender and sexuality in children's literature, it signaled a growing interest in these topics. Last year, Trites's Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children's and Adolescent Literature (2018) revisited the earlier volume's claims in order to more fully engage with questions of intersectionality, ecocriticism, and other concerns relating to the study of gender and sexuality in young people's literature and media. In the years that passed between Trites's two texts, these topics have been the subjects of a number of other monographs, essay collections, and special [End Page 210] issues, indicating a widespread and varied investment in exploring representations of gender and sexuality, especially with an eye to how they evolve and intersect with other identity markers. Contributions such as Christine Wilkie-Stibbs's The Feminine Subject in Children's Literature (2002), Annette Wannamaker's Boys in Children's Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child (2008), and Lance Weldy and Thomas Crisp's 2012 special issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly on sexualities in children's literature, to offer only a very small sampling, have all centered gender and sexuality in their approaches to literature and media for young audiences. Tricia Clasen and Holly Hassel's collection Gender(ed) Identities: Critical Rereadings of Gender in Children's and Young Adult Literature thus enters a lively, frequently evolving conversation, offering nineteen essays about a number of mostly recent texts that are read through a variety of disciplinary and theoretical lenses. It's surprising, then, that the editors introduce the collection with little recognition of the existing scholarship; aside from a fairly extensive discussion of Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth B. Kidd's Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature, the editors mention other key works of children's and young adult literature scholarship in passing only or not at all. It's unfortunate that the collection's introduction and the brief overviews that precede each section don't do more to locate this collection within the current critical conversation on gender and sexuality in children's and young adult literature; the editors have missed an opportunity to more effectively articulate what is fresh and needed about the essays they have gathered. The collection is organized into five sections, beginning with "Gender(ing) Communities." This grouping of four essays focuses primarily on representations of adolescent womanhood, beginning with Terry Suico's "History Repeating Itself: The Portrayal of Female Characters in Young Adult Literature at the Beginning of the Millennium," which focuses on the portrayals of teen girls in three popular series from the early 2000s: Ann Brashares's Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; Cecily von Ziegesar's Gossip Girls; and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. This opening chapter does the useful work of establishing the growing popularity of young adult literature more generally, though its interrogations of the novels themselves are relatively unsurprising. The following two essays, Victoria Flanagan's "Girls Online: Representations of Adolescent Female Sexuality in the Digital Age" and Amy Cummins's "Academic Agency in YA Novels by Mexican American Women Authors," likewise [End Page 211] investigate representations of adolescent womanhood, each offering a clear focus and useful insights. The final chapter in this section, Angel Daniel Matos's standout "Queer Consciousness/Community in David Levithan's Two Boys Kissing: 'One the Other Never Leaving,'" focuses on representations of young men, who receive notably less attention than young women in the volume as a whole. Section 2, "Developing Gender(ed) Identities," loosely organizes its four essays around "the relationship between...

Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns as a Child-Rescue and Neo-Orientalist Narrative

In their article "Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns as a Child-Rescue and Neo-Orientalist Narrative" Abdullah Mohammad Dagamseh and Olga Golubeva argue that the novel contrib­utes to hegemonic Eurocentric discourse by showing the superiority and benevolence of the West. In contrast to existing scholarly focus on Hosseini's portrayal of female characters, this article highlights how children of both sexes are represented. The authors' aim is to show how Hosseini's picture of children affected by war contributes to the neo-Orientalist and child-rescue discourses, jus­tifying the foreign involvement in Afghanistan's internal affairs. Moreover, Dagamseh and Golubeva argue that the use of universal values and the seemingly noble cause of bettering the lives of children in Afghanistan contribute to the stereotypical discourse of a "progressive" West and an "underdevel­oped" East.

Why Is Melanctha Black?: Gertrude Stein, Physiognomy, and the Jewish Question

This article reads Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” as a racial, if not racist, text—a text not solely about blacks but also about Jews in the sense that black characters work as a mask for the author’s concern about her own Jewishness. Nineteenth-century pseudoscientific medical discourses link blackness, Jewishness, and homosexuality—the trinity of “difference”—based on their biological connectedness and similarities. Examining the racism and misogyny particularly inherent in the theories of physiognomy, this article will demonstrate the ways in which Stein employs and manipulates representative prejudices of her time in the portrayal of female characters in Q.E.D., as well as the black Melanctha, through which she reveals and conceals her own racial and sexual identity as a Jewish-American lesbian woman. Arguing that the aesthetic experimentation of “Melanctha” grows out of the author’s concerns about her racial and sexual marginality, this article further offers a context in which the black Melanctha may be read as a character Stein created to treat her racial self-hatred, a problematic phenomenon exhibiting the productive power of fear.

American Writers in Europe: 1850 to the Present

American Writers in Europe: 1850 to the Present

Portrayal of Female Protagonists in Hindi Films: A Study on Changing Trends

Cinema is one of the most popular forms of mass consumption that continuously conditioning the cultural values in Indian society. It plays a crucial role in informing, entertaining and educating its audiences. It has always seen as an important medium through which the harsh realities of life expressed through its fictional characters. Films with female protagonists are not new to Indian cinema; however, contemporary film makers are now even more comfortable in making bold films. Such female-led brings out the problems and success stories of women upfront, by allowing women to talk about it in public. By showing women as emotionally and economically independent, female centric films encourage societal change in the treatment of women in the patriarchal Indian society.Numerous studies have been conducted on the Indian Cinema Industry, and on the stereotypical portrayal of women in commercial Indian cinema. Although there have been some women - centered movies that have tried to address women’s issues, there has been very little, if any, research done on the portrayal of women in these films. In these movies, women are shown to break out of the conventional roles, and proved themselves as a maker of meaning. It is in this context the present paper makes an attempt to analyze women centric movies by focusing on the changing trends in the portrayal of female characters in film narratives.

Feminine Desire Is Human Desire

This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamined women writers, Mannu Bhandari (1931–) and R. Chudamani (1931–2010), who are considered key representatives of the Hindi and Tamil literary canons, respectively. Mani demonstrates that from within their specific geographic and historical contexts, Bhandari's and Chudamani's writing provides insight into literary discourses of gender equality circulating in the immediate postindependence moment. In particular, she argues that these women writers broadened the scope of feminist thought and literary expression existing at the time through their rhetorical use of a language of entitlement that universalizes feminine desire in humanist terms. They did so through the portrayal of female characters who express the desire to possess sexual freedom, economic independence, and human equality on the same terms as the male characters. Feminist scholarship has characterized the 1950s and 1960s as a moment of paucity in women's writing and decline in feminist politics. Yet Bhandari's and Chudamani's distinct uses of a language of entitlement offer a deeper understanding of the role of the literary in shaping feminist thought. Their work thus provides alternative genealogies of the categories of feminism and women's writing in India.

Concept of Witchcraft in African Drama and Negative Female Stereotyping in Select Nigerian Plays

Drama as the saying goes is as old as man. It is an integral part of every human society. The mimetic bodily gestures of primitive man necessitated by the in-adequacies of spoken language gave birth to drama. Drama and theatre have over the ages been appropriated for diverse human purposes. It has at one point or the other of human development or civilisation been a tool for education, entertainment, propaganda, confrontation, opposition, socialisation, mobilisation and therapy amongst other purposes in society. This essay is an exploration of the concept of witchcraft as it is appropriated by playwrights in their dramatic creations. The thrust of the essay is the portrayal of female characters as witches in African drama. The essay is limited to the Nigerian dramatic tradition; it examines three selected dramatic texts: J.P. Clark’s The Wives Revolt, Irene Isoken Salami’ Emotan and Zulu Sofola’s Wedlock of the Gods. All three dramatic texts explore the subject of witchcraft in female characters from three different trado-cultural perspectives.

The Portrayal Of Female Characters In Dickens' Novels Oliver Twist And Great Expectations

The Portrayal Of Female Characters In Dickens' Novels Oliver Twist And Great Expectations

“Murder Me…Become a Man”: Establishing the Masculine Care Circle in Young Adult Dystopia

Young adult (YA) dystopia, a genre which is led almost exclusively by young female protagonists, has gained much scholarly attention in recent years. While most of the academic discussions focus, rightly, on portrayals of female characters and gender performance, portrayals of masculinity have failed to elicit the same scholarly response. This article argues that YA dystopia has begun to model a more inclusive, broader approach to masculine behavior by portraying male characters in nurturing positions and forming care relationships with other characters in the narrative. These relationships form a “care circle” of dependent characters, which guides how male characters approach the performance of masculinity.

Hermione Granger through the Focus of Feminist Theory

The present article analyzes the character of Hermione Granger from The Harry Potter Series, taking a feminist stance and considering feminist, queer and non-essentialist theories. In this essay, the feminist nature of Hermione’s character is explored, discussing the nature and portrayal of female characters in children’s literature.

The Doubly Oppressed: The Portrayal of Female Characters in Mongo Beti’s The Poor Christ of Bomba

This essay explores and analysis the condition of female characters in Mongo Beti’s novel, The Poor Christ of Bomba (1971). The paper argues that women in the novel’s settings are being oppressed and unjustly maltreated by both colonialists, spearheaded by Father Drumont, and by the native African culture. Thus, the concept of “double oppression” is suitable in demonstrating the theme of maltreatment and exploitation of women in the novel, and their roles in the society. The paper exposes the pretence, hypocrisy, insincerity and biasness of the Christian mission in respect to women issues such polygamy, adultery and other sundry issues.

Through the Lens of a Man: The Portrayal of Female Characters in RM Malope’s Matlhoko, Matlhoko, a Feminist View

Through the Lens of a Man: The Portrayal of Female Characters in RM Malope’s Matlhoko, Matlhoko, a Feminist View

Indented Identities: The Quandary of the Indian Woman

Indian television has a come a long way since its humble beginnings. But while advancements are being made on the technical front, most soaps on Indian television lack realism and thrive by weaving new patterns on a tattered storyboard saturated in the tenebrous tar of patriarchy and superannuated social conventions. Television possesses the potency to mould public discourse on account of its pervasive- and invasive- nature. A vast majority of the public consumes entertainment proffered in the form of soap operas- which seem endearingly preoccupied with everyday concerns. Although the portrayal of women in Indian soaps has changed over the years, gender roles and behavioural patterns are influenced by a complex reworking of disempowering archetypes and stereotypes instilled in the public imagination by anintransigent, elite fraternity viciously dedicated to embracing overt aspects of modernity. In view of the largelydeprecatory portrayal of female characters, it is high time to interrogate the role of the soap opera in shaping the identity of women.Keywords: Television, women, identity, soap opera, audience

Gender, the Subaltern and the ‘Construction of Silence’ in M.G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets

This essay explores the depiction of female characters in The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets in an effort to understand the extent to which M.G Vassanji’s writing perpetuates or breaks with (neo)colonial epistemology. Vassanji’s understanding of gender in these two novels is linked to dominant notions of femininity and masculinity and his (re)imagining of the shifting issues of subjectivity and agency, especially in relation to the processes of (de)colonization and migration. His portrayal of female characters can be characterized as ‘enlightened compassion’ (Spivak 1988a 140), and what Busia calls ‘the peculiar construction of silence or silencing’ (87). In exposing women’s multiple subaltern positions, Vassanji’s narratives stage their powerlessness by presenting ‘typical’ women and then representing them in a manner that intensifies their voicelessness.

Assia Djebar’s la Femme Sans Sépulture ( 20002 ) / the Woman without Sepulcher : The Quest for Female Heroism

Assia Djebar has earned international attention for her poignant, sophisticated portrayals of female characters. Her semi-autobiographical fiction, La Femme sans sepulture (2002) / The Woman without Sepulture , tells the story of Zoulikha, a forgotten heroine of the Algerian war of independence; she went up to the “maquis” in spring 1957 and was arrested two years later by the French army. She disappeared and her corpse was never found. Through Djebar’s narrative this exceptional woman is resuscitated and her radiant presence is everywhere in ‘Cesaree’ (Cherchell in West Algeria), the birthplace of Assia Djebar. Zoulikha’s story becomes a love song against oblivion and hatred. Her tragic fate, her mutilated and tortured body stands as a symbol of resistance linking the struggle for national liberation with that of women’s liberation and highlights the extraordinary role of the Algerian women during the Algerian War. This paper explores the concept of the hero, more appropriately put, the concept of the heroine in La Femme sans sepulture / The Woman without Sepulcher and investigates how Djebar adapts the motif Journey (Northrop Frye’s element of the quest) to the female character Zoulikha Oudai, a freedom fighter during the Algerian Revolution War. Djebar re-writes history to reevaluate the heroic role of the Algerian women. Thus, Zoulikha’s fight stands as a symbol for other women, the whole generation of mothers and daughters before and after independence. We consider that in previous studies concerning the hero–like in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces – women are relegated to a secondary role. Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope in The Female Hero claim that women are and have been heroic, but that the culture has often been unable to recognize female heroism(1981: vi). Nowadays, however, it is evident that the study of the woman as a ‘hero/ine’ is necessary to a better understanding of not only of women’s writings, but of literature as a whole.

The presentation of female characters in three of BM Khaketla's texts: A literary analysis

Like most literature around the world, African literature initially portrayed women poorly. This is in accordance with Kalu's (2001:14) observation that the role of women in society is constantly questioned and ‘for centuries women have struggled to find their place’ in a world that is predominantly male oriented. Inaccurate and incomplete portrayals of female characters littered early African works. This may be largely due to the fact that African literature was first written by men, whose education was put above that of women. Educated men not only came from a patriarchal society but were educated by missionaries and colonisers, who also came from a patriarchal society. The article attempts to investigate the representation of women characters in BM Khaketla's texts. His penchant to portray androcentric narratives is at variance with the female gender that is trivialised through patriarchy, culture, a gender socialisation process, marriage and domestic enslavement. The images of African women in these texts will be reassessed and redefined. The article concludes with some contemporary issues showing that women do have control over their own lives and are therefore the designers of their own future. There is room for contemplation of individual responsibility in women's plight apart from their cultural classification and expectations.