Category: Feminism

Over the centuries, women did not have equal rights and privileges as men on many levels. Regarding English literature written by men, women were just objects and no leading roles. However, at the end of the 18th century, women began to write literary works and the female roles became individuals rather than serving as accessories…

Introduction In the nineteenth century, male dominated the world of literature. Even so, it is often referred to as the age of the female novelist (Showalter 3). The reason being, that it is characterized by great women writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Shelley and the Brontë sisters.…

Simone de Beauvoir published her book “The Second Sex” following world war II in 1949. Her book would later become known as a “feminist bible” (Beauvoir, Borde, & Malovany-Chevallier, 2011). It became an epithet bound to discourage impious readers wary of a sacred text and a personality cult. It is through Simone de Beauvoir, that…

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is regarded as an important work of American Feminist literature as it explores the attitudes towards women’s mental and physical health in the 19th century. The short story is fictional yet can be considered semi-autobiographical as it was written after Gilman experienced severe post-partum depression. In this passage,…

The work of women writers in the 19th century is termed to have been very limited in both physical and artistic sense. Many facts can be attributed to that including politics of the time and the places of women in the society at the time. Women of that time saw the need to emancipate themselves…

The underlying feminism in the famous classic ‘Little Women’ by Louisa Alcott is a topic widely discussed since the novel’s publication in 1868, just after the first wave of the feminist movement. The real discussion revolves mainly around the main protagonist ‘Jo’ Josephine March and her character traits that are very clear to critics and…

Feministic values are very prominent in the play The Merchant of Venice, mostly those involving the radical feminist concept of a patriarchal society. The female personas were able to exploit the activity of cross-dressing to accomplish the business they needed so that their lives might be more tolerable while under the control of men within…

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne created a story about a woman who was to endure the disgrace of the scarlet letter “A” that sewed on her garments as a symbol of her adultery. This character’s name is Hester Prynne. Nathaniel Hawthorne created this story after he was fired from his job working in the…

Introduction to Feminism in ‘In the Time of the Butterflies’ It has been argued over many years, that women are no less than men, that women are strong, powerful and that women do not need a masculine figure to represent them in any way. How correct are those statements? Do women really need to prove/argue…

Art is not therapy. As a young artist, expressing grief and trauma through art, this is what I was told by an art teacher. In order to examine, unpack and refute this comment, this narrative exploration will define the use of art as a therapeutic tool, the differences and links between art and art therapy,…