17th Century Treatment of Woman in Literature Essay

By the Middle Ages, it was comm and if accepted that evening was princip bothy to blame for the disobedience that led to the fall of humanity. Greek ideas had re primed(p) Jewish in Christian thinking, including the nonion that the soul was good unless the trunk evil. Heretical though this might run by means of been, it didnt stop gender organism regarded as somehow evil. One of the fewer recorded gallant women writers, the mystic Margery Kempe, aspired to celibacy even within wedding ceremony.As it becomes appargonnt in a few select plant life representing women in chivalrous literature, includingThe track record of Margery Kempe, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the young Knight, and Le Morte Darthur, in the middle ages or medieval period, restrictions placed on women underwent a signifi canfult change. At the beginning of this period, womens pieces were rattling narrowly prescribed and women did not occupy much to do with deportment byside of the home. As this age went on, however, women gradually began to express more than opinions and have a greater and more equal authority in society. ii earlier medieval texts, Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight offer readers both naive categories of women, those who atomic number 18 or are not confined. Later, with the writings of Margery Kempe, the strict duality begins to disappear and the reader is confronted with a char who is blend of each of these ideas of women. eon she is confined by her society, she is unconfined by its conventions such as marriage and traditional gender roles. In general, however, each text presents an shell of a proper and confined fair sex as well as the terminated opposite some so that the reader can see what evils can occur if a woman is not confined.The women in Beowulf, at least on first glance, might appear to be glorified waitresses and cozy objects, but their role is uttermost more complicated than this. When it is stated in one of the important quote s from Beowulf that, A poof should weave peace As confined in a marriage, women in Beowulf are assigned the role of peace weaver, queen and bedmateAll of the human women in Beowulf are queens and stick about to their duties as such with grace and obedience.The only exception to this model of medieval femininity is Grendels mother who is technically a woman but is so hideously described that the idea of gender becomes grossly distorted. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight even though it was written some years subsequently Beowulf. In this text, the reader is first confronted with the ideal woman, Guenevere, who is confined and is serving her role as peace weaver and object for the male gaze. the goodly queen gay in the midst/ on a dais well-decked and punctually arrayed / with costly silk curtainsall broidered and b established with the best gemsChaucers womenAlthough women have strongly in Chaucers earlier whole works, such as The Boke of the Duchess and Troilus and Criseyde, we o nly ensure three women on the pilgrimage described in The Canterbury Tales * The hook up with woman of Bath * The Prioress * Another nun who accompanies her but is hardly mentioned again. The two principal women reflect the only ways that women at the time could secure independence and status in the Church or in a trade. The Wife of Bath represents those whose skills, such as weaving, gave them financial independence, though Chaucers character seems to have grown wealthy mainly by marrying a series of rich old men. is tempting to see the Wife as a champion of female rights, and her Tale brings out the idea that women should have maistrieover men, but the Wife is of course a character in a story written by a man. She has had five husbands, want the woman of Samariawho is challenged by Jesus (in toilet 417-18), withouten oother compaignye in youthfulnesse.Her fifth husband, whom she married for love rather than riches, proved to be less compliant and very well read. She claim s to have put him in his place eventually, but Chaucer enjoys fashioning the Wife recount (and try to refute) all the misogynistic tales with which he has assaulted her.Women in rebirth and after Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the social standing and the good and economic rights of women continued to be restrictive, limiting them to the domestic sphereDuring the Protestant rehabilitation of the sixteenth century and the resulting Catholic Counter-Reformation, the depiction of women in domestic roles became more and more important. The social system of patriarchy matured during the early modern period, peculiarly during the Reformation. The concept of patriarchy involved male control over or so all facets of society.The assigned works from the English Renaissance primarily present women un practicalally. Despite a few exceptions, these works depict women as being idealistically beautiful, as having perfect justness, or, conversely, as exercising hyperboli cally negative traits. The few exceptions to this rule do depict women in a more lifelike light. For instance, in its first six stanzas, the female verbalizer of prat Donnes The Bait sycophancys Marlowes Passionate Shepherd, but in the final quatrain, she acknowledges how nonsensical she is for biting at his bait, saying, That fish that is not catched thereby, / Alas, is wiser far than I (1247).william Shakespeare in any case paints a realistic picture of a woman in praise 130, debunking the florid Petrarchan conventions that elevate womens viewer almost beyond comprehension but asserting that his mistress is as rare (1041) as any Petrarchan subject nonetheless. Among the male authors, Shakespeare alike presents the most substantive and realistic female character of these works with Cordelia in King Lear. Although her honesty at first brings disownment and exile, she emerges as one of the few characters in the touch who remain true to their convictions throughout the cours e of the narrative.Cordelias realistic portraying is rivaled only by the highly personal poetry of the only female author assigned, Katherine Philips. In A Married State, Philips also debunks the popular post favoring of marriage, especially with its bene fit ins for women, noting to her audience of young women that the single life yields No rough husbands to create your fears / No pangs of childbirth to extort your tears / No childrens cries for to offend your ears (1679).Another of her poems, On the Death of My First and Dearest Child, hector Philips, provides an equally realistic further exponentially more emotional storey of the uniquely maternal experience of losing a child. Despite the success of these works in presenting realistic depictions of women, they are the exceptions to the rule, as the majority of the assigned works portray women quite unrealistically. Perhaps the most common of the exaggerated portrayals addresses womens physical beauty.Sonnet 64 of Edmund Spen sers Amorettidescribes his subject with the inflated Petrarchan conventions satirized by Shakespeare, likening each detail of her physical appearance to a opposite flower, and claiming that her sweet odour did them all excel (866)an obviously impossible feat. The bride of Spensers Epithalamion is sung as having similarly cosmic beauty, with eyes like stars (870) or Saphyres shining bright (872). In fact, Spenser describes all her body as like a pallace fayre (872) in a highly exaggerated comparison, the meaning of which almost defies interpretation.Even in a poem addressing the neo-Platonic ideal of finding virtue in beauty, Sir Philip Sidneys Astrophil unruffled relapses to using the common Petrarchan convention analyse Stellas eyes to the sun in Sonnet 71 in advance concluding with the confession that he fails in his attempt to elevate his prudence from her physical beauty to her underlying virtue. These last two works also invoke the fallacy of women as having unadulterated virtue. Again, Astrophil lauds the inherent goodness that Stellas beauty reflects.Not only does she possess this virtue, but she also seeks to advance all with whom she comes in contact And not content to be apotheosiss heir / Thyself, dost strive all minds that way to move, / Who mark in thee what is in thee most fair (926). Spenser describes one example of the flawless temperament of the bride ofEpithalamion by recounting her humility, even shyness, in the face of the adoring stares of all the guests at her wedding and the unsullied virginity she brings to her marriage bed.In some other work, the chaste Celia of Ben Jonsons Volpone finds her faith and integrity unrewarded with an attempted affair pressure upon her by her husband and a false conviction for allegedly seducing yet another man. Finally, in a highly complex simile, Donne draws a correspond between his love and the fixed foot (1249) of a compass in A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. The woman he addresses is so constant, so faithful, so flawlessly virtuous, that she is as the tool that produces the circle, the shape of perfection.Just as common as excessively positive characterizations of women are the excessively negative. ii of the assigned plays include women whose primary activity is political scheming Goneril and Regan in King Lear and Lady Politic Would-Be in Volpone. Goneril and Regan present blandish platitudes to their father, Lear, that do not reflect their true feelings for him. In fact, after receiving their inheritances of one-half the kingdom each, they want nothing more to do with him and turn him out into the stormy night.Lady Politic also schemes in an effort to development her social status, leveling false accusations of adulterous seduction against Celia in order to advance her and her husbands own chances of inheriting Volpones fortune. The speaker of Donnes Song might have been hurt by such women as these, for he denies the existence of any faithful and virtuous wom an. If his addressee were to find a seemingly true woman, Donne laments that Though she were true when you met her, / . . . / Yet she / Will be / False, ere I come, to two, or three (1238).Another of Donnes poems, The Flea, contains another common criticism of women that they too often deny their suitors. The listener of this melodramatic monologue, in killing the flea, casually rejects the speakers elaborate analogical argument for a relationship between them, and in response, the speaker insults her honor, which amounts to as much as this fleas death took life from thee (1236). The Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd also counters an elaborate argument, this one an appeal more emotional than rational.Sir Walter Raleghs houri responds to each point from Marlowes shepherd with the argument that all his promised goods and pleasures will fade with time, including his own youth and love. This reply to a heartfelt attempt to win her love establishes the nymph as cold and self-centered, as opp osed to the devoted and emotionally expressive shepherd. The speaker of Andrew Marvells To His Coy Mistress experiences a similar rejection from his think lover.Rather than praise her beauty and virtue, he mocks them as fleeting and meaningless, respectively, saying, Thy beauty shall no more be be, / . . . in thy marble vault . . . (1691) and . . . wherefore worms shall try / That long-preserved virginity, / And your quaint honor turn to dust (1691-92). Perhaps the strongest indictments of women in these works charge them with an opposite sin the base corruption of one time virtuous men. Arcasia, in Spensers The Faerie pouffee, attracts and seduces good men only to turn them into wild beasts doomed to her service.Shakespeares Sonnet 144 describes a similar woman, close contact with whom carries damning effects To win me presently to hell, my female evil / Tempteth my better angel from my side, / And would corrupt my saint to be a devil (1042). The most accomplished female cor rupter of these works affects not only the man in her life but all of humankind. John Miltons Eve, after ignoring the counsel of her wiser husband, inflicts sin upon all her descendents as a result of her inferior reason, virtue, and faithaccording to Adam and Milton.The sinful memoir of humanity to follow owes itself to the weakness of a woman. The enormity of this last example typifies how the unrealistically exaggerated portrayals of women in English Renaissance literature far outweigh the few examples of more realistic and moderate depictions. This subject culminates in the image of Miltons Eve in the epic poem paradise Lost. Although Miltons Eve comes, in the mid-seventeenth century, at the end of the Renaissance in England, her image builds upon, and perpetuates, Renaissance antifeminist commonplaces, while it also questions and undermines them.Milton emphasizes Eves subsidiary company position in his description of Adam and Eve in disc 4 For contemplation he and valor for med, /For softness she and sweet agreeable grace /He for God only, she for God in him (11. 296-299). Eve herself articulates and generalizes that obsequiousness God is thy Law, thou mine to know no more/Is womans happiest knowledge and her praise (11. 638-639). When she rebels against her secondary position, she separates herself from Adam in their Edenic tasks and therefrom is vulnerable to Satans temptations.When the Renaissance in England was at its height, in Edmund Spensers Elizabethan world, the great epic poet of the 1590s presents images of women that contrast with the shadowy or negative women of Miltons epic poem. While antifeminist views of female nature are embodied in the allegorical Error in Book 1 of Spensers The Faerie Queene, other females throughout the epic serve to hold back women. In part because Spensers poem was written in praise of his own Queen Elizabeth, the positive images of women range widely. They include the gentle, yet forceful, Una, whose cry, Fi e, fie, sapless harted knight (1. x. 465) shocks the feeble Redcrosse Knight into action against the temptations of Despair. In the third bind of The Faerie Queene, the virtue of Chastity is exemplified through the woman warrior Britomart.In this portrait, Spenser tells Queen Elizabeth that he is disguising praise of her, his own queen, since explicit celebration would be curt But O dred Soveraine/ Thus farre forth pardon, sith that choicest wit/ Cannot your glorious pourtraict pick up plaine/ That I in colourd showes may shadow it,/ And antique praises unto present persons fit (3. . 23-27). Throughout her reign, Queen Elizabeth provided a strong, positive image of a woman, through which poets from Peeles play, The Arraignment of Paris, through William Shakespeares Henry VI, Part 3 found opportunities to create dominant roles for woman. Yet Queen Elizabeth herself perpetuated some of the misogynist stereotypes that preoccupied her at her accession in 1558, in such tracts as Joh n Knoxs Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.Queen Elizabeth control through her own alienation from her womanliness. She ruled as the Virgin Queen, chronic the idea of chastity as the norm and replacing in her still newly Protestant country the lost ideal of the Virgin Mary. The cheat of her costuming and the artfulness of her speeches both contributed to her power. During Elizabeths reign from 1558 to 1603, positive images of women include the female characters of Shakespeares comedies, like Rosalind of As You Like It and Beatrice of Much Ado about Nothing. by and by James Is accession, however, the Jacobean theater explored female characters who achieved tragic, marvelous stature, like John Websters The Duchess of Malfi. In her closet drama, The Tragedy of Mariam, Elizabeth Cary explored the dilemmas face strong women. In addition, in this later period of the Renaissance, such women writers as Elizabeth Grymeston, the author of the Miscelanea Lady Mary Wroth, the author of the poetry and prose epic beg Urania and Amelia Lanier, the author of a poetic defense of Eve, became creators of rich images of women, which we are only now beginning to recover.