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Feminist approaches to literature.

This essay offers a very basic introduction to feminist literary theory, and a compendium of Great Writers Inspire resources that can be approached from a feminist perspective. It provides suggestions for how material on the Great Writers Inspire site can be used as a starting point for exploration of or classroom discussion about feminist approaches to literature. Questions for reflection or discussion are highlighted in the text. Links in the text point to resources in the Great Writers Inspire site. The resources can also be found via the ' Feminist Approaches to Literature' start page . Further material can be found via our library and via the various authors and theme pages.

The Traditions of Feminist Criticism

According to Yale Professor Paul Fry in his lecture The Classical Feminist Tradition from 25:07, there have been several prominent schools of thought in modern feminist literary criticism:

• First Wave Feminism: Men's Treatment of Women In this early stage of feminist criticism, critics consider male novelists' demeaning treatment or marginalisation of female characters. First wave feminist criticism includes books like Marry Ellman's Thinking About Women (1968) Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1969), and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970). An example of first wave feminist literary analysis would be a critique of William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew for Petruchio's abuse of Katherina.
• The 'Feminine' Phase - in the feminine phase, female writers tried to adhere to male values, writing as men, and usually did not enter into debate regarding women's place in society. Female writers often employed male pseudonyms during this period.
• The 'Feminist' Phase - in the feminist phase, the central theme of works by female writers was the criticism of the role of women in society and the oppression of women.
• The 'Female' Phase - during the 'female' phase, women writers were no longer trying to prove the legitimacy of a woman's perspective. Rather, it was assumed that the works of a women writer were authentic and valid. The female phase lacked the anger and combative consciousness of the feminist phase.

Do you agree with Showalter's 'phases'? How does your favourite female writer fit into these phases?

Read Jane Eyre with the madwoman thesis in mind. Are there connections between Jane's subversive thoughts and Bertha's appearances in the text? How does it change your view of the novel to consider Bertha as an alter ego for Jane, unencumbered by societal norms? Look closely at Rochester's explanation of the early symptoms of Bertha's madness. How do they differ from his licentious behaviour?

How does Jane Austen fit into French Feminism? She uses very concise language, yet speaks from a woman's perspective with confidence. Can she be placed in Showalter's phases of women's writing?

Dr. Simon Swift of the University of Leeds gives a podcast titled 'How Words, Form, and Structure Create Meaning: Women and Writing' that uses the works of Virginia Woolf and Silvia Plath to analyse the form and structural aspects of texts to ask whether or not women writers have a voice inherently different from that of men (podcast part 1 and part 2 ).

In Professor Deborah Cameron's podcast English and Gender , Cameron discusses the differences and similarities in use of the English language between men and women.

In another of Professor Paul Fry's podcasts, Queer Theory and Gender Performativity , Fry discusses sexuality, the nature of performing gender (14:53), and gendered reading (46:20).

How do more modern A-level set texts, like those of Margaret Atwood, Zora Neale Hurston, or Maya Angelou, fit into any of these traditions of criticism?

Depictions of Women by Men

Students could begin approaching Great Writers Inspire by considering the range of women depicted in early English literature: from Chaucer's bawdy 'Wife of Bath' in The Canterbury Tales to Spenser's interminably pure Una in The Faerie Queene .

How might the reign of Queen Elizabeth I have dictated the way Elizabethan writers were permitted to present women? How did each male poet handle the challenge of depicting women?

By 1610 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl presented at The Fortune a play based on the life of Mary Firth. The heroine was a man playing a woman dressed as a man. In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on The Roaring Girl , Smith breaks down both the gender issues of the play and of the real life accusations against Mary Frith.

In Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi , a frequent A-level set text, Smith discusses Webster's treatment of female autonomy. Placing Middleton or Webster's female characters against those of Shakespeare could be brought to bear on A-level Paper 4 on Drama or Paper 5 on Shakespeare and other pre-20th Century Texts.

Smith's podcast on The Comedy of Errors from 11:21 alludes to the valuation of Elizabethan comedy as a commentary on gender and sexuality, and how The Comedy of Errors at first seems to defy this tradition.

What are the differences between depictions of women written by male and female novelists?

Students can compare the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë or Jane Austen with, for example, Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles or D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover or Women in Love .

How do Lawrence's sexually charged novels compare with what Emma Smith said about Webster's treatment of women's sexuality in The Duchess of Malfi ?

Dr. Abigail Williams' podcast on Jonathan Swift's The Lady's Dressing-Room discusses the ways in which Swift uses and complicates contemporary stereotypes about the vanity of women.

Rise of the Woman Writer

With the movement from Renaissance to Restoration theatre, the depiction of women on stage changed dramatically, in no small part because women could portray women for the first time. Dr. Abigail Williams' adapted lecture, Behn and the Restoration Theatre , discusses Behn's use and abuse of the woman on stage.

What were the feminist advantages and disadvantages to women's introduction to the stage?

The essay Who is Aphra Behn? addresses the transformation of Behn into a feminist icon by later writers, especially Bloomsbury Group member Virginia Woolf in her novella/essay A Room of One's Own .

How might Woolf's description and analysis of Behn indicate her own feminist agenda?

Behn created an obstacle for later women writers in that her scandalous life did little to undermine the perception that women writing for money were little better than whores.

In what position did that place chaste female novelists like Frances Burney or Jane Austen ?

To what extent was the perception of women and the literary vogue for female heroines impacted by Samuel Richardson's Pamela ? Students could examine a passage from Pamela and evaluate Richardson's success and failures, and look for his influence in novels with which they are more familiar, like those of Austen or the Brontë sisters.

In Dr. Catherine's Brown's podcast on Eliot's Reception History , Dr. Brown discusses feminist criticism of Eliot's novels. In the podcast Genre and Justice , she discusses Eliot's use of women as scapegoats to illustrate the injustice of the distribution of happiness in Victorian England.

Professor Sir Richard Evans' Gresham College lecture The Victorians: Gender and Sexuality can provide crucial background for any study of women in Victorian literature.

Women Writers and Class

Can women's financial and social plights be separated? How do Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë bring to bear financial concerns regarding literature depicting women in the 18th and 19th century?

How did class barriers affect the work of 18th century kitchen maid and poet Mary Leapor ?

Listen to the podcast by Yale's Professor Paul Fry titled "The Classical Feminist Tradition" . At 9:20, Fry questions whether or not any novel can be evaluated without consideration of financial and class concerns, and to what extent Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own suggests a female novelist can only create successful work if she is of independent means.

What are the different problems faced by a wealthy character like Austen's Emma , as opposed to a poor character like Brontë's Jane Eyre ?

Also see sections on the following writers:

• Jane Austen
• Charlotte Brontë
• George Eliot
• Thomas Hardy
• D.H. Lawrence
• Mary Leapor
• Thomas Middleton
• Katherine Mansfield
• Olive Schreiner
• William Shakespeare
• John Webster
• Virginina Woolf

If reusing this resource please attribute as follows: Feminist Approaches to Literature at http://writersinspire.org/content/feminist-approaches-literature by Kate O'Connor, licensed as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (2.0 UK).

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William Shakespeare

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Though there are only two traditionally female characters in Hamlet — Ophelia and Gertrude —the play itself speaks volumes about the uniquely painful, difficult struggles and unfair fates women have suffered throughout history. Written in the first years of the 17th century, when women were forbidden even from appearing onstage, and set in the Middle Ages, Hamlet exposes the prejudices and disadvantages which narrowed or blocked off the choices available to women–even women of noble birth. Hamlet is obsessive about the women in his life, but at the same time expresses contempt and ridicule for their actions—actions which are, Shakespeare ultimately argues, things they’re forced to do just to survive in a cruel, hostile, misogynistic world.

Gertrude and Ophelia are two of Hamlet ’s most misunderstood—and underdeveloped—characters. Hamlet himself rails against each of them separately, for very different reasons, in misogynistic rants which accuse women of being sly seductresses, pretenders, and lustful schemers. What Hamlet does not see—and what men of his social standing and his time period perhaps could not see if they tried—is that Gertrude and Ophelia are products of their environment, forced to make difficult and even lethal decisions in an attempt to survive and stay afloat in a politically dangerous world built for men, not for women. When Gertrude’s husband, King Hamlet, dies, she quickly remarries his brother, Claudius —who actually murdered him. There are two possibilities: the first is that Gertrude knew about the murder, and the second is that she didn’t. The text suggests that while Gertrude was likely not directly involved in the murder, she was aware of the truth about Claudius all along—and chose to marry him anyway. While Hamlet accuses his mother of lusting after her own brother-in-law, killing her husband, and reveling in her corrupted marriage bed with her new spouse, he fails to see that perhaps Gertrude married Claudius out of fear of what would happen to her if she didn’t. Gertrude, as a woman, holds no political power of her own—with her husband dead, she might have lost her position at court, been killed by a power-hungry new or foreign king, or forced into another, less appealing marital arrangement. Marrying Claudius was perhaps, for Gertrude, the lesser of several evils—and an effort just to survive.

Ophelia’s trajectory is similar to Gertrude’s, in that she is forced into several decisions and situations which don’t seem to be of her own making, but rather things she must do simply to appease the men around her and retain her social position at court. When Ophelia is drawn into her father Polonius and Claudius’s plot to spy on Hamlet and try to tease the reason behind his madness out of him, she’s essentially used as a pawn in a game between men. Polonius wants to see if Hamlet’s madness is tied to Ophelia, and so asks Ophelia to spurn Hamlet’s advances, return gifts and letters he’s given her in the past, and refuse to see or speak with him anymore to see test his hypothesis. Ophelia does these things—and incurs Hamlet’s wrath and derision. Again, as with his mother, he is unable to see the larger sociopolitical forces steering Ophelia through her own life, and has no sympathy for her uncharacteristic behavior. After the death of her father—at Hamlet’s hands—Ophelia loses her sanity. Spurned by Hamlet, left alone by Laertes (who is off studying in France, pursuing his future while his sister sits at court by herself) and forced to reckon with the death of her father—after Hamlet, her last bastion of sociopolitical protection—she goes mad. Even in the depths of her insanity, she continues singing nursery songs and passing out invisible flowers to those around her, performing the sweet niceties of womanhood that are hardwired into her after years of knowing how she must look and behave in order to win the favor of others—specifically men. Indeed, when Ophelia kills herself, it is perhaps out of a desire to take her fate into her own hands. A woman at court is in a perilous position already—but a madwoman at court, divorced from all agency and seen as an outsider and a liability, is even further endangered. Though Ophelia kills herself, she is perhaps attempting to keep her dignity—and whatever shreds of agency she has left at the end of her life—intact.

Gertrude and Ophelia are subject to paternalistic condescension, sexual objectification, and abuse. They are also subject to the constant psychological and emotional weight of knowing that no matter how dehumanizing and cruel the treatment they must face at court may be, things are even worse for women of lower social standings—and if the two of them don’t keep in line, lose their positions at court and face far worse fates. Gertrude and Ophelia make the decisions they make out of a drive simply to survive—and yet Hamlet never stops to imagine the weighty considerations which lie behind both women’s actions.

Women ThemeTracker

Women Quotes in Hamlet

Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not “seems.”

Frailty, thy name is woman!

Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me…

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An Interesting Character Study: Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth is widely regarded as one of the most villainous female characters in all of English literature, and perhaps Shakespeare’s most cold-hearted female character. Not only does she urge her husband to murder their King for no other reason than heartless ambition, she also states that she would dash out her own baby’s brains rather than lose her courage for such a regicidal act.

‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’ was the title of a long essay by the critic L. C. Knights, published in 1933, mocking the school of criticism (ultimately influenced by the critic A. C. Bradley) which seeks to ask, and answer, such questions about details hinted at, but not confirmed, in the play concerning characters’ lives. Although the play doesn’t tell us, Lady Macbeth does declare that she has ‘given suck’ to a baby, although whether this was her child with Macbeth, or a child by a previous marriage (in keeping with the source material in Holinshed), the play never reveals.

Does the question matter? In one sense, no. Even if Macbeth has no heir to succeed him (so the crown might end up passing to Banquo’s descendants anyway), he may hope to get one. So the motivation for keeping the crown and getting rid of Banquo and Fleance remains the same. The most important thing, perhaps, is Lady Macbeth’s shocking revelation that she would be prepared to murder her own baby that she had suckled (whether her child with Macbeth or not is beside the point) in order to fulfil her ambition for power.

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3 thoughts on “An Interesting Character Study: Lady Macbeth”

For me, Lady Macbeth is the ultimate supportive spouse: ready to do everything it takes to help her husband to achieve his ultimate goal, no matter if this will cause her madness first, and then her death. Macbeth is quite the ungrateful sod: when he is told about his queen’s death, he simply shrugs. Poor Gruoch (the real Lady Macbeth’s name), what kind of fame was she undeservedly given.

The worst take I have heard

Very much interesting..

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‘Tough, Cold, Terse, Taciturn and Prone to Not Saying Goodbye When They Hang Up the Phone’

By Carina Chocano

• July 1, 2011

Every time I hear someone use the term “strong female character,” I want to punch them. The problem is, I hit like a girl. Before I go further, here’s an anecdote that might help set the tone for what I’m about to try to say, which I worry has the potential to come across all wrong unless I manage to dispel certain widely shared assumptions without unduly setting anyone off.

Years ago, in the nascent days of the George W. Bush administration, while en route to the airport from his parents’ house in Florida, my boyfriend at that time and I spent an afternoon visiting with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend. Like many Democrats, I was still very angry with Florida, and as fond as I was of my ex-boyfriend’s parents, navigating the minefield of our respective political affiliations (which pretty much meant we had to limit our debates to discussing the relative merits of Outback Steakhouse versus Chili’s) left me exhausted, depressed and somewhat bloated. By the time we reached his brother’s house, I was ready to go back to California and resume my life of loudly resenting Florida from a safe distance while eating at restaurants that didn’t require their servers to memorize corporate scripts. All that stood in the way of me and this golden dream was the visit.

It started, innocuously enough, with lunch in the kitsch-yet-sinister town of Celebration, where we hoped to be lucky enough to experience a postprandial, regularly scheduled fake snowfall. It took a darker turn after we piled back into the S.U.V., headed to their house to pick up the guns and drove to the indoor gun range. As Rush Limbaugh fulminated at top volume, I slumped in the back seat like a sullen 13-year-old, a gun case resting heavily on my lap, and wondered how I had arrived at this place. What did it mean that I was here? Could I be here and still be me? Who was I? Within about 15 seconds of stepping inside the shooting range, before the guy behind the counter could take my gun order, I burst into tears, ran outside and spent the next couple of hours alone in the car reading Jane Austen.

So here is the question I’m posing: If this story were a scene in a movie, and the movie were being told from the point of view of a young woman, would you describe that protagonist as a “strong female character”? Or would you consider her to be weak?

If weak, would you find it possible to relate to her on the basis of something other than her sex characteristics? Or would identifying with this “feminine” behavior threaten your sense of self, whether you were a man or a woman? Would you consider the scene funny, or not, and if not, why not? And what would a “strong female character” in a movie have done in this situation, anyway? Toss off an epigram and then shoot the radio? Reveal a latent talent for martial arts, jump the rifle-range counter and start pummeling the guy at the desk? Confidently march out the door to the strains of a Motown anthem and never look back? And what would she be wearing? Would boots or stilettos need to be involved? Or would flip-flops or ballet flats be O.K.?

“Strong female character” is one of those shorthand memes that has leached into the cultural groundwater and spawned all kinds of cinematic clichés: alpha professionals whose laserlike focus on career advancement has turned them into grim, celibate automatons; robotic, lone-wolf, ascetic action heroines whose monomaniacal devotion to their crime-fighting makes them lean and cranky and very impatient; murderous 20-something comic-book salesgirls who dream of one day sidekicking for a superhero; avenging brides; poker-faced assassins; and gloomy ninjas with commitment issues. It has resulted in characters like Natalie Portman’s in “No Strings Attached,” who does everything in her power to avoid commitment, even with a guy she’s actually in love with; or Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy; or pretty much every character Jodie Foster has played since “Nell” or, possibly, “Freaky Friday.”

Maybe I’m a cream puff, but few cultural tropes get under my skin like “strong female character,” and it still surprises me when like-minded people use it. Maybe the problem is semantic. Maybe what people mean when they say “strong female characters” is female characters who are “strong,” i.e., interesting or complex or well written — “strong” in the sense that they figure predominantly in the story, rather than recede decoratively into the background. But I get the feeling that what most people mean or hear when they say or hear “strong female character” is female characters who are tough, cold, terse, taciturn and prone to scowling and not saying goodbye when they hang up the phone.

Of course, I get the point of characters like these. They do serve as a kind of gateway drug to slightly more realistic — or at least representational — representations of women. On the other hand, they also reinforce the unspoken idea that in order for a female character to be worth identifying with, she should really try to rein in the gross girly stuff. This implies that unless a female character is “strong,” she is not interesting or worth identifying with.

“Strong women characters” are a canard. They refer to the old-fashioned “strong, silent type,” a type that tolerates very little blubbering, dithering, neuroticism, anxiety, melancholy or any other character flaw or weakness that makes a character unpredictable and human.

The absurdity of the strong-female-character expectation becomes apparent if you reverse it: Not only does calling for “strong male characters” sound ridiculous and kind of reactionary, but who really wants to watch them? They sound boring. In fact, traditional “strong male characters” have been almost entirely abandoned in favor of male characters who are blubbery, dithering, neurotic, anxious, melancholic or otherwise “weak,” because this weakness is precisely what makes characters interesting, relatable and funny.

Just to give an idea how entrenched, pervasive and distorting this idea can be: A few weeks back, I was in the car listening to Elvis Mitchell interview Paul Feig, the director of “Bridesmaids.” Mitchell remarked that “Bridesmaids” seemed an unlikely project for Feig to have taken on. Feig replied that he had wanted to do a project for “strong women characters” for a while and pointed out that, after all, “Freaks and Geeks” was Lindsay’s — a teenage girl’s — story.

Funny, Mitchell remarked, Kristen Wiig’s character in the movie didn’t exactly strike him as particularly strong — she actually seemed like kind of a mess. Feig conceded that, yes, she was kind of a mess, but it was O.K., because they had made sure to establish in two scenes that, before she was temporarily derailed by the recession, she was a talented and successful business owner and would soon be back on top.

I don’t really believe that Feig, whose movie is the first in a while to feature women who sound a lot like women, thinks that the reason that we feel empathy and not contempt for Wiig’s delightfully, deliriously, awesomely messed-up and pathetic character is because she used to own a bakery. I think he meant it in the other sense, in the sense that he meant to do a story told strongly from a woman’s point of view. Either that or what happened was that he felt himself pulled into a discussion that’s been so distorted by this pervasive and stifling either/or fallacy that confronting it actually makes people get nervous and say weird things. I’m sure he’s perfectly aware that the movie has struck a nerve because its female characters are such a jumble of flaws and contradictions. Wiig’s not likeable despite the fact that she never gets her brake lights fixed and thoughtlessly hurts someone even as she herself is experiencing the pain of being hurt; or despite the fact that she’s jealous of her best friend’s happiness or of her best friend’s new best friend’s money and apparent perfection; or that she lingers in a destructive relationship with a guy she knows is treating her like dirt; or that, unlike the protagonists of the average romantic comedy aimed at women, she is forced to live with weirdos, who treat her miserably, and she doesn’t live in an adorable downtown loft complete with a pale blue refrigerator that retails for $2,000. (Nice touch, “Something Borrowed.”) We don’t relate to her despite the fact that she is weak, we relate to her because she is weak.

In an essay about MTV’s reality show “The Real World,” Chuck Klosterman wrote about how he and his raw-hot-dog-eating roommate came to be enthralled by the show in its first season and subsequent seasons: “The raw hot dog eater and I watched these people argue all summer long, and then we watched them argue again in the summer of 1993, and then again in the summer of 1994. Technically, these people were completely different every year, but they were also exactly the same. And pretty soon it became clear that the producers of ‘The Real World’ weren’t sampling the youth of America — they were unintentionally creating it.”

Something similar happens when we talk about strong female characters. Certain traits become codified into a bad-faith embodiment of a type rarely found in nature: the stunning blond 23-year-old astrophysicist whose precocious brilliance and professional-grade beauty are no match for her otherworldly self-confidence, say, or the workaholic mercenary encumbered by emotions. It’s as if the naturalism of male characters has grown in inverse proportion to the realism in female characters. The insistence on “strong female character” is not bad because it aspires to engender respect, it’s bad because it tries to compensate for an existing imbalance by stacking the deck in favor of the female character, by making her better, more deserving, higher-toned, more virtuous and deserving of respect, somehow.

“Strength,” in the parlance, is the 21st-century equivalent of “virtue.” And what we think of as “virtuous,” or culturally sanctioned, socially acceptable behavior now, in women as in men, is the ability to play down qualities that have been traditionally considered feminine and play up the qualities that have traditionally been considered masculine. “Strong female characters,” in other words, are often just female characters with the gendered behavior taken out. This makes me think that the problem is not that there aren’t enough “strong” female characters in the movies — it’s that there aren’t enough realistically weak ones. You know what’s better than a prostitute with a machine gun for a leg or a propulsion engineer with a sideline in avionics whose maternal instincts and belief in herself allow her to take apart an airborne plane and discover a terrorist plot despite being gaslighted by the flight crew? A girl who reminds you of you.

Hayao Miyazaki and the Art of Being a Woman

The famed Japanese animator and director created heroines who defied feminine stereotypes and showed me how to be at home in my own skin.

“I wanted to make a movie,” the Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki told Roger Ebert in 2002, “especially for the daughters of my friends.” The renowned filmmaker was referring to Spirited Away, his masterpiece about a young girl who finds herself working in a magical Japanese bathhouse run by a witch. But he could have been talking about almost any of his movies. Perhaps more than any other living maker of animated films, Miyazaki has created a grand library of work that, among other things, shows a keen understanding of the complexities of what it might mean to be a woman.

Miyazaki’s films are bewitching and bewildering, beautiful and challenging in the best of ways. They are beloved for their strong female protagonists, their gorgeous largely hand-drawn animation, and for the way they blur conventional boundaries: between good and evil, between life and death. From his earliest film, The Castle of Cagliostro , to his last before he retired from directing, The Wind Rises , Miyazaki has created movies that embrace nuance rather than simplistic binaries. For me, the most important binary he dissolved was that of gender.

In many Western cartoons and in anime, it’s common to have well-defined heroes and villains, as well as clear demarcations between what male and female characters can achieve and how they should look. But Miyazaki softens these distinctions. Many of his characters, including the Princess Nausicaä, the wolf-girl San, and the delivery girl Kiki, were role models who defied cultural stereotypes of femininity and showed me women who could be anything they wished to be. In a way, they actually saved me.

I remember watching 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind for the first time. A young woman flies in, early in the film, on her white glider, into a vast forest of beautiful yet toxic plants and takes a sample from one into a beaker. When I hear her voice, something makes me shiver. When she takes off her brown oxygen mask under the protective molted shell of a beetle’s eye, poisonous pollen falling around her like snow, it happens again. I know she’s the girl on the cover of the movie case, yet here she is: alone, exploring, unafraid, androgynous. I’m a tween, and I don’t process my thoughts clearly at the time. But I know, suddenly, that she is different from everything else I’ve watched up to this point. She seems to wear power like a coat. She lingers in my thoughts after the movie is over.

I’m transgender. I grew up in the Commonwealth of Dominica in the Caribbean, where the idea of being openly queer was almost unthinkable to me. Our laws from the days of British colonialism made buggery a crime, and there are still no governmental protections from anti-LGBT discrimination. Growing up, I felt lost. I saw myself as a woman due not to what I liked or disliked, but because that was how I felt in my mind—as if a switch in there had simply been turned to girl instead of boy . For many years I neither had the language to fully understand what this meant nor the courage to tell anyone this secret.

On bad days, I felt like I was wearing a mask I couldn’t remove, and on my worst days I considered drinking poison to stop hearing the calls of the girl who seemed to be imprisoned inside. The environment of me was falling apart, growing toxic like the one Nausicaä inhabited. In Miyazaki’s Spirited Away , the protagonist Chihiro loses her name; I felt that in a sense I had never had a real name in the first place, having always been called by others a male name that did not accord with the person I wished to be.

When I watched Miyazaki, something changed. For the first time, I saw representations of girls and women that seemed real and attainable, yet mythic all the same. Here were female characters who were vulnerable and independent, who defied gender norms in the way they looked and behaved. Partly because our detractors often reduce trans women to caricatures of femininity, rigid depictions of female beauty in Western animation and some Japanese anime can seem even more inaccessible to us than they already do for many cisgender girls. But Miyazaki’s films reinforced for me what many women come to learn eventually: that being female is not about fitting one superficial ideal or another. It is ultimately not about how you look or how you act, but who you are.

Miyazaki’s characters seemed real, too, because they were shown even in their least triumphant, most ordinary moments. In all of his films, the director includes the quiet scenes and mundane daily acts that many other movies, animated ones in particular, eschew. Characters gaze at streams or brush their hair, not to advance the film’s plot, but to add a sense of realism—the kind that makes fictional people feel less like tropes and more like human beings. This sense of humanity is so often missing from other animated portrayals of characters, female characters in particular, which made Miyazaki’s films even more meaningful to me.

These scenes, Miyazaki explained in his interview with Roger Ebert , are moments of ma , or emptiness. The filmmaker illustrated the concept to Ebert by clapping. “The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension.” He told Ebert that American movies with frantic paces are often afraid of that silence, that ma , causing boredom. Yet life is filled with those empty spaces—and this technique, however subtle, helped bring Miyazaki’s female characters to life for me in a way that few other movies could.

But Miyazaki’s movies, while often rooted in Japanese history and iconography, still managed to be utterly universal in the stories they told. His films offered non-exaggerated representations of womanhood I could imagine myself embodying if I were to ever tell people the truth about myself. As I watched, I found deeper meanings in the films that helped guide me until I came out at 27.

N ausicaä of the Valley of the Wind , which came out in 1984, was my first film of Miyazaki’s, and its heroine was the film character I admired most growing up. Princess Nausicaä lives in a world in which the human population has been greatly reduced by global warfare. In the aftermath of this conflict, a giant, toxic forest, filled with equally enormous insects, has taken root, forcing humans to set up communities in small areas far from the dangerous spores of the plants—one of these being Princess Nausicaä’s seaside town, the Valley of the Wind, and another being the distant city of Tolmekia.

From the start of the film, Nausicaä doesn’t abide by gendered expectations. An independent spirit, she works as a scientist in a secret underground laboratory and singlehandedly learns how to remove the toxins from the plants she has cultivated. She also defeats four Tolmekian soldiers in a moment of fury after they kill her father (though she saves their queen’s life later on). She even fulfills a prophecy that the wise woman of the village claims will be carried out by a man in a blue robe; Nausicaä does so at the end of the film, but wearing a blue dress. Her appearance itself calls to mind early panels of the artist Moebius’s famous 1975 Arzach comics, which feature a masked male protagonist riding a white creature that resembles Nausicaä’s glider.

And the Tolmekian queen Kushana, too, is complex: She is the closest to a villain in the film, yet is not entirely villainous. Despite her takeover of the Valley of the Wind and her desires to burn down the great forest and eradicate the giant insects, Kushana has an understandable grievance: she, like Melville's Captain Ahab, has lost a limb to one of the giant creatures, and, she implies, possibly more. As much as I want to dislike her, Miyazaki imbues her with a kind of stoic sadness that renders her a little more empathetic.

Nausicaä may have seemed a bit too radical for some audiences at the time, if Roger Corman’s 1985 English dub of the film, titled Warriors of the Wind , is any indication. The film was heavily edited to suggest a simple good-versus-evil narrative, and its American VHS cover bizarrely placed gun-toting male soldiers, rather than Nausicaä (renamed Zandra), at its center. (After this revealing incident, Studio Ghibli, the animation film studio cofounded by Miyazaki, instituted a no-edits policy.) If princesses are meant to represent ideals for young girls, Nausicaä outshines every Disney heroine. With her appearance and actions, she showed me a womanhood that was complex and liberating.

Kiki’s Delivery Service , which features another indelible heroine, was the next Miyazaki film I saw. A lovely coming-of-age tale of girlhood adapted from a novel by the same name, it follows a young, initially inept witch who flies on her broom away from her home to try to find herself in a completely unfamiliar city for a year—as all witches must at the age of 13. The 1989’s film’s simple-but-powerful message of believing in oneself resonated with me in particular. “I’ve decided not to leave this town,” Kiki says on her first night in the new land she has flown to, where she has found a kind baker, Osono, willing to take her in. “Maybe I can stay and find some other nice people like Osono, who will accept me for who I am.” Kiki’s Delivery Service is a tale of trying to fit into a new world as an outsider, as well as a story of self-acceptance rather than a search for inauthentic popularity. It’s about learning what it means to find yourself when a part of you—in this case, Kiki’s magic—has disappeared.

Sometimes, being trans can feel like coming of age a second time, flying off to find yourself in an unfamiliar place, like Kiki, and hoping you will land without crashing. You learn the contours of the new world you’ve landed in—the catcalls, the fear of walking in certain places when you are alone, the people who will talk down to you out of the old assumption that prettiness and intelligence do not coexist, and the other subtle things that come to casually define your life. Sometimes, I do crash. Sometimes, I cry when I think about the child I can never give birth to, an element of motherhood I wish so much I could share. Yet, as Kiki’s Delivery Service reminds viewers, if we can conquer the things that make us cry, we can find other ways to smile.

The final film of Miyazaki’s that stood out to me in terms of gender and identity was Princess Mononoke , which is set in an alternative version of Muromachi-era Japan. Mononoke, whose actual name is San, is a liminal figure who came to represent for me the conflict between selfhood and expression even more than Nausicaä. San is human who was raised by wolves. She knows she is not a wolf in the same sense that her adoptive siblings are, yet they accept her as one of their own. Like them, she lives in hatred of humankind, albeit with greater irony. She is mockingly called Mononoke-hime , or “princess of the spirits,” by her human enemies in the gun-producing town on the edge of the forest. Though she has no kingdom to rule over, she moves with a kind of wild regality through the film’s scenes.

Like Miyazaki’s other films, Princess Mononoke refuses to fit its characters into neat categories. Lady Eboshi, San’s enemy and ruler of the nearby town, wants to clear the forest, but she is also kind. She takes in lepers whom others have rejected and invites women from brothels to do work around the factory—a job the women jokingly say is too tough for their male neighbors. In Mononoke’s world, women can achieve anything men can, if not more. Eboshi resists the stereotype of the heartless technology-obsessed human out to destroy the natural world and earns the viewer’s empathy—even more so than Nausicaä ’s Kushana.

These contraries that Miyazaki’s characters embody—good and bad, ruthless and caring, male and female—remind me a bit of something the Japanese writer Junichirō Tanizaki once described. In his well-known 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows , Tanizaki defined what he believed to be a particularly Japanese quality: finding beauty in things that contained both light and darkness. For Tanizaki, the West continuously, obsessively strove toward all things being bright, sterile, loud, and new. On the other hand, Japan saw the value in imperfections, taking a pleasure in the loveliness of aged things, of things partially lit, of understatement. While this idea, of course, is a huge essentialist generalization, it intriguingly mirrors the sense of nuance in Miyazaki’s work. His films appreciate flaws, find wonder in unusual places, and understand the importance of balancing contrasts.

While Nausicaä, Kiki, and San meant the most to me, Miyazaki’s other works also offered moving portrayals of female characters: Chihiro in Spirited Away , Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle , Naoko in The Wind Rises , Sheeta in Laputa . Japanese literature owes much to women who depicted multidimensional female figures, like Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shōnagon, and the early feminist Akiko Yosano; in his own way, Miyazaki has contributed to this history. His work enriches and unsettles. This is what great art does: It blows out the candles in our room until all is dark, then relights a few. Yet, somehow, we can see ourselves, the nakedness of the self, more clearly by these new lights.

In the way we turn to our favorite songs and art when the blue moods descend, I turned to these wonderful women. More than any other characters I’d seen, they gave me a sense of hope through their extraordinary, yet ordinary, power. They were symbols to remember, lighthouses of the soul on a night filled with shipwrecks. When I finally came out, I thought of them again. That is the beauty of Miyazaki’s films: how even someone like me, who does not explicitly exist in them, can find herself in, and through, his characters. How his fantasy princesses and metropolitan witches and wolf girls can be as human as anyone else.

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Key Question

What is the role of women in The Great Gatsby ? Below, we’ll review the role of women in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and introduce three of the novel’s main female characters: Daisy, Jordan, and Myrtle.

Historical Context

The Great Gatsby is filled with characters who appear to be larger-than-life, living the American Dream in the Jazz Age of the 1920s. The 1920s was also a period of increased freedom for women, as young women of this generation distanced themselves from more traditional values. However, in the novel, we don’t hear from the female characters themselves—instead, we primarily learn about the women from how they are described by the two main male characters, Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway. Read on to learn about the main female characters in The Great Gatsby .  

Daisy Buchanan

The female character we usually think of in The Great Gatsby is Daisy. Daisy, Nick’s cousin, lives in affluent East Egg with her husband, Tom, and their young daughter. Daisy is mentioned by Nick here: "Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago." Daisy appears almost removed, as an after-thought, of an importance only as the wife to Tom. Later, we learn that Daisy was previously in a romantic relationship with Jay Gatsby, and that many of Gatsby’s actions have been designed as a strategy to win over Daisy.

In the novel, the male characters find Daisy’s voice to be one of her most remarkable and notable features. According to Nick: "I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered 'Listen,' a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour."

As the novel progresses we learn that Daisy is the reason that Jay Gatsby has built up his opulent, lavish lifestyle. She's the reason, the hope-for-a-future that makes him dare to dream, and even dare to reinvent himself (from the small-town farm boy to the successful Jay Gatsby).

Jordan Baker

Jordan Baker is a close friend of Daisy from childhood. We learn that Jordan is a relatively well-known golfer, as Nick recalls having seen her picture and having heard of her before meeting her: “I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.”

Jordan and Nick meet at a dinner at the Buchanans’ house. When the two meet, Daisy speaks of setting up a relationship between the two of them, and later they do indeed begin dating.

Myrtle Wilson

Myrtle Wilson is Tom Buchanan’s mistress, who Nick describes as vibrant and charismatic. When Nick first meets her, he describes her as follows: “Her face… contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.” Myrtle is married to George Wilson, who runs an auto shop in a working-class area outside of New York City.

Narration in The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is told from the perspective of Nick, whom many scholars have considered to be an unreliable narrator . In other words, Nick’s way of reporting on people and events in the novel may be biased, and an “objective” reporting of what really happened in the novel (or an objective description of the female characters in the novel) could potentially look different from how Nick has described the situation.

Study Guide

For more resources on The Great Gatsby , review our study guide below:

• The Great Gatsby Overview
• Review: The Great Gatsby
• Themes in The Great Gatsby
• Famous Quotes from The Great Gatsby
• Questions for Study and Discussion
• Key Terms and Vocabulary
• 'The Great Gatsby' Study Questions
• 'The Great Gatsby' Characters: Descriptions and Significance
• 'The Great Gatsby' Themes
• The Great Gatsby and the Lost Generation
• 'The Great Gatsby' Overview
• 'The Great Gatsby' Plot Summary
• 'The Great Gatsby' Vocabulary
• Role of Women (and Girls) in "The Catcher in the Rye"
• The Role of Women in "Wuthering Heights"
• Discussion Questions for Pride and Prejudice
• Atticus Finch Biography
• 'A Rose for Emily' Questions for Study and Discussion
• Discussion Questions for 'A Christmas Carol'
• 'The Jungle' Questions for Study and Discussion
• 'Wuthering Heights' Questions for Study and Discussion
• "Of Mice and Men"

Female Characters Analysis

Women with voices are, by definition, strong women. Indeed, a woman plays an influential responsibility in life. Women are important people in societies globally. Strong women know they have enough strength for a journey, believing that they will become stronger through this journey. For instance, they take the lead to help families adjust primarily to new challenges and realities in case of political and economic society change. They are vital to the world’s prosperity bearing in mind that they are pioneers in a nation. In this case, women deserve equal rights and opportunities to participate in society, politics, education and economics. Societies have always emphasized the relevance of women’s appearance, thus educating them to measure their self-worth based on their present image. Women have a significant role in society to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Therefore, the essay’s objective is to explore the functions of women in the respective stories and why men cannot effectively replace them.

Penelope was one of the most important women characters in Odyssey. She was Odysseus’ wife, king of Ithaca and a committed mother to Telemachus. Significantly, Penelope was a great leader in her personal and faithfulness strengths, especially when awaiting Odysseus to return home. She carried the kingdom during which she refused to give up her deep-set beliefs, thus representing a home. Individuals expected her to appear weak and helpless without her husband though she proved otherwise. Eumaios described her as waiting for Odyssey “with enduring heart” in the palace” (Homer 16.37). She provided the motivation, especially for Odysseus’s return whereby she eager she waited for her husband’s arrival. Penelope was a willing wife in the bedroom as the author states that they “gladly went together to bed, and their old ritual” (Homer 23.296). It proved that she did not get married again because of disinterest in sexual desires, but her faithfulness remained unshaken. More importantly, she was one of the reasons Odysseus returned to Ithaca and had desired to unite with the son after many years of living apart.

Penelope was important to this story because of her solid trait as a woman, considering that her personalities remain consistent throughout The Odyssey. Her significance was to develop and sustain the best reputation. As a wife, individuals expected women to preserve the reputations of their husbands’ families and maintain their household systems. Penelope symbolizes a woman who is faithful to her husband no matter the situations they undergo. She appeared a loyal and confident woman, whereby Minerva advises him, “unless you have the blood of Ulysses and of Penelope in your veins, I see no likelihood of your succeeding” (Homer 2.19). In this case, she represented an ideal loyal Greek wife in the story, considering she had become a role model for other people to emulate. She emerged as a complex yet virtuous and powerful character despite most people mocking and making scandalous gossip about her. She was a good wife because of standing firm, especially when suitors fought for her hand in marriage.

Penelope had a serious and dynamic character, a devoted mother and a wife. Though she lacks the zest and fascination for life that other women portray. This makes her a complicated woman with a destiny sense, especially one who weaves her plots as deftly as if weaving an argument. She had no power to remove the stubborn suitors from invading her house asking to marry her though she knew their ill intentions (Homer 4.49). However, she has proved that women always have a mother way of dealing with an issue. She revealed her cunning nature, indicating that she was a good wife to the wily husband. Therefore, she symbolized a woman’s clever tactics, proving that she could not easily be deceived or carried away by her emotions to marry someone blindly.

Similarly, Shamhat was also an important woman character in the Epic of Gilgamesh. She was a sacred temple prostitute whose task was to use her attractiveness mainly to attempt Enkidu from his wildness. She was asked to civilize him by making sacred love. In this case, she was taken to a certain water source to expose herself after Enkidu was spotted in that place. Therefore, she was an important character in the story because her sexuality was associated with civilization rather than nature. “This is Shamhat! Uncradle your blossom” (George 1.7 180). She represented a sensuous refinement of culture, primarily the sophisticated lovemaking pleasures, alcohol, food, agriculture, clothing and music. She is also an important character in the story, considering that she manages to entice Enkidu to have sex with her. She changes him from an almost animal to a human being. In this case, she plays her role well by taming Enkidu, the wild man, through sex. She persuades him to turn away from wild animals and follow her to a more civilized world.

Moreover, besides being a harlot, she teaches Enkidu various ways of being civilized, showing her motherly figure. In this story, women only hold a small role, but their duties are pivotal to the story. She is important in the story as her sexuality is utilized as a tool by a man to tame another man. “spread your clothes so he may lie on you do for the man the work of a woman!” (George 1.7.185). This means that women’s work was to take care of men without objection during that period. Therefore, she was vital in the story because she used to prepare Enkidu for the trials he would face ahead. Her motherly character symbolizes Mesopotamia women view as a child and bringers of life. In the same case, Shamhat plays a significant role as a woman. Although she was not a powerful god or the wisest or strongest of all human beings, she still had a key influence over other people around her. She cared for Enkidu by teaching her to eat bread and drink (George 2.95.14). She told him that food was essential to life and there was a lot more in the fields. When men were considered one of the wisest and most powerful gods and humans, she had the power to influence and change their personalities significantly. In this case, she was a sacred harlot, more than just an object primarily to be used by a man for pleasure. Although she was considered as a woman living a life of shame in the story, she portrays a woman’s kindness, wisdom and love.

In addition, Helen was a prime character in the Odyssey. She was married to Menelaus and a daughter to Leda and Zeus. During the period, the Trojan war began after she got abducted by Paris and after her husband went to retrieve her. Nonetheless, Helen is not a simple woman as she was an intelligent individual seeing things how they are and though the shoe is more reserved to wifey roles. Helen had a beautiful, romantic, hopeful, and weary personality in the ancient world whereby she had a kind heart to all (Homer 4.41). Moreover, she was bold enough to tell Paris that he was younger than her despite being in the same age group. Again, Helen was not afraid of dying, but she was always afraid of what tomorrow would bring. The importance of this character is that she was not limited by obeying what King Sparta ordered her to do.

Besides, just like anyone would love someone else, Helen leaves the king despite his powers after falling in love with a handsome young man, Paris. She is a vital character who proves that she was not anyone’s property even though she married when young, as Menelaus furiously thinks after she leaves. In addition, the three women shared similar heroism, particularly which differs mainly by societal expectations for every respective gender. In all three instances, women were presented as sources of wisdom and greater responsibilities. They play many roles, both evil and good roles in nature. The three women are very significant because they are not limited by the circumstances that they face in the stories.

Nonetheless, male characters in this could not have played similar functions like the three women. For instance, Odysseus’s main goal was to take the crew back home after the war. However, he might not have changed his goal though he failed many times and got distracted on the way home for over fifteen years. Penelope hoped that one of the fine days, her husband would return home. In this case, she failed to marry another man and remained cunning for many years. However, this was a role that Odyssey could not manage, especially after he cheated on her with multiple women. During his journey, Odyssey met with two women, Circe and Calypso. Circe was the first woman Odysseus slept with after reversing the spell that had made his crew swine. However, this was not a good justification for cheating his wife with another woman. Again, not only did he cheat with Calypso primarily in addition to Circe, but he comfortably stayed on her island for many years until the gods urged her to release him (Homer 5. 54). All that period, his wife waited faithfully for his comeback, refuting all suitors who came to marry her for the sake of a man who barely thought of a way to get back home.

Again, it is certain that Gilgamesh could not complete his task without the help of a woman, Shamhat. He sent her to seduce Enkidu, which she succeeded after staying with him for six days and seven nights. Besides, through this period, Enkidu proved no longer a wild beast living with animals but was taken to a civilized world and became of Gilgamesh’s best friends. In this case, through this woman, Enkidu lost his raw animal strength and gained an intellect and consciousness of a human being. Neither Gilgamesh nor Enkidu had a male friend before as Enkidu only recognized steppe animals, and Gilgamesh was an oppressive king. However, with the help of a woman, the two have a strong bond. Love motivated Gilgamesh from a bully to an exemplary king. Enkidu changed from a wild beast to a nobleman with the help of a woman. Since the two had lived without male friends, only a woman’s presence could help them overcome their human nature.

Lastly, individuals considered Hellen as one of the most beautiful women worldwide. Similarly, male characters could not have served the same function as her. She was married to Menelaus but was in life with Paris, Trojan prince. More importantly, her amazing sexual figure was irresistible. Male desires of a woman are mysterious, overwhelming and bewildering. The woman’s desire involves being deceptive and destructive. For instance, Hellen lived with her husband for many years, but he never realized he did not love her completely. In this case, this was a plot only a woman could succeed. Lastly, all the three character’s functions signify a role that can only best fit a woman. Women have a prime role in society, and just like men, they should be respected because they have a strong purpose that cannot be replaced with a man’s character.

Works Cited

George, Andrew. “The Epic of Gilgamesh. A New Translation.” (1999).

Homer, Homer.  The odyssey . Xist Publishing, 2015.

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Female Characters in Shakespeare’s “Othello”: A Feminist Critique Essay

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Women as Possessions

Women as submissive, women as powerful, women being disloyal and promiscuous, works cited.

Othello is among Shakespearian tragic plays as the story ends with numerous characters dead including the main principals. The play explores issues of power and the main difference that existed between male and female roles and occupation during the Elizabethan period. The play also focuses on jealousy, chastity, magic, love, murder and miscommunication. Out of vengeance Othello commits murder on the main basis of unfaithfulness.

When basing the play on the feminist perspective, we can analyze and judge difference social status and values that women held in Elizabethan society. Through Othello , we get to learn of privilege practices in patriarchal marriages and restrictions and suppression of femininity in the play. According to the play, women were only meant to marry whereby after marriage they were massively held responsible for child rearing and house management.

In addition, Elizabethan society expected women to be obedient, silent, and chaste to their fathers, husbands, and brothers; let’s say that the society expected women to obey men in general. The society saw women to be psychologically and physiologically inferior to men. The following compares and contrast the principal female characters in the play Othello : Desdemona, Bianca and Emilia. It demonstrates the restrictions placed on women during Elizabethan era.

The play Othello clearly demonstrates women as possession. After hearing Othello’s defence and Brabantio’s complain, the Duke allows Desdemona to go with Othello to Cyprus. Iago is assigned by Othello who ironically describes him as an honest and trustworthy man to inform the Duke that “ To his conveyance I assign my wife ( Shakespeare 283).”

Following Othello’s comments, we can clearly get to know how he views his wife; he treats Desdemona as his own possession. Actually, Othello see her as a commodity which should be transported and guided everywhere. The first senator asks Othello just before they leave to Cyprus to take good care and look after Desdemona. On the other hand, Desdemona’s father sees her as his property.

Brabantion believes that Othello stole Desdemona from him without his permission. When Iago woke up Brabantio to inform him that Othello had eloped with his daughter Desdemona, he called out , “Awake! What, ho, Brabantio! Thieves! Thieves! Thieves! Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags! Thieves! Thieves ( Shakespeare 1.1.7)!” Iago is actually suggesting by his shouts that Othello had stolen Brabantio’s property.

The role and occupation of women is also depicted in Othello’s loving words to his wife Desdemona when he called her “Come, my dear love, /the purchase made, the fruits are to ensue ( Shakespeare II.3.8-9).” This clearly describes what marriage meant in Elizabethan society; it was an act of purchase whereby women were bought by their husbands as a favor while they were expected to sexually fulfill men’s desires since men considered it a return for the privilege done to them.

Iago also depicted the view of women possession by men in the society when he believed that Othello had slept with Emilia his wife. Iago said ‘it is thought abroad that “twixt my sheets/He’s done my office ( Shakespeare I.3.381-2).” Iago felt very bad when he realized what Othello had used his possession and that is what drove him to revenge by insulting Emilia in public before killing her.

Emilia never complained since she is objected to obey her husband, above all to remain silent and not complain in any way. This shows that women were actually deprived of their humanity during Elizabethan era. Iago had an intention of sleeping with Othello’s wife Desdemona as a pay for what he did to him.

He clearly stated in chapter two of the play that “evened with him, wife for wife ( Shakespeare II.1.290).” The feelings of women are completely ignored in the play for example Desdemona and Emilia’s feelings have been completely been disregarded in the play. This clearly brings out the fact that women were merely objects to be used by men to fulfill their own desires; they were perceived as possessions by men.

Desdemona depicts women being submissive to their husbands and this can be seen when she continually obeys orders from her husband Othello from the beginning of their relationship to later stages of the play when Othello got jealous.

Desdemona herself declared that “I am obedient (Shakespeare III.3.89). ” Towards the end of the play, we still see Desdemona obeying Othello’s commands; she submissively agreed to go to bed when Othello ordered her to do so. Even in her final breath though full of grief, she remains faithful and true to Othello and provides him with an ilibi which he does not put in use. This shows that Desdemona has completely accepted and respected her role as a woman in the society; she is an obedient wife to Othello.

Emilia being known as a strong character in the play also indicates her awareness of her proper roles as a woman in the society. At the end of the play when she revealed Iago’s plans, she says that “Tis proper I obey him, but not now’ (Shakespeare V.2.195).” Though Emilia decided to disobey her husband, she still felt the urge to explain why she had deviated from her responsibility as a woman.

Bianca also expresses similar sentiments but consoles herself after Cassio spurned at her because he wanted her to be circumstanced. Bianca is being forced by the laws of the society to get circumstanced, actually she did not want to put up with the idea of being circumstanced which implies that Bianca had no choice but to agree and embrace the laws of the society.

Based on what the three characters went through, we can clearly see that the society weighs heavily on women’s shoulder. This has left them feel like they need to support men themselves even if the men’s actions are not worth bearing with. Brabantion clearly expressed his thoughts concerning women as being, “of spirit still and quiet’ and ‘A maiden never bold (Shakespeare I.3.95-97).” Brabantion actually expressed his expectations of women through his words.

Women were to obey men by following all rules of nature. It was natural in Elizabethan society for feminine to do what their husbands, fathers and brothers told them. This is what was termed as being natural ; any other action was termed as unnatural since the society did not recognize it.

At the beginning of the play, Desdemona is featured as a confident, defiant and strong woman; however she ended up becoming a victim of emotional and physical abuse which led to her death. Despite the fact that she was obedient and passive to her husband, she blames Othello for his violent behaviour.

Desdemona decided to take the blame of the harm; when Emilia asked her who was responsible for the bruises on her face she replies “Nobody; I myself. Farewell (Shakespeare 5.2.29).” Desdemona exhibited symptoms of a “battered woman syndrome.” However, she puts all the blame on herself and endured all the abuses from Othello.

The play Othello also depict that women can also be powerful. This statement means that women in the play had the right to question men despite the fact that the society was too harsh on them. At the end of the play in Act IV, we see Emilia damming her opinions concerning men; she argues that women are not physically different from men.

She states “ Let husbands know, their wives have sense like them; they see and smell, and have their palates both for sweet and sour as husbands have ” (Shakespeare IV.3.92-5). Emilia believes that women too undergo suffering just like men; they also have affections and desires.

However, she believes that men are weak mentally. Emilia suggested that men are simplistic and brutish since they are not able to control their own desires with their own logical thought. This is very evident in the play through Iago and Othello’s actions which proves of Emilia’s statement. Desdemona exhibits the strength of a woman in public when she made a powerful speech as she was trying to explain to her father concerning her duties as a woman to Othello. She openly disagreed with her father.

Women in the play are depicted as a source of strength to women. When Othello mistook his wife by believing the bad rumor that she is cheating on him, he felt like he did not want to be a soldier anymore. He was convinced that he had lost his masculine and that is why he did not have any form of desire for thrusting cannons, big wars and military music.

Desdemona’s infidelity left him emasculated. This brings out the biggest role women played in Elizabethan society; they acted as a source of strength to their husbands. Othello totally lost pleasure on the things he loved and instead filled with rage and anger to revenge back for what Cassio had done to him not knowing that it was just a bad rumour.

Bianca is Cassio’s lover though she is very jealous after realizing what Iago had plotted for the man loved. Bianca is referred in the play as a harlot and a whore since she is poor and coming from a lower class as compared to Emilia and Desdemona. She is used by Iago to make Othello jealous by dropping Desdemona’s handkerchief at Cassio’s feet.

This was to confirm that Desdemona was actually committing adultery. Othello actually confirmed his suspicion after Bianca conducted a good act with the handkerchief. Bianca allowed Iago to use her which made her become disloyal to her lover Cassio causing the lives of Othello and Desdemona.

Brabantio believes that since Desdemona had the strength to deceive his own father by eloping with Othello was a great possibility that she can deceive her husband too by another man. The main idea that Brabantio had was that “ unruly daughter will make an unruly and promiscuous wife (Shakespeare 213) .” Iago convinced Othello that Desdemona was actually cheating on him.

He told Othello that a woman who could easily obey and deceive his father is capable of screwing around with other men. Othello did not think twice, he did not see that Desdemona’s decision to escape with him was actually a sign of love and loyalty to him. He however saw it the way Iago had told him; a sign of infidelity and disloyalty.

This shows that most men in Venetian believed that those women who stood strong to oppose men were capable of doing worst things. They were considered as disloyal and promiscuous. However, often, almost in all the scenes in the play, we see that Othello is always preoccupied by matters of flesh whenever he was talking with the wife. This also brings out the role of women in the society which is objects for satisfaction.

The male society in the play despite rating women as second citizens, they also constructed them as evil for luring them into sexual sin. Iago stereotyped women by suggesting that they are not always as they appear; he believes that women are more of housewives and wild cats.

On the other hand, after Othello wrongly mistook Desdemona for cheating on him, he ceases to find any form of sexual power. While speaking to Iago concerning his plan to murder Desdemona, he becomes adamant and states that he will “not expostulate with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again ” (Shakespeare IV.1.203-5).

Generally, all the women in the play are accused of inappropriate sexual behaviours and prostitution yet as we see it, none of the women appear guilty of what they are accused of. This shows how men undermine women and how possessive they are such that if they get any form of information that they are or have cheated on them; they do everything within their power to avenge it. This also shows that men blame women for their failures instead of accepting that they are wrong, they put the full blame on women.

In conclusion, the play Othello e xplores issues of power and the main difference that existed between male and female roles and occupation during the Elizabethan period. Through the play, we get to learn of privilege practices in patriarchal marriages and restrictions and suppression of femininity in the play.

Women are taken as possessions by their men, they should be submissive and to be blamed in cases when men fails. Women are also considered as disloyal and promiscuous beings in the society. However, despite the challenges women faced in the Elizabethan period, we also see them standing out to be strong and courageous as depicted by Desdemona and Emilia.

Shakespeare, William. Four Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth . New York: Bantam Books, 1988.

Shakespeare, William. Othello . Maryland: University Press of America, Inc., 1985.

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A Translator’s Reckoning With the Women of the Odyssey

Since I completed my translation of the Odyssey , which is the first published version of Homer’s epic in English translated by a woman, readers have often assumed that I must sympathize above all with the story’s female characters. I am asked, in particular, about my interpretation of Penelope, Odysseus’ faithful wife. Penelope spends twenty years in tearful isolation, waiting for her man to come home from war—and also, as it happens, from the cave and bed of two beautiful goddesses—while caring for her son and warding off the advances of her abusive suitors. At the same time, she manages to fool the suitors with her sneaky trick of weaving by day and unpicking her work at night, telling them that she can never marry until her project is finished. Moreover, she successfully needles her husband by pretending to have moved the bed that he constructed out of a still-living olive tree, a reminder that she has the power to hurt him by sleeping with another man. She’s canny, she’s strong-willed, she has grit, she has a vivid imagination, she’s loyal, she’s a competent, mostly single mother who shows deep love for her difficult, moody son, and she keeps a big and complex household running for two decades. You have to love her for all these things, and I do.

But many students, scholars, and general readers want even more from this literary character: they want her to fit the ideal of an empowered woman. It is comforting to subscribe to the notion—as Daniel Mendelsohn does in his recently published memoir, “An Odyssey,” and as Robert Fagles does, in his translation of the poem—that the marriage between Odysseus and Penelope is a partnership of intellectual equals, based on true love and a shared outlook on life. Odysseus speaks, in Homer’s poem, of the ideal of like-mindedness ( homophrosyne ) in marriage. It is not usually mentioned that he brings it up only when talking to an impressionable teen-age girl, Nausicaa, whom he avoids telling that he’s married, and whom he has a strong ulterior motive for buttering up, since his life depends on her help. (We should know by now that powerful older men do not always tell young women the truth.) Moreover, the sentimentalized reading of Penelope erases some facts about her social position that the original poem makes very clear. Whereas Odysseus has many choices, many identities, many places to go and people to be and to see, Penelope has only one choice, and it is defined exclusively by her marital status: she can wait for Odysseus, or marry someone else—and even this very limited choice is not open forever, since the abusive suitors can eventually force her hand. In Mary Beard’s forthcoming pamphlet, “Women and Power,” she writes about a scene in the Odyssey that she calls Western literature’s “first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up’ ”—Telemachus telling Penelope, in Book One, to be silent after she asks the poet performing in her palace to sing a different tune.

The silencing of female voices, and the dangers of female agency, are central problems in the poem. Penelope’s strictly constrained position is presented in some ways as necessary, since élite wives who act more freely may do scary things—like the half-divine Helen, who abandons her husband for another man, or her sister Clytemnestra, who helps her lover murder her husband. In Ithaca, Odysseus owns the house, the weapons, the wealth, the slaves, the farm, the orchard, and the seat in the council of men; Penelope does not even fully share the marriage bed, which her husband calls “my bed.” Penelope is, like her husband, highly intelligent; but her intelligence, evoked by her standard epithet, periphron , “circumspect,” suggests caution and risk aversion. Her keen mind is not liberating; it keeps her stuck. By contrast, Odysseus’ intelligence is defined as an ability to find a fix for any situation: he is polymechanos , the guy with a solution for everything, and an iron will. The poem sets up a sharp distinction between Odysseus’ fantasy and Penelope’s realism. He believes that, after twenty years away from home, he can return to being exactly the man he used to be, while she knows that, no matter how strong or smart or faithful she is, she can never be the same. In one of the most upsetting and beautiful passages of the poem, Penelope cries so desperately that her very being seems to dissolve. In my translation, it reads:

Her face was melting, like the snow that Zephyr

scatters across the mountain peaks; then Eurus

thaws it, and as it melts, the rivers swell

and flow again. So were her lovely cheeks

dissolved in tears.

Other translations of this passage say that her tears “melted” or “streamed” down her cheeks, or that (in the English cliché) her “heart” melted. But Homer’s original text says that her chros —her “skin” or “flesh”—melted, and that her cheeks themselves dissolved ( teketo kala pareia ). Penelope experiences her marriage in terms of grief, abandonment, and the loss of identity—a loss that, disturbingly, Homer presents as a necessary and natural process, like the coming of spring on the mountain. In translating this passage, I wanted to bring out both the beauty and the precision of the imagery, and the horror—a common, relatable horror—of being a woman who experiences her attachment to her husband as the destruction of her self. I wanted the reader of my English to feel as I do in reading the Greek: for Penelope, and with her pain, rather than prettifying or trivializing her grief.

All this may make Penelope seem like an innocent victim, but she is also a woman of privilege, who colludes in, indeed insists on, the silencing of more vulnerable women. Penelope clutches desperately at whatever shards of autonomy are available in her husband’s house. After Odysseus slaughters her suitors, he tells Telemachus to kill the female slaves who have slept with them. Contemporary translators and commentators often present the massacre of these women as if it were quite ordinary, and entirely justified. The murdered slaves are routinely described in contemporary American English translations as “disobedient maids,” and are labelled as “sluts” or “whores”—a level of verbal abuse that finds absolutely no analogue in the Greek. The killing of these abused slaves (who are usually referred to, euphemistically, as “servants” or “maids”) is often described as if it were unquestionably ethical. The study guide SparkNotes describes these women as “disloyal women servants” who must be “executed,” while CliffsNotes calls them “maidservants” who were “disloyal,” and claims that their murder has a “macabre beauty.” In the poem’s original language, Telemachus refers to them only with hai , the feminine article—“those female people who . . . slept beside the suitors.” In my translation, I call them “these girls,” and hope to convey the scene in both its gruesome inhumanity and its pathos: “their heads all in a row, / were strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony. They gasped, / feet twitching for a while, but not for long.”

There is a vision of empowered femininity in the Odyssey, but it is conveyed not in in the mortal world but in that of the gods. The poem’s plot is, of course, engineered by the wonderfully gender-fluid goddess Athena, who protects and saves her favorite human from the Sirens, goddesses and female monsters who try to entrap him or transform him or hide him or devour him or swallow him up, with their dangerous feminine wiles. The divine Calypso, Aphrodite, and Circe provide passionate models of female power—idealized fantasies of how much agency mortal women might have, if only social circumstances were completely different. I read Homer’s great poem as a complex and truthful articulation of gender dynamics that continue to haunt us. The Odyssey traces deep male fears about female power, and it shows the terrible damage done to women, and perhaps also to men, by the androcentric social structures that keep us silent and constrained. Birds in Homer are the ultimate image of speech and of freedom. Athena repeatedly transforms herself into a bird of prey, whooshing up to the rooftops or surfing across the waves of the sea. The silenced slave girls are “like doves or thrushes,” caught in a hunter’s net. Penelope, meanwhile, is like a “pale gray nightingale” who “sits among the leaves / that crowd the trees.” She can’t fly, but her warbling amounts to a “symphony of sound.”

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Friday essay: girls have long been woefully underestimated – but now they’re roaring back

Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Monash University

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Michelle Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Teenage girls are typically the least powerful and most underestimated group within Western cultures – where adults are seen as superior to children, and men are privileged above women. Girls can also provoke cultural fears and anxieties because they occupy a transitional space between childhood and adulthood.

How old is a “girl”? The definition has shifted, along with things like the age of consent and marriage. The significance of marriage has tended to mean young women are called “girls” even into their early twenties. While female children are also understood as girls, a distinct girls’ culture begins, it’s generally thought, around the pre-teen years.

The separate stage of life we know as girlhood originated in the second half of the 19th century. It was brought into being by two major transformations: the raise of the age of marriage to the early twenties and girls working outside the home. In Britain and the United States, these changes created a time of independence for young women, between being under the control of parents and the confines of marriage, as literary historian Sally Mitchell has written .

The reality of girls having financial and personal freedom was a worrying prospect. As Mitchell writes , the way a girl is seen as both immature and occupying a liminal stage “gives her permission to behave in ways that might not be appropriate for a woman”.

Yet a separately designated period of girlhood also gave rise to a girls’ culture designed to cater to their unique interests, such as books, magazines and organisations. This “girl culture” would expand and become more visible in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Today’s girls enjoy a wide range of interests and pursuits, from Taylor Swift fandom to political action and elite sport. Yet their interests are often trivialised or dismissed.

Girls of substance

Girls are often framed as “ at risk ”, or as potential dangers to themselves via sex and drugs. At the same time, they are typically dismissed in terms of their political or cultural influence. A popular nursery rhyme suggests girls are made of “sugar and spice and all things nice”. This implies a pleasant, compliant nature, rather than challenging the status quo.

When girls have made a political impact and risen to international prominence, they have often been the target of significant hatred. For example, activist Greta Thunberg gained global notoriety as a 15-year-old when she began the School Strike for Climate movement in 2018.

She became a figure of online hate, especially after sailing to the US in 2019 to participate in climate talks. Thunberg was criticised for having political passion (“whining” and exhibiting “anger”), and for daring to speak up when she was only a “child”.

Even Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who survived being shot by a Taliban gunman in Pakistan in 2012 and subsequently became an activist for girls’ education, has been the subject of waves of “ Malala hate ”. Her acceptance into Oxford University, her Nobel Peace Prize and high-profile interviews in magazines such as Vogue have only heightened the volume and vitriol of the disapproval.

Girls of substance, such as Thunberg and Yousafzai, defy feminine expectations by being assertive and refusing to accept social and political norms largely established by male leaders. The degree of irritation these outspoken girls have provoked illustrates how they disrupt the cultural expectations of girls as compliant and unimportant.

Boys vs girls in popular culture

Just as girls themselves have been dismissed when they have attempted to influence politics or culture, the interests and passions of girls have typically been derided as trivial in comparison with those of boys and men.

One of the first visible manifestations of female fandom was teenage girls’ early enthusiasm for The Beatles in the 1960s. As expert on media fandom Mark Duffett explains , the enthusiasm of girls and women for the band was distinguished as “feminized ‘hysterical’ affect” in contrast with “intellectually mature, artistic appreciation”.

The idea that the aspects of culture girls are attracted to are inferior or disposable is another way their interests have been belittled.

Words associated with the music girls primarily consume, such as “bubblegum” pop, signal its “sweetness” and lack of substance. In the 1980s and 1990s, girls’ fandom of “boy bands” such as New Kids on the Block and the Backstreet Boys was disparaged.

More recently, there is some animosity towards “Swifties” and dismissal of the musical quality and likely longevity of Taylor Swift’s music. However, her undeniably successful recent tour to Australia attracted reams of positive media coverage. Articles celebrated girls and their mothers wearing glitter and sequins and attending concerts together.

In the realm of cinema, superhero and comic films are big business today: the Marvel cinematic universe is the highest-grossing franchise in history. These films, with huge production and marketing budgets, are derived from publications and toys typically associated with boys. Though some of these fictional universes include female characters, they are less commonly at the forefront.

In contrast, girls’ interests and hobbies have been so derided and marginalised that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) was one of the first films to elevate a girls’ toy to major cinema prominence.

Unlike the seven-film Transformers franchise , which has grossed over $5 billion , Barbie exhibits a high-degree of self-awareness and irony about the toy and how girls play with it. Barbie, which has grossed 1.45 billion US dollars at the box office, was widely dissected as a measure of contemporary feminism.

While a predominantly male viewership can uncritically watch action films about robots that change form for entertainment, a story about an iconic fashion doll for girls carried many other expectations – because of its rarity and the sense that girls’ toys and interests are frivolous.

From dismissal to lucrative market share

In the 1870s, in both Britain and the United States, doctors argued against the value of girls’ education by suggesting girls entering puberty required the limited supply of energy available within their bodies to prepare their reproductive systems for womanhood. If girls undertook rigorous academic study, their ability to have healthy children and to retain “their natural grace and gentility” might have been compromised, writes historian Kathleen E. McCrone.

These historical opinions highlight two perceptions of girls: first, that they were physically “weaker” beings who were not capable of the same physical and intellectual activities as boys; and second, that their primary purpose was to bear children.

Things have changed a great deal since. Teenage girls, for instance, are participating in the Olympics in notable numbers as peak athletes. Skateboarding in particular features girls such as 14-year-old Australian skateboarder Arisa Trew , who became the youngest ever Australian Olympic gold medallist this week. (She also became the first woman to land a 720 – two full rotations while mid-air – in competition.)

Girls now have a different kind of cachet: market power in a capitalist economy. In 2000, a Disney executive observed the number of girls dressed in generic princess costumes for live Disney on Ice performances. In response, he initiated the Disney Princess line of merchandise. These toys, costumes, books and accessories reached annual sales in the billions in the early 2000s .

In 2023, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which appealed largely to girls and young women, became the highest-grossing tour of all time .

Nevertheless, Swift attracts criticism that her performances are as not as legitimate as those of male bands who cater to an older fanbase (which includes more men). In a direct reference to the Eras Tour, the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, for example, joked with a live audience that his band was undertaking the “Errors Tour”, “because we actually play live”.

One cultural arena where girls dominate is reading. The 2024 Report of the Australian Teen Reading in the Digital Era project shows twice as many girls are “fiction fanatics” (avid readers) as boys. And boys are far more likely than girls to abstain from reading altogether.

Most young adult fiction is written by women , for an audience of primarily girls and young women. Girls are highly influential on the book industry, by sharing their opinions about books on BookTok and exerting pressure on publishers through social media to increase the diversity of published authors .

The gendered nature of teen reading is commonly framed as a “problem”, with campaigns for more fiction to be published that will directly appeal to boys , to improve their rates of literacy. However, research has repeatedly found male characters have been historically overrepresented in children’s literature. This continues to be the case, despite modest improvements in recent years.

Until comparatively recently, girls have been expected to identify vicariously with male protagonists in fiction and film. Yet it is typically presumed that boys are not willing to read or view stories about girls or written by women, just as men largely refuse to read books written by women . Author of the Harry Potter series, Joanne Rowling, famously adopted the pen-name “J.K” because of her publisher’s assumption that boys would not read a book written by a woman .

The women of tomorrow

In 2024, young women comprise around 60 per cent of Australian university students , reflecting women’s entry into numerous professions. Meanwhile Kamala Harris is a serious contender to become the first female US president, showing girls they can aspire to almost any role in life.

Yet despite movements towards equality for girls and women, sexism continues to permeate many institutions and girls continue to experience sexual assault at double the rate of boys .

Girls are the women of tomorrow. To improve the future for women, it is important to reevaluate attitudes towards girls’ culture and interests. We need to consider why they are often dismissed, compared to the hobbies and passions of boys.

For parents, there is a vital role to play in counteracting stereotypes about girls. Adults can also improve their engagement with girls to prepare them to face a sometimes hostile world.

Chelsey Goodan’s Underestimated: The Wisdom and Power of Teenage Girls , for instance, talks about the need to trust girls to make their own choices, the importance of discussing complex issues, such as sexuality, with them honestly, and why we need to listen to them in ways that allow them to reveal difficult emotions, such as shame and fear.

As Goodan suggests, by dismissing girls with labels like “hormonal”, “crazy” and “dramatic”, our culture “minimizes their voice until it’s silent”.

Most importantly, we can empower girls to speak up. We can also improve our level of respect for them and what they have to say. Devaluing the period of youth for half of the population contributes to attitudes that diminish the contributions, achievements and interests of women, too.

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Famed author’s conflicting attitudes towards the women in his life

Lascivious tendencies: The Cover of Hardy's women features Thomas Hardy and his second wife, Florence, who worked as his assistant while he was married to his first wife. Left, Paula Byrne. Photos / Supplied

Book review: English writer Thomas Hardy is often associated with memorable female characters: Tess from Tess of the d’Urbervilles , Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd or Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure . They are characters who have been made more memorable by numerous film and television adaptations.

Author Paula Byrne has structured her study of Hardy around the women who inspired and obsessed him. The book has 71 chapters, all but one of which is named after a woman, and including a handful about Hardy’s fictional characters. Her prologue hooks the reader.

Hardy was a very private man, fearful of what later biographers might say about him. So much so that in 1918, he burnt pages of manuscripts, notebooks, reviews and correspondence. The destruction was driven by the diary kept by his first wife Emma, which his second wife Florence compared with her own, “… but when I remember the awful diary that the first Mrs T. H. kept full of venom, hatred, and abuse of him and his family, I am afraid to do more than chronicle facts.”

Florence and Hardy collaborated on a secret work. Hardy wrote his own biography for publication after his death, written in the third person and to be branded as his “official” biography by Florence.

One of the insights that did survive from Hardy’s first wife was that, “He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.” Hardy Women divides his life and the women he encountered into age periods, beginning with childhood and the mother, sisters and cousins who played a part in the writer’s early development.

Even here, things are not straightforward, since the list also includes other influences, such as land owners, philanthropists and even a woman who Hardy witnesses being hanged for the murder of her husband.

The unexpected links are fascinating. Themes of drunken husbands and domestic violence appear again and again, and very soon we see numerous topics that recur in Hardy’s novels, things he saw all too often in his youth.

After the childhood sections, we move to Hardy’s period of apprenticeship before setting off around England with periods spent in London, Weymouth and Cornwall. This is followed by detailed sections about the women Hardy created in his novels, so often amalgams of many of the women he knew in real life.

Although the book is obviously concerned with the women who influenced Hardy’s life, this does mean that we lose a little balance in the picture of his childhood. His father is a minor character and one who appears only because his wife frequently chides him for his lack of ambition.

By contrast, Hardy’s friend Horace Moule, a brilliant young scholar who tutored Hardy as a boy and encouraged him as a writer, is the only male character to have a chapter in the book. While Moule encouraged Hardy, he also counselled him against applying to study at Cambridge University, a rejection that Hardy later channelled into Jude the Obscure .

It is easy to come away from this book with a poor view of Hardy; as a flirt, as a user of women and someone happy to apply some of the double standards that he bestowed on many of the male characters in his novels.

While married to his first wife, Hardy tried to seduce a young writer, Florence Henniker. Her gentle rejection of his wish to kiss her was the inspiration for some of Hardy’s better poetry. But his double standard of supporting women’s emancipation and modern views seems at odds with his own lascivious thoughts and actions. Filled with spite at Florence’s rejection, Hardy wrote a story called An Imaginative Woman, in which there are multiple similarities to his failures with her.

The final section of the book is dominated by Hardy’s first wife, Emma, initially by her increasingly odd behaviour, then by her declining health, and finally by her death, which had a profound effect on Hardy. Having been unhappy in his marriage for many years, Emma’s death seemed to push Hardy to remember only the brief good times and forget the misery of the rest.

He had already found himself a replacement in Florence Dugdale, a writer of children’s stories and 39 years younger than him. In a strange turn of events, Florence found herself living with the Hardys, working as an assistant to Thomas while befriending Emma.

In many people’s mind, Hardy is primarily a novelist, although the truth is that he spent many more years writing poetry after the rough reception of Jude the Obscure in 1895. He spent the next 30 years producing eight collections of poetry. Wife Florence made a very astute observation about his poetry, noting that he had become so infatuated by the beautiful young actress playing Tess in a local theatre production that he was inspired to write new poems. This was “always a sign of wellbeing with him. Needless to say, it is a dismal poem.”

Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses by Paula Byrne (Williams Collins, $42.99) is out now.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Heart of Darkness — Female Characters in the Novel “Heart of Darkness”

Female Characters in The Novel "Heart of Darkness"

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