Tipping The Velvet Analysis

The city of Sydney provokes connotations of beauty, glamour, and prestige, however, Day’s personification of Sydney as a femme fatale character exposes the corrupt and seedy underbelly that exists behind the enchanting illusion. Day establishes the personification of Sydney using the pronoun “she” which serves to reinforce the femme fatale characterisation. Additionally, Sydney’s feminised representation is corroborated in an extract from ‘The Urbanisation of Australia: Representations of Australia in Popular Culture’, where Sydney is characterised as, “a woman who is beautiful and corrupt. She is seductive, dangerous, a femme fatale.” Day further manifests the illusive front of the city through a description of its enchanting disguise, “Sydney Tower dazzling the city with fool’s gold at sunset”.

Craft examines the usual roles of the Victorian men and women, passive women especially, requiring them to “suffer and be still”. The men of this time were higher up on the important ladder of that era. Craft believes the men are the “doers” or active ones in

Children's Literature is everlastingly framed by variable ideologies; this represented the standards and values of a didactic society in the nineteenth century, which was controlled transcendently by the church. Enforcing religious perspectives on the idealistic family life, gender roles were compulsory in respectability, and a woman's place was inside the home. The nineteenth century was an extremely confusing time, with its firm Victorian qualities, class limits, industrialism and expansionism. It was the time when society was a male dominated society in which women were controlled by the male figures in the society.

There’s a very clear distinction between roles for women and roles for men. From the first two stanzas the narrator has “invented a game” which gets her father to “look up from his reading” and notice her (3,4). Prior to her dressing like a boy, he had not paid any attention to her and she feels that in order to get his attention she has to pretend to be a boy. The last stanza is where there is the clear message of the different roles for men and women. The woman narrating describes how by shedding her outfit she “returns invisible” as herself (27).

The Victorian Era was the history of the United Kingdom during Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 to 1901. The Victorian society was broken up into four different classes, Gentry, Upper Class, Middle Class, and Working Class. Depending on what class you were a part of determined the type of diversion you got to participate in. Of course, the higher classes were involved in a wider range of activities. The lower classes activities were limited and not as diverse.

Miranda Devine’s opinion piece ‘Modest Middleton Girls Impeccable’ published in the Sunday Herald, May 8th, 2011, argues that todays society had become “pornified” and role models such as The Middleton sisters are bringing back “sexiness by implication”. A patronising tone is adopted when Devine refers to the “over-peroxide” and “over-cleavaged” appearance of Generation Y girls. But when the author talks about the Middleton's sisters, she uses juxtaposition by adopting a more sensitive tone of appreciation and respect, commenting on the modesty and classiness of Kate and Pippa. Devine attempts to get her readers, older people in particular, to re-evaluate dressing and popular fashion culture, by commenting on the desirability of a female that

As with all theories, this feminist approach to Louise Halfe’s “Body Politics” does not come without its flaws. While it can be argued that this poem criticizes the performativity of feminine gender roles in a patriarchal society, this cannot be proven definitively without knowing the author’s original intentions. Furthermore, the poem does not give its readers enough information to conclude that the society the women live in is in fact a patriarchal society. This becomes evident, as there is no reference to any masculine figure – so any assumptions about the masculine-dominant culture are purely speculative. It is possible that Halfe wrote this poem in an attempt to challenge the gender binary, however one stands to question how successfully she is in doing so.

Exposing Foundations: Psychoanalysis and Gender in Mulvey and Butler Woman… stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the image of woman still tied in her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning. 6 In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Laura Mulvey points out that psychoanalytic theory can “advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught” (2). To understand why woman is only “the bearer of meaning, not the maker of meaning” in this order, I will turn to a very small fraction of Lacan’s psychoanalytic philosophy. Here we find that

It may skew her thinking and at times be subjective. The intended audience is someone who is studying literature and interested in how women are portrayed in novels in the 19th century. The organization of the article allows anyone to be capable of reading it.

The New Woman represented independent women who were generally unmarried and strove towards social and economic emancipation. They lay emphasis on criticising society’s assertion that marriage is the only end to which all women should strive to. Mrs Cheveley reflects the New Woman as she fearlessly enters London society unaccompanied and prepared to partake in politics, more particularly the blackmail of Sir Robert Chiltern. This kind of venture is singular for a woman at the time where their roles were relegated to catering to the needs of their husbands and their children, not rivalling men in the intellectual realm or threatening the stability of spousal love as Mrs Cheveley did. However despite the singularity of her courageous venture outside the delineated role of a women it is more stigmatised as opposed to the

Despite her age, Sheila is handled by society with the competence of a child. With very few responsibilities and little to no authority over her life, someone (either her family, the Berlings or Gerald) is constantly controlling her. This treatment of women in the 1910s was unfortunately very common and household work and minding children fell onto their shoulders. Women of this time could not live a comfortable life alone without a man providing an income, they had no right to vote, essentially belonged to their husbands, and were generally only employed in low-wage menial jobs. Despite Sheila and Eva Smith being of like age, the Birling’s juxtaposed idea of Eva Smith being able to provide for herself, whilst Sheila is expected to be provided for by her husband or family, highlights the different expectations women are held to from different social classes.

The Victorian era, the setting of the play A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, consisted of many social reforms such as bringing light to the ideas of socialism, liberalism, and most importantly feminism. Feminism dates back to the ancient Greek periods. Proto Feminists such as Plato fought for the total sexual equality of men and women publicly prescribing that they should be part of the highest class. That was during 400 B.C. and still 2,000 years later in that patriarchal society, women were isolated in their homes and forced to do housework and take care of the children while their spouse was able to go out, get a job, and have whatever freedom he wanted. Women were unable to make money of their own and depended on their husband to make the

Jane Austen lived in a period at the turn from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century, which was a period of mixed thoughts, which conflicted all the times. Among all the conflicts, the most important one was the disparity in social status between men and women. Not only men’s status was in the center of the society but also common people thought it was right that men were much more important than women were. In those days girls were neither allowed nor expected to study much because they did not have to work for a living. They were supposed to stay at home and look beautiful in order to get suitable husbands.

The novel being written at a time when the society was a patriarchal society , dominated by man and by the rich and wealthy person of the society, the struggle Jane had to go through in order to find her individual identity, independence, equality and dignity seem impossible for a woman of no fortune and no physical beauty. Yet Jane never surrenders to those snobbish people who despise poor and the weak people. She defied most of the cultural standards and the societal norms of the Victorian period which was a man- dominated society and the poor people were oppressed. She lived in a ‘’world that measured the likelihood of woman’s success by the degree of her marriageability,’’ which included her familial connections, economic status and beauty ( Moglene 484). We can see from the relationships she had with men that she defied the generally accepted norms and tradions of the nineteenth- century women.

Society and Marriage 2. Mistress or Wife 3. Wealth, Power and Equality: from Governess to Heiress 1. Society and Marriage - Victorian period: marrying out of interest with no regards for affection. Brontë exploits this issue in “Jane Eyre” by showing this darker side of society through the enigmatic Edward Rochester and his lustful family.