17th Century Treatment of Woman in Literature Essay

By the Middle Ages, it was unremarkably accepted that eve was principally to blame for the disobedience that led to the fall of humanity. Greek ideas had replaced Jewish in Christian thinking, including the nonion that the soul was good just now the tree trunk malign. Heretical though this might set ab come out been, it didnt stop sexuality world regarded as somehow evil. One of the a few(prenominal) recorded gothic women writers, the mystic Margery Kempe, aspired to celibacy even plug-inhin uniting.As it becomes app arnt in a few aim working re bring outing women in medieval literature, includingThe Book of Margery Kempe, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the unitary thousand Knight, and Le Morte Darthur, in the middle ages or medieval period, restrictions placed on women underwent a significant change. At the beginning of this period, womens intents were very narrowly prescribed and women did not produce much to do with behavior outside of the home. As this age went on, h owever, women gradually began to extinguish much opinions and ready a majusculeer and to a greater extent equal role in society.Two preferably medieval texts, Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight offer contri andors both simple categories of women, those who are or are not confined. Later, with the writings of Margery Kempe, the strict duality begins to disappear and the reviewer is confronted with a charr who is blend of each of these ideas of women. succession she is confined by her society, she is unconfined by its conventions much(prenominal) as marriage and traditional gender roles. In general, however, each text presents an workout of a prudish and confined cleaning woman as well as the complete opposite almost so that the ref can call in what evils can occur if a woman is not confined.The women in Beowulf, at least on first glance, might appear to be glorified waitresses and sexual objects, except their role is farther more complicated than this. When it is stated in one of the important quotes from Beowulf that, A coffin nail should weave pause As confined in a marriage, women in Beowulf are assigned the role of peace weaver, queen and bedmateAll of the human women in Beowulf are queens and bring together to their duties as much(prenominal) with thanksgiving and obedience.The plainly exception to this model of medieval femininity is Grendels begin who is technically a woman but is so hideously described that the idea of gender becomes grossly distorted. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight even though it was create verbally some years after Beowulf. In this text, the reader is first confronted with the ideal woman, Guenevere, who is confined and is serving her role as peace weaver and object for the male person gaze. the goodly queen gay in the center/ on a dais well-decked and duly set out / with costly silk curtainsall broidered and bordered with the best gemsChaucers womenAlthough women feature strongly in Chaucers fro nt works, such as The Boke of the Duchess and Troilus and Criseyde, we however go lead women on the pilgr get a line described in The Canterbury Tales * The get hitched with woman of Bath * The Prioress * Another nun who accompanies her but is hardly mentioned again. The two principal women reflect the solely elbow rooms that women at the time could achieve freedom and status in the Church or in a trade. The married woman of Bath represents those whose skills, such as weaving, gave them financial independence, though Chaucers font seems to have grown wealthy mainly by marrying a series of rich old men. is tempting to see the Wife as a champion of pistillate rights, and her Tale brings out the idea that women should have maistrie everywhere men, but the Wife is of course a character in a story write by a man. She has had five husbands, like the woman of Samariawho is challenged by saviour (in arse 417-18), withouten oother compaignye in youthe.Her fifth husband, whom she ma rried for love rather than riches, proved to be slight compliant and very well read. She claims to have rove him in his place eventually, but Chaucer enjoys making the Wife recount (and try to refute) all the misogynistic tales with which he has assaulted her.Women in renascence and after passim the sixteenth and ordinal centuries, the social standing and the legal and economic rights of women continue to be restrictive, limiting them to the domestic sphereDuring the Protestant reformation of the sixteenth century and the resulting Catholic Counter-Reformation, the disembowelion of women in domestic roles became increasingly important. The social system of patriarchy matured during the early modern period, particularly during the Reformation. The ideal of patriarchy involved male control over nearly all facets of society.The assigned works from the side rebirth primarily portray women un possibleally. Despite a few exceptions, these works depict women as being idealistica lly beautiful, as having perfect virtue, or, conversely, as exercising hyperbolically disallow traits. The few exceptions to this rule do depict women in a more realistic light. For instance, in its first six stanzas, the effeminate speaker system of John Donnes The Bait kudoss Marlowes Passionate Shepherd, but in the final quatrain, she ac sleep withledges how foolish she is for biting at his bait, saying, That fish that is not catched thereby, / Alas, is wiser far than I (1247).William Shakespeare likewise paints a realistic picture of a woman in Sonnet 130, debunking the florid Petrarchan conventions that get ahead womens beauty almost beyond science but asserting that his mistress is as exalted (1041) as any Petrarchan subject nonetheless. Among the male authors, Shakespeare in like manner presents the most substantive and realistic egg-producing(prenominal) character of these works with Cordelia in poof Lear. Although her honesty at first brings disownment and exile, she emerges as one of the few characters in the play who remain legitimate to their assurances end-to-end the course of the narrative.Cordelias realistic portrayal is rivaled lonesome(prenominal) by the highly personal rime of the only female author assigned, Katherine Philips. In A marry State, Philips in any case debunks the popular perspective favoring of marriage, especially with its benefits for women, noting to her hearing of young women that the single bread and butter yields No discourteous husbands to create your fears / No pangs of childbirth to extort your divide / No childrens cries for to offend your ears (1679).Another of her rimes, On the Death of My First and Dearest Child, Hector Philips, provides an equally realistic yet exponentially more frantic account of the uniquely maternal experience of losing a child. Despite the success of these works in presenting realistic depictions of women, they are the exceptions to the rule, as the majority of the ass igned works portray women quite unrealistically. Perhaps the most park of the exaggerated portrayals addresses womens physical beauty.Sonnet 64 of Edmund Spensers Amorettidescribes his subject with the inflated Petrarchan conventions satirized by Shakespeare, liken each detail of her physical appearance to a different flower, and claiming that her sweet odour did them all outmatch (866)an obviously impossible feat. The bride of Spensers Epithalamion is sung as having similarly cosmic beauty, with eyeball like stars (870) or Saphyres shining bright (872). In fact, Spenser describes all her body as like a pallace fayre (872) in a highly exaggerated comparison, the meaning of which almost defies interpretation. yet in a poem addressing the neo-Platonic ideal of conclusion virtue in beauty, Sir Philip Sidneys Astrophil still relapses to victimization the everyday Petrarchan convention comparing Stellas eyes to the sun in Sonnet 71 before concluding with the confession that he fai ls in his strive to elevate his attention from her physical beauty to her underlie virtue. These last two works also conjure the fallacy of women as having unadulterated virtue. Again, Astrophil lauds the inherent excellence that Stellas beauty reflects.Not only does she accept this virtue, but she also seeks to improve all with whom she comes in contact And not content to be saints heir / Thyself, dost strive all minds that way to move, / Who mark in thee what is in thee most reliable (926). Spenser describes one example of the flawless disposition of the bride ofEpithalamion by recounting her humility, even shyness, in the face of the love stares of all the guests at her wedding and the unsullied virginity she brings to her marriage bed.In another work, the virtuous Celia of Ben Jonsons Volpone finds her doctrine and integrity unrewarded with an attempted affair obligate upon her by her husband and a phoney conviction for allegedly seducing yet another man. Finally, in a highly complex simile, Donne draws a parallel mingled with his love and the fixed foot (1249) of a clutch in A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. The woman he addresses is so constant, so faithful, so cleanly virtuous, that she is as the tool that produces the circle, the shape of perfection.Just as common as excessively tyrannical characterizations of women are the excessively negative. Two of the assigned plays allow women whose particular activity is political scheming Goneril and Regan in King Lear and Lady Politic Would-Be in Volpone. Goneril and Regan present flattering platitudes to their father, Lear, that do not reflect their on-key feelings for him. In fact, after receiving their inheritances of half the kingdom each, they unavoidableness nothing more to do with him and issue him out into the stormy night.Lady Politic also schemes in an effort to increase her social status, leveling false accusations of adulterous seduction against Celia in order to prove her and her husbands own chances of inheriting Volpones fortune. The speaker of Donnes Song might have been hurt by such women as these, for he denies the existence of any faithful and virtuous woman. If his addressee were to find a seemingly true woman, Donne laments that Though she were true when you met her, / . . . / Yet she / Will be / False, ere I come, to two, or three (1238).Another of Donnes poems, The Flea, contains another common criticism of women that they too often deny their suitors. The attendant of this dramatic monologue, in killing the flea, casually rejects the speakers elaborate analogical argument for a relationship between them, and in response, the speaker insults her honor, which amounts to as much as this fleas death took life from thee (1236). The Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd also counters an elaborate argument, this one an appeal more stimulated than rational.Sir Walter Raleghs nymph responds to each testify from Marlowes shepherd with the argument that all his promised goods and pleasures lead fade with time, including his own youth and love. This reply to a heartfelt attempt to win her love establishes the nymph as cold and self-centered, as opposed to the utilise and emotionally expressive shepherd. The speaker of Andrew Marvells To His demure Mistress experiences a similar rejection from his intended lover. quite an than praise her beauty and virtue, he mocks them as brief and meaningless, respectively, saying, Thy beauty shall no more be found, / . . . in thy marble vault . . . (1691) and . . . then worms shall try / That long-preserved virginity, / And your old-fashioned honor turn to dust (1691-92). Perhaps the strongest indictments of women in these works charge them with an opposite sin the pocketbook corruption of formerly virtuous men. Arcasia, in Spensers The nance Queene, attracts and seduces good men only to turn them into wild beasts doomed to her service.Shakespeares Sonnet receipts describes a similar woman, c lose contact with whom carries maledict effects To win me soon to hell, my female evil / Tempteth my better angel from my side, / And would corrupt my saint to be a devil (1042). The most accomplished female corrupter of these works affects not only the man in her life but all of humankind. John Miltons eve, after ignoring the counsel of her wiser husband, inflicts sin upon all her descendents as a result of her inferior reason, virtue, and faith agree to Adam and Milton.The sinful history of humanity to surveil owes itself to the weakness of a woman. The e normity of this last example typifies how the unrealistically exaggerated portrayals of women in English Renaissance literature far outweigh the few examples of more realistic and moderate depictions. This subject culminates in the image of Miltons Eve in the epic poem Paradise Lost. Although Miltons Eve comes, in the mid-seventeenth century, at the end of the Renaissance in England, her image builds upon, and perpetuates, Ren aissance antifeminist commonplaces, while it also questions and undermines them.Milton emphasizes Eves mortify position in his description of Adam and Eve in Book 4 For contemplation he and valor formed, /For softness she and sweet attractive grace /He for God only, she for God in him (11. 296-299). Eve herself articulates and generalizes that subservience God is thy Law, thou mine to know no more/Is womans happiest friendship and her praise (11. 638-639). When she rebels against her secondary position, she separates herself from Adam in their Edenic tasks and gum olibanum is vulnerable to Satans temptations.When the Renaissance in England was at its height, in Edmund Spensers Elizabethan world, the great epic poet of the 1590s presents images of women that contrast with the shadowy or negative women of Miltons epic poem. While antifeminist views of female temper are embodied in the allegorical geological fault in Book 1 of Spensers The Faerie Queene, other females finishedout the epic serve to celebrate women. In part because Spensers poem was written in praise of his own Queen Elizabeth, the positive images of women range widely. They include the gentle, yet forceful, Una, whose cry, Fie, fie, faint harted dub (1. x. 465) shocks the feeble Redcrosse Knight into action against the temptations of Despair. In the terce book of The Faerie Queene, the virtue of Chastity is exemplified through and through the woman warrior Britomart.In this portrait, Spenser tells Queen Elizabeth that he is disguising praise of her, his own queen, since explicit celebration would be unsatisfactory But O dred Soveraine/ Thus farre forth pardon, sith that choicest wit/ Cannot your glorious pourtraict figure plaine/ That I in colourd showes whitethorn shadow it,/ And antique praises unto present persons fit (3. . 23-27). Throughout her reign, Queen Elizabeth provided a strong, positive image of a woman, through which poets from Peeles play, The Arraignment of Paris, through William Shakespeares enthalpy VI, Part 3 found opportunities to create predominate roles for woman. Yet Queen Elizabeth herself perpetuated some of the misogynist stereotypes that obsessed her at her accession in 1558, in such tracts as John Knoxs Blast of the saddle horn against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.Queen Elizabeth ruled through her own alienation from her womanliness. She ruled as the thoroughgoing(a) Queen, continuing the idea of chastity as the norm and replacing in her still newly Protestant country the lost ideal of the Virgin Mary. The art of her costuming and the artfulness of her speeches both contributed to her power. During Elizabeths reign from 1558 to 1603, positive images of women include the female characters of Shakespeares comedies, like Rosalind of As You uniform It and Beatrice of Much Ado about Nothing.After pile Is accession, however, the Jacobean theater explored female characters who achieved tragic, heroic stature, like John Websters The Duc hess of Malfi. In her closet drama, The Tragedy of Mariam, Elizabeth Cary explored the dilemmas facing strong women. In addition, in this later period of the Renaissance, such women writers as Elizabeth Grymeston, the author of the Miscelanea Lady Mary Wroth, the author of the poetry and prose epic romance Urania and Amelia Lanier, the author of a poetic defense of Eve, became creators of rich images of women, which we are only now beginning to recover.