17th Century Treatment of Woman in Literature Essay Example for Free

17th Century Treatment of Woman in Literature EssayBy the Middle Ages, it was commonly accepted that Eve was leadingly to blame for the disobedience that led to the f all told of humanity. classic conceits had replaced Jewish in Christian thinking, including the nonion that the soul was good but the body evil. Heretical though this tycoon have been, it didnt stop sexuality being regarded as somehow evil. One of the fewer recorded medieval women writers, the mystic Margery Kempe, aspired to celibacy even within marri age.As it becomes app arent in a few select works representing women in medieval literature, includingThe entertain of Margery Kempe, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Le Morte Darthur, in the diaphragm ages or medieval period, restrictions placed on women underwent a signifi so-and-sot change. At the beginning of this period, womens roles were really narrowly prescribed and women did not have much to do with life outside of the home. As this age went on, however, women gradually began to express to a greater extent opinions and have a greater and to a greater extent equal role in society.Two earlier medieval texts, Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight offer readers two 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 reader is confronted with a woman who is immingle of each of these whims of women. speckle she is confined by her society, she is unconfined by its conventions such(prenominal) as marriage and tralatitious gender roles. In general, however, each text presents an example of a proper and confined woman as closely as the complete opposite al more or less so that the reader can see what evils can occur if a woman is not confined.The women in Beowulf, at least on first glance, might appear to be glorified waitresses and sexual objects, but their role is far more complicated than this. When it is ver balise in one of the important quotes from Beowulf that, A queen should weave peace As confined in a marriage, women in Beowulf are appoint the role of peace weaverbird, queen and bedmateAll of the human women in Beowulf are queens and adhere to their duties as such with grace and obedience.The only exception to this model of medieval womanhood is Grendels mother who is technically a woman but is so hideously describe that the idea of gender becomes grossly distorted. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight even though it was compose some years afterwards Beowulf. In this text, the reader is first confronted with the ideal woman, Guenevere, who is confined and is serving her role as peace weaver and object for the male gaze. the goodly queen gay in the midst/ on a stump well-decked and duly arrayed / with costly silk curtainsall broidered and bordered with the best gemsChaucers womenAlthough women feature strongly in Chaucers earlier works, such as The Boke of the Duchess and Troilus an d Criseyde, we only find three women on the pilgrimage described in The Canterbury Tales * The Wife of Bath * The Prioress * Another nun who accompanies her but is hardly mentioned again. The two principal women reflect the only ways that women at the time could achieve independence and status in the church building or in a trade. The Wife of Bath represents those whose skills, such as weaving, gave them financial independence, though Chaucers character seems to have gr give birth wealthy mainly by marrying a series of rich quondam(a) men. is tempting to see the Wife as a champion of young-bearing(prenominal) rights, and her Tale brings out the idea that women should have maistrieover men, but the Wife is of course a character in a story written by a man. She has had five husbands, like the woman of Samariawho is challenged by Jesus (in rear end 417-18), withouten oother compaignye in younkere.Her fifth husband, whom she married for love rather than riches, proved to be less c ompliant and very well read. She claims to have put 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 Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the friendly standing and the licit and economic rights of women continued to be restrictive, limiting them to the domestic sphereDuring the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and the resulting Catholic Counter-Reformation, the showion of women in domestic roles became increasingly important. The social system of patriarchy matured during the early advanced(a) period, particularly during the Reformation. The concept of patriarchy involved male control over nearly all facets of society.The assigned works from the English Renaissance primarily portray women unrealistically. Despite a few exceptions, these works d bigt women as being idealistically beautiful, as having perfect virtue, or , conversely, as exercising hyperbolically negative traits. The few exceptions to this precept do depict women in a more realistic light. For instance, in its first six stanzas, the female speaker of John Donnes The Bait praises Marlowes Passionate Shepherd, but in the final quatrain, she acknowledges how mad she is for biting at his bait, saying, That fish that is not catched thereby, / Alas, is wiser far than I (1247).William Shakespeare also paints a realistic portray of a woman in sonnet 130, debunking the florid Petrarchan conventions that elevate womens beauty almost beyond comprehension but asserting that his mistress is as rare (1041) as any Petrarchan field of operation nonetheless. Among the male authors, Shakespeare also presents the most substantive and realistic female 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 endure straightforward to th eir convictions finishedout the course of the narrative.Cordelias realistic portrayal is rivaled only by the highly individualised poetry of the only female author assigned, Katherine Philips. In A Married State, Philips also debunks the popular scene favoring of marriage, especially with its benefits for women, noting to her audience of young women that the single life yields No blustering husbands to create your fears / No pangs of childbearing to extort your tears / No childrens cries for to offend your ears (1679).Another of her poems, On the Death of My First and passion Child, Hector Philips, provides an equally realistic yet exponentially more emotional account of the uniquely enatic experience of losing a child. Despite the success of these works in presenting realistic depictions of women, they are the exceptions to the rule, as the majority of the assigned works portray women quite unrealistically. Perhaps the most common of the exaggerated portrayals addresses wome ns personal beauty.Sonnet 64 of Edmund Spensers Amorettidescribes his subject with the inflated Petrarchan conventions satirized by Shakespeare, likening each detail of her personal appearance to a different flower, and claiming that her sweet odour did them all excel (866)an obviously impossible feat. The bride of Spensers Epithalamion is sung as having sympatheticly cosmic beauty, with eyes like stars (870) or Saphyres shining bright (872). In fact, Spenser describes all her body as like a pallace fayre (872) in a highly exaggerated comparison, the substance of which almost defies interpretation.Even in a poem addressing the neo-Platonic ideal of finding virtue in beauty, Sir Philip Sidneys Astrophil suave relapses to using the common Petrarchan convention comparing Stellas eyes to the sun in Sonnet 71 before concluding with the confession that he fails in his attempt to elevate his attention from her corporeal beauty to her underlying virtue. These last two works also invok e the fallacy of women as having double-dyed(a) virtue. Again, Astrophil lauds the inherent goodness that Stellas beauty reflects.Not only does she possess this virtue, but she also seeks to emend all with whom she comes in contact And not content to be Perfections heir / Thyself, dost reach out all minds that way to move, / Who mark in thee what is in thee most fair (926). Spenser describes one example of the unflawed disposition of the bride ofEpithalamion by recounting her humility, even shyness, in the face of the adoring stares of all the guests at her man and wife and the unsullied virginity she brings to her marriage bed.In some other work, the staring(a) Celia of Ben Jonsons Volpone finds her faith and integrity unrewarded with an assay affair forced upon her by her husband and a false conviction for allegedly seducing yet another man. Finally, in a highly complex simile, Donne draws a parallel between his love and the fixed foot (1249) of a compass in A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. The woman he addresses is so constant, so faithful, so flawlessly virtuous, that she is as the tool that produces the circle, the shape of perfection.Just as common as besides absolute characterizations of women are the excessively negative. Two of the assigned plays include women whose primary activity is political sharp 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 true feelings for him. In fact, after receiving their inheritances of half the kingdom each, they want nothing more to do with him and turn him out into the stormy night.Lady Politic also schemes in an effort to increase her social status, leveling false accusations of adulterous seduction against Celia in order to advance her and her husbands own chances of inheriting Volpones fortune. The speaker of Donnes Song might have been hurt by such women as these, for he denies the e xistence 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 listener of this dramatic monologue, in kill 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 resolve to the Shepherd also counters an elaborate argument, this one an appeal more emotional than rational.Sir Walter Raleghs houri responds to each point from Marlowes shepherd with the argument that all his promised goods and pleasures will fade with time, including his own youth and love. This reply to a heartfelt attempt to win her love establishes the ny mph as cold and self-centered, as opposed to the devoted and emotionally expressive shepherd. The speaker of Andrew Marvells To His Coy Mistress experiences a similar rejection from his intended lover.Rather than praise her beauty and virtue, he mocks them as fleeting 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 quaint honor turn to junk (1691-92). Perhaps the strongest indictments of women in these works charge them with an opposite sin the base corruption of formerly virtuous men. Arcasia, in Spensers The Faerie puffe, attracts and seduces good men only to turn them into wild beasts doomed to her service.Shakespeares Sonnet 144 describes a similar woman, close contact with whom carries damning effects To win me concisely 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 lowly reason, virtue, and faithaccording to Adam and Milton.The sinful history of humanity to follow owes itself to the weakness of a woman. The outrageousness of this last example typifies how the unrealistically exaggerated portrayals of women in English Renaissance literature far outgo the few examples of more realistic and moderate depictions. This subject culminates in the image of Miltons Eve in the epic poem Paradise Lost. Although Miltons Eve comes, in the mid-seventeenth century, at the end of the Renaissance in England, her image builds upon, and perpetuates, Renaissance antifeminist commonplaces, while it also questions and undermines them.Milton emphasizes Eves subordinate position in his description of Adam and Eve in Book 4 For conte mplation he and valor formed, /For softness she and sweet attractive grace /He for theology 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 knowledge and her praise (11. 638-639). When she rebels against her secondary position, she separates herself from Adam in their Edenic tasks and thus is vulnerable to Satans temptations.When the Renaissance in England was at its height, in Edmund Spensers Elizabethan world, the great epic poet of the 1590s presents images of women that contrast with the shadowy or negative women of Miltons epic poem. While antifeminist views of female nature are embodied in the allegorical Error in Book 1 of Spensers The Faerie Queene, other females throughout the epic serve to 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 forcefu l, Una, whose cry, Fie, fie, faint harted horse (1. x. 465) shocks the feeble Redcrosse Knight into action against the temptations of Despair. In the third book of The Faerie Queene, the virtue of Chastity is exemplified through the woman warrior Britomart.In this portrait, Spenser tells Queen Elizabeth that he is disguising praise of her, his own queen, since explicit celebration would be unretentive But O dred Soveraine/ Thus farre forth pardon, sith that choicest wit/ Cannot your glorious pourtraict figure plaine/ That I in colourd showes may shadow it,/ And antique praises unto present persons fit (3. . 23-27). Throughout her reign, Queen Elizabeth provided a strong, positive image of a woman, through which poets from Peeles play, The Arraignment of Paris, through William Shakespeares Henry VI, Part 3 found opportunities to create dominant roles for woman. Yet Queen Elizabeth herself perpetuated some of the misogynist stereotypes that haunted her at her accession in 1558, in s uch tracts as John Knoxs Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.Queen Elizabeth rule through her own alienation from her womanliness. She ruled as the Virgin Queen, continuing the idea of chastity as the norm and replacing in her still newly Protestant country the lost ideal of the Virgin bloody shame. The artifice of her costuming and the artfulness of her speeches both contributed to her power. During Elizabeths reign from 1558 to 1603, positive images of women include the female characters of Shakespeares comedies, like Rosalind of As You Like It and Beatrice of Much Ado about Nothing.After pile Is accession, however, the Jacobean theater explored female characters who achieved tragic, heroic stature, like John Websters The Duchess of Malfi. In her closet drama, The Tragedy of Mariam, Elizabeth Cary explored the dilemmas face up 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.