Tag Archives: feminist literature

[Work: The Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare, 1611]
But Your Kind Hostess:

Rhetoric, Meter, and Tone in Act I Scene ii of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale

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Introduction:

William Shakespeare Sanders Portrait - The Winter's Tale - Act 1 Scene 2 - rhetoric, meter, tone, dialogue, analysis

Sanders Portrait of William Shakespeare

In accordance with the heightened complexity in the structure of Shakespeare’s later plays, the rhetoric and verse forms grow more dense. The intertwining thematic and formal constructions visible throughout his body of work become knotted and subtly layered.

One such instance of this mode of high-wrought writing meeting structural experimentation in the later works of Shakespeare is The Winter’s Tale. Its narrative twists (and, indeed, genre twists) set the stage for dialogue pregnant with verbal and dramatic irony.

Careful attention to a particular passage and to the relationship between that passage and the entire play can yield a vivid portrait of how the play’s thematic concerns are woven into every moment. The passage near the beginning of The Winter’s Tale wherein Hermione convinces Polixenes to stay in Sicily is a potent example of this. In this scene, the play’s concerns with authoritative testimony and with gendered power structures belie the facade of courtly playfulness. These areas of interest, though never explicitly confronted, are present in the passage’s musicality, rhythm, diction, and rhetoric.

There is a confluence in the dialogue formed by the rhetorical flux of femininity, power, youth, and virtue and the ironic metrical disharmony of the dialogue’s participants which situates the scene as an introduction to The Winter’s Tale‘s comedy with hints of its imminent tragedy.

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[Work: The Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare, 1611]
But Your Kind Hostess:

Rhetoric, Meter, and Tone in Act I Scene ii of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale

 was last modified: March 26th, 2020 by Daniel Podgorski

[Work: Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, 1847]
Powerful Vision:

The Power of Women and the Motif of Sight in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

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Introduction:

Charlotte Brontë Sketch by M.R.P. - Jane Eyre - feminism and vision

Caricature Sketch by M.R.P.

The revolutionary and game-changing nature of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in the history of literature is easily forgotten. The novel seems to modern readers, after all, a conventionally Victorian exercise in listening to the inner struggles of a person navigating a highly ordered and repressive society. But I consider that perspective to be akin to the ‘Seinfeld is Unfunny’ trope, insofar as anyone leveling that accusation must necessarily have limited knowledge of the medium.

Brontë’s sustained, sensitive, and extremely personal examination of the thoughts and feelings of her character Jane Eyre was daring and unconventional. It is no coincidence that many late Victorian realists as well as many early twentieth century Modernists cite Jane Eyre as a big influence. I could talk about this book from any of six or seven angles, but to give this article some focus (and prevent my endless rambling) I would like to make the case for Brontë’s achievement through a quick look at just one of Jane Eyre‘s motifs: vision.

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[Work: Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, 1847]
Powerful Vision:

The Power of Women and the Motif of Sight in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

 was last modified: February 7th, 2023 by Daniel Podgorski

[Work: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, (Pearl Poet), c. late 1300s]
The Green Knight’s Wife:

Space and Gender Relations in the Chivalric Romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

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Introduction:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Illustration - Medieval, feminism, space, powerThe Tuesday Tome series has housed some light recommendations as well as some in-depth readings of classics; this article is one of the latter, and the work in question is very classic indeed: the late-medieval verse work Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. One of my many literary interests is how one can gain insight into an often-misunderstood and often-stereotyped era or group through literature, and there are few eras about which there are more misconceptions and simplifications than the middle ages.

In the study of literature, over the past hundred and fifty years or so, there has been growing emphasis on the significance of setting, and particularly on the relationship between space, whether natural, urban, or interior, and the thematic elements with which such study has always been primarily concerned.

There are now myriad papers on the cities in Dickens, the jungles in Conrad and Wells, and the rooms in the works of the Brontës. Such emphases yield valuable insights which should not be restricted to the past couple of centuries of literature. In the late-medieval chivalric text Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, space can be seen, as in the latter case of the Brontës, commenting on the nature of femininity and the human relationships between men and women which take place in that space.

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[Work: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, (Pearl Poet), c. late 1300s]
The Green Knight’s Wife:

Space and Gender Relations in the Chivalric Romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

 was last modified: August 12th, 2022 by Daniel Podgorski