Female Tropes and Morality
We
have covered many different texts over the semester, many with views on women
and morality. The different portrayals of women put before us show damsels and
seductresses, innocents and monsters, while the morality in these texts varies
from moral to not. These different portrayals of woman are what are expected of
them, they are used to control the women or to demonize them. With these tropes
one is moral, the pure innocent damsel, while one is immoral, the supernatural
seductress.
In
the first text we cover The Castle of Otranto we only really see examples of
the pure innocent damsel trope. The women of this novel were expected to be
obedient, kept and who lack independent thought, choice and identity that do
whatever their men say. Their virtue was everything to there place in society. Isabelle
was very obedient and did not raise any objection when she was used as a
bargaining tool by being offered as a wife to one of the male characters, then after
his death right before the wedding she was then pursued his father who was
significantly older and wanted to use her to produce a new heir after getting
ride of his current wife. Matilda was a dutiful daughter doing what she was
told and towing the family line even when tested with her love being thrown in
prison. Hippolita gave up everything for her husband, her individuality, her
dignity and her morality so he could find a way to produce a new heir. These
three woman when faced with these challenges of stay quiet or doing the right
thing had a choice to make; that would greatly affect them, like Victor in
Frankenstein. Victor however, did not make the moral choice. He chose to follow
is own ambition and go against nature to sate his obsession with creating life.
In one post it is discussed that Isabelle and Matilda broke convention and did
what was right while Hippolita stayed in her husbands shadow. Isabelle and
Matilda had to do what was morally right and that meant deifying the male
authority that had power over them. Isabelle had to protect her virtue, which is
expected of the women of the time. They needed to be pure and untouched, so she
took control of her life and gets away from the man pursuing her. Matilda does
the right thing by freeing an innocent man who she loves from prison going
against her father’s wishes. These two women took action to change their lives
and not have to be under the control of the men who were trying to make them
not follow their morals.
To help make my
point that man was trying to keep women from being individuals and should do what
men want here’s a picture:
It says that
women should be in their place in the kitchen serving men, not trying to better
themselves and have dreams. This is from the 1950s and is has the same type of
message that the 1764 novel had. Women should be obedient and subservient to
men and their wants. These were made over 150 years apart but have the same
message, this shows that even with all of our progress it was not long ago that
we still treated women as less. We still
do today to some degree but is has gotten better.
In class
on February 27th when we were talking about the Romance of the
Forest we focused on the poems that are through out the book, precede some of
the chapters and the impact they have on each chapter. One poem the preceded a
chapter described Adeline in three lines and those three lines said so much according
to a post. The poem used was, Odes of
Passion (page 172) "And
Hope enchanted smil’d, and wav’d her golden hair; And longer had she sung-but with a frown,
Revenge impatient rose…’" These
lines impress upon you that with all her beauty she is too much of the world,
and how that knowledge has hurt her heart and caused her troubles. Her troubles
are numerous and she starts out helpless just trying to be safe. She is trying
to escape an immoral, evil and corrupt man who does not want her existence to
come to light. He is so immoral that he does everything he can to have her
killed. Her existence has a power over him that she does not know women are not
taught they have any power. If Adeline becomes know as his illegitimate
daughter it could seriously damage his social standing. What Adeline does to
break the damsel in distress trope she is put in is show that not all heroines
are completely useless. She ends up with the power to save the hero who had
been protecting her and she has the courage to stand up for what is morally right
to use that power to save him.
Those last two pieces have primarily focused on the
pure innocent damsel trope; well Lamia by Keats has another trope that is
entirely different, the supernatural seductress. As I mentioned in my post Keats
describes Lamia as something beautiful that has been turned into something
dark, miserable and sinister that has held on to some of her former beauty. From
the text you see this when he says “She seem'd, at once, some penanced lady elf, Some demon's mistress, or
the demon's self.” You feel the evil from the use of words like demon but they
are still conditioned with beauty like lady and mistress making you think back
to her former beautiful self. Even though there is a somewhat sympathetic feel
you know she is a seductress with power over men. This upfront way of showing
she is a seductress is an away to dehumanize her. She is trapped in the
illusion of this serpent like visage; which when snake imagery is added to
women they are seen as unnatural. This trope is a way to show women that
sexuality is evil and that if they give in to it they will become immoral. With
lamia lore being so wide spread there is a lot of art work depicting it.
Look
at this picture:
This picture is of Lamia shedding her snakelike
visage and being able to see herself for the first time without the illusion
that made her look dangerous and mysterious. You see where the beauty came from
in the description that made her such a powerful and dangerous seductress.
Lamia as the supernatural seductress is the opposite of the pure innocent
damsel whose life is to stay pure and virtuous. The pure innocent damsel’s “virtue must be displayed at all times,
and any action relating to sexuality, including self-defense against the sexual
advances of men, is met with the harshest social reprisals. This definition of
virtue determines that woman should not display any sexuality, and when they
do, it is seen as an evil that must be somehow socially repaired.” (Drake) This
obsession with purity and virtue has blanketed society and become part of the
morality of our world and females are expected to follow it because men say so;
but this piece also shows that a woman who was not what was expected and not
always a pure innocent can still change be it for the worse or better.
Don Juan
is a womanizer and is womanized. In Byron’s sex is mentioned a lot, while that
is true about Clare’s as well, Clare while crude also brings up love and
marriage. Morals are loose in both versions. In Byron’s version I saw that it
was about exploring sexuality, you actually here about woman having sex and it
being there choice. During the time of the piece morals in Spain had relaxed
somewhat from what the Catholic Church established. There was a new social
level women started “concentrating on,
noble mistresses, revealed that Spanish society had ambiguities about issues of
morality, honor, status, and gender that allowed both male and female Spaniards
to manipulate social attitudes as skillfully as they manipulated the law.”
(Grace) While they did not focus as much on their own morality they still forced
their female children to live buy the higher standard of purity and innocent so
that profitable marriages could still happen. Even women could have lovers
without consequence if their husbands sighed off on it. That kind of moral
ambiguity started working its way though society as a whole affecting what
people expected of each other. Society had started accepting the mediocrity that
became commonplace at the time. The morals in Clare’s Don Juan are even worse,
because of his views on women and how he describes their usefulness in his
work. One passage that really got my attention after I read the related post
was this:
"Children
are fond of sucking sugar candy
& maids of
sausages—larger the better
Shopmen are
fond of good sigars & brandy
& I of
blunt— & if you change the letter—
To C or K it
would quite as handy
& throw
the next away—but I'm your debtor
For modesty—
yet wishing nought between us
I'd hawl
close to a she as vulcan did to venus"
From what
I can understand from this, he over sexualizes woman. This passage makes me
think Clare’s was a womanizer and jerk. The imagery I see is Clare’s saying
that woman are fond of penis the “larger the better” and he of cunt, and that that
is what women are good for. I never noticed this level of crudeness until it
was pointed out in the post. His moral compass is seriously messed up.
These
works show the different tropes women were expected to fill and how the
morality of the time affects what is expected of is women.
Bibliography
·
Drake,
Amanda D. Virtue, Innocence, and Desire in "the Castle of
Otranto", "the Monk", and "Dracula". Central
Missouri State University, 2006 United States – Missouri ProQuest. 7 May
2013.
·
Grace
E. Coolidge “A Vile and Abject
Woman”: Noble Mistresses, Legal Power, and the Family in Early Modern Spain Journal
of Family History July 2007 32: 195-214, doi:10.1177/0363199007300205
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