Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Female Tropes and Morality


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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