complex and ambiguous attitudes towards women 2 Flashcards
What is the outline for the introduction?
> whether political or personal both authors writes from a context which exhibits complex and often conflicting attitudes towards women
> Shelley= Mary Wollstonecraft ‘Vindication…’= ‘rational companionship’ over ‘slavish obedience’ set against her own sense of longing for traditional conservative nuclear Baxter family + dedication of entire life to preserving works of husband
> Atwood= Reaganism= christian evangelism+ revival of traditional values= set against women liberation movement + 2nd wave feminism= demanded female equality. ===> @ heart of debate= tendency of anti-porn feminists to align with anti-porn religious zealots==> who they disagreed with on almost everything else
= both authors present complex+ ambiguous attitudes towards women in attempt to reconcile their own perception of gender/gender politics
= remains unresolved= presentation of womanhood+ attitude towards it becomes study of human nature, suggesting that ‘slavish obedience’ is detrimental to men+ women
What is topic sentence 1?
1.) ambiguous attitude towards female sexuality: though female sexual experience is repressed and denied, male characters still exploit the act of sex for their own sexual pleasure+ to enjoy a sense of control
> Victor’s denial of female sexuality= disgusted by a an enlarged + physically powerful female with full sexual autonomy, as this does not comply with his 19th century patriarchal aesthetic that women should be small, delicate and passive.
- ‘she might turn with disgust [from the monster] to the superior beauty of man’
Shelley complicates F’s perception of female sexuality through strikingly sexual description of his destruction of the female monster= denial of female sexual autonomy becomes almost synonymous with male sexual pleasure:
> ‘trembling with passion I tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged’
