Women in Literature

Reading through the Lens of Gender

Jerilyn Fisher, Ellen Silber, Jerilyn Fisher, Ellen Silber

• Publisher: Greenwood
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780313313462
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780313016714
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

With the literary canon consisting mostly of works created by and about men, the central perspective is decidedly male. This unique reference offers alternate approaches to reading traditional literature, as well as suggestions for expanding the canon to include more gender sensitive works. Covering 96 of the most frequently taught works of fiction, essays offer teachers, librarians, and students fresh insights into the female perspective in literature. The list of titles, created in consultation with educators, includes classic works by male authors like Dickens, Faulkner, and Twain, balanced with works by female authors such as Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Also included are contemporary works by writers such as Alice Walker and Margaret Atwood that are being incorporated into the curriculum, as well as those advancing a more global view, such as Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The essays are expertly written in an accessible language that will help students gain greater awareness of gender-related themes. Suggestions for classroom discussions—with selected works for further study—are incorporated into the entries. The volume is organized alphabetically by title and includes both author and subject indexes. An appendix of gender-related themes further enhances this volume's usefulness for curriculum applications and student research projects.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Women's Roles and Influence in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• The War against the Feminine: Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front
• "Doctor She!" Helena and Sisterhood in William Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well
• Mother, Wife, Fallen Woman: Marital Choice in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
• "Young Lady" or "Slut": Identity and Voice in Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John
• Righteous Activist or Confrontational Madwoman: Sophocles' Antigone
• Female Resistance to Gender Conformity in Kate Chopin's The Awakening
• Mothers and Children in Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees
• William Faulkner's Male Myth: The Bear
• More Than Skin Deep: Robin McKinley's: Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast
• Sylvia Plath's: The Bell Jar: Trapped by the Feminine Mystique
• Toni Morrison's: Beloved: Maternal Possibilities, Sisterly Bonding
• Richard Wright's Black Boy and Black Women
• Culture, Tradition, Family: Gender Roles in Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima
• Girls into Women: Culture, Nature, and Self-Loathing in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
• Founding Women's History: Christine de Pizan Writes The Book of the City of Ladies
• A Dystopic Vision of Gender in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
• An Immigrant Girl's Quest for the American Dream in Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers
• As My Mother's Daughter: Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
• Non-conformists and Traditionalists: Buchi Emecheta's The Bride Price
• The Symbolic Annihilation of Women in Jack London's The Call of the Wild
• Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: Gender in the Middle Ages
• Sex, Violence, and Peter Pan: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
• Paths to Liberation in Alice Walker's The Color Purple
• The Women in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
• Witch-Hunting, Thwarted Desire, and Girl Power: Arthur Miller's The Crucible
• "A Nice Girl Ought to Know!" Henry James' Daisy Miller
• Redefining Female Absence in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
• Black and White Womanhood in Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose: Mammies, Ladies, Rebels
• Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl: Writing a Self—The Female Adolescent Voice
• The Slammed Door that Still Reverberates: Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House
• Frozen Lives: Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome
• Catherine Barkley: Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms
• The Invisible Black Female Artist in Alice Childress' Florence
• Daring Creation: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
• Shattered Rainbows in Translucent Glass: Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie
• What It Means to Be a Lady: Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind
• Patriarchy and Property: Women in Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth
• No Expectations at All: Women in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations
• Beautiful Fools and Hulking Brutes: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
• Reading between the Lines: Connecting with Gertrude and Ophelia in William Shakespeare's Hamlet
• Freedom Reconsidered: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
• When Women Shape the World: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland
• Girls and Women in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street
• Living in a Borderland: Cultural Expectations of Gender in Julia Alvarez' How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
• A Song of Freedom: Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• Good Mother, Bad Mother in Joanne Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
• Bobbie Ann Mason's: In Country: A Girl's Quest for Her Father and Herself
• The Invisible Women in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
• Be True to Yourself: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
• "Thinking Different" in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club
• Gender Bending: Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness
• What a Teacher Learns: Ernest J. Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying
• The Foreignness of Femininity in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim
• Boys' Club—No Girls Allowed: Absence as Presence in William Golding's Lord of the Flies
• Unnatural: Women in William Shakespeare's Macbeth
• Emma Rouault Bovary: Gendered Reflections in Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• The Road to Nowhere: Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York)
• (Re)surfacing: Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
• Critiquing "the We of Me": Gender Roles in Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding
• Beauty and Gender in Alix Kates Shulman's Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
• Where No Role Fits: Maggie's Predicament in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss
• Herman Melville's: Moby-Dick: Epic Tale of Male Destruction
• Images of Possibility: Gender Identity in Willa Cather's My Àntonia
• The Good Woman: Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve
• Boyhood Unraveled: Elie Wiesel's Night
• Sexuality as Rebellion in George Orwell's 1984
• Homer's: Odyssey: "The Iliad's Wife"
• Jocasta and Her Daughters: Women in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex
• Women Stripped of Humanity: John Steinbeck's: Of Mice and Men
• Role Traps in Ken Kesey's: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Under the Burden of Yellow Peril: Race, Class, and Gender in Yoshiko Uchida's Picture Bride
• Woman and Art in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Truths Universally Acknowledged: Stereotypes of Women in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
• Undue Influence in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• Exploring the Gender Puzzle of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion
• Seasoned with Quiet Strength: Black Womanhood in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun
• Heroism against the Odds: William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
• Molly Bolts and Lifelines: Rita Mae Brown's Ruby fruit Jungle
• "A" as Hester's Autonomy in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter
• Female Freedom in Other Places and Inner Spaces: Suzanne Fisher Staples' Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind
• Gender in Silas Marner by George Eliot
• Empowerment through Writing in Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter
• Wearing "Her Favour in the Battle": The "Go-between" in D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers
• Riding Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire
• Agent or Victim: Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles
• An African-American Woman's Journey of Self-Discovery in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Fragmenting Culture, Fragmenting Lives: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart
• "Just a Lady": Gender and Power in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
• Women Righting Wrongs: Morality and Justice in Susan Glaspell's Trifles
• "For Such as We Are Made of, Such We Be": The Construction of Gender in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or What You Will
• The Power of Mothers in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
• A Chinese-American Woman Warrior Comes of Age: Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
• The Will to Survive in Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place
• Procrustean Bed: Gender Roles in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
• Negotiating Tight Spaces: Women in Michael Dorris' A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
• Appendix: Thematic List of Books
• Index of Literary Works by Author
• Subject Index
• About the Editors and Contributors