GNERO Y LITERATURA EN LOS PASES DE HABLA INGLESA Nac.

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Please note the following general comments on your exams: Lack of focus is one of the main drawbacks of your answers. Questions are specific enough for you to write your answers with a direction. Answers need to be supported by references to the excerpt/complete work. Grammar and spelling have been taken into account when they presented problems of readability.

1. In an Artists Studio. The Victorian Web offers an outstanding interpretation of the poem:

In her poem, "In an Artist's studio," Christina Rossetti responds to the tendency of Victorian poets to objectify women in their experiment with aestheticism. Her poem recalls Robert Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" in which a male artist pretends to possess his estranged wife by having her pose as his model. This poem also recalls Pygmalian of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a misogynist sculptor who chisels the perfect female and becomes so enamored with his own creation that he asks the gods to bring her to life. Like the artist of Rossetti's poem, Pygmalian essentially falls in love with himself and his own projections and ideas about women. In Rossetti's poem, the artist conceives of his female subject as a passive, emotionless object which he can mold to fit his own fantasies and projections. The description of the female subject is consistent with the stereotypical Victorian view of female patience, passivity and selflessness. The image of the artist "feeding" upon his subject's face refers to the male desire to possess women as wholly aesthetic objects.

Other suggestions:

The male artist never actually looks at his subject. He only devours and feed upon her face. The poem examines the tendency of men to objectify women in art and the way that women are shown to suffer as a result. The sonnet is a metaphor for the mind of the devoted lover, filled with paintings of his beloved upon which he feeds. The verb feeds indicates the dependence of a newborn, just like a mother to the artist. Perhaps his devotion may be an obsession as he feeds by day and night. A queen, A nameless girl, A saint, An angel: These nominal groups describe the female face under different personalities the author is fascinated about. Sometimes his lover is a child and others more maternal. They are

represented in onehis own creation. The girl is not real but rather as he imagines her to be in different settings and poses. He creates his ideal woman who mirrors himself (One face looks out, She with true kind eyes looks back at him.).

A critique of Victorian mens fascination with idealized beauty as well as the idea of the Victorian woman confined to the home. Rossetti is also probably critiquing her brother Dantes over-zealous love affair with his model Lizzie Siddal as well as the male ideal. Siddal felt isolated as a woman artist, perhaps she experienced something of the same conflict between creative imagination and social roles that was later felt by other female artists such as Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. One means unique but also individualism. We is the readers, the audience in his studio. The idea of a girl being deprived of name (a nameless girl) is supposed to be a critique of womens objectification done by the male gaze. We know nothing about the woman in the painting as she is hidden behind those screens. The verb fills symbolizes her omnipresence from the first lines until the end of the poem. The muse is also generous and in return gives him her devotion and trust with true kind eyes looks back on him. In the opening lines of the sonnet the muse is filling the studio, given a special vitality by the fact that all the action is hers, not the audience (she looks out, sit or walks or leans, she appears in all her canvases, every canvas). The mirror is quite a positive image as it gave back all her loveliness. Portrayed as beautiful, young, and in bright colours, her image is perfect, whole, unaffected by time (when hope shone bright). The image of perfection created in the paintings is his dream, and it is at the expense of the happiness of the real woman who is wan with waiting.

2. Motherhood in The Bluest Eye, The Woman Who Walked into Doors and The Yellow Wallpaper: Common feature: physical/emotional separation from mother and child.

Many doctors recommended marriage as the cure to hysteriaa young womans disease virtually synonymous with femininity. But they also spoke of the dangers of motherhood leading to mental breakdown. A large number of women in asylums in the nineteenth century were suffering from what we would now call post-natal depression as we can read in Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper.

Based on her own experience as a young mother, Gilman demonstrates that motherhood was not a process of emotional release. However, writing was.

As Elaine Hedges notes, Gilman was not opposed to the idea of home. She believed that it tended to produce such qualities, necessary for the development of the human being, as kindness and caring. However, due to economic dependence, women and children were imprisoned and suffocated within individual homes.

Gilman attacks the idea of the nuclear family: a dominant father, a more or less subservient mother, and an utterly dependent child. In an essay entitled The Subjection of Women (1869), John Stuart Mill compared wives to slaves.

Gilbert and Gubar comment on the connections between the anxiety women writers feel, houses and maternal bodies. They define Doctor John Gilmans fictional husband in Yellow as paternalistic and censorious.

The protagonist of Yellow is an absent mother who causes anxiety and is forced to a child-like state.

For Dr John Gilmans fictional husband in Yellow the rings and things of the room a one-time nursery are reminiscent of childrens gymnastic equipment. For his wife they are really the paraphernalia of confinement.

As Mary Jacobus points out the end of the story brings the feeling of loss home along with the loss of the female protagonists family and the loss of the self. Post-natal depression takes her to the fragmentation of the self.

Pauline Breedlove in The Bluest Eye, the protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper and Paula Spencer in The Woman Who Walks into Doors are deficient mothers.

Pauline Breedlove in The Bluest Eye shows the effects of scarcity of love in the world especially in an enclosed community. She is a frustrating mother who lives in a dysfunctional home and denies any possibility of growth.

Pauline lacks emotional ties as a result of an emotional displacement in her move from South to North. With her children Pauline is less physically brutal, but no less emotionally violent.

Paulines sense of worth resides in the authority she wields in the Fisher home and the respectability she beats into her children. In the Fishers kitchen Pauline inverts her perspective and strikes Pecola and comforts her white charge.

Pauline is a failure as a mother as she squeezes her life into a narrow coherence, but in so doing, she extinguishes her vitality. She is trapped in a household of kids.

Pauline refuses her family because she cannot transform them. She is so driven by personal demons that he attempts to purge them in violence against his family. Morrison considers that black women who despise girls like Pecola are antithetical to the village culture she respects.

Pecolas name is taken from that of the pretty, nearly white girl in Imitation of Life who hates her mother because she is black and ugly.

Pecola Breedlove connects her parents affection to the fact that she has blue eyes.

Pecola is a scapegoat for her mother.

Pecolas own motherhood: she gives birth to a stillborn child who represents a failure of nature. Pecola likes the prostitutes. They are more than willing to share the lessons they have learnt.

The MacTeers shelter Pecola and give her protection. They are far better then the Breedloves because they own property. Mrs MacTeers place is not in a white familys kitchen but in her own.

Paula Spencer is an honest mother of a dysfunctional family of four.

A battered wife, she is protective with her daughter but cannot get closer to her son John Paul.

She fascinated about family in her rebellious adolescence.

Paula is a mother who reclaims her dignity but is subject to fits of anger and depression that threaten all that she has accomplished.

Memories of what alcoholism did to her children gravitate to her in all the novel.

Most times she is an inactive mother as people do not see her.

Gender Difference feminism appears as a positive reassessment of the socially marginal. It offers a turning towards women and the feminine. Such an approach produces an increasing affirmation of women and of woman-towoman relationships. They stress the role of the mother in the development of the self, in contrast to Freud himself who highlighted the father and the masculine.

Feminist concerned with promoting a care ethic in society (including writers such as Carol Gilligan, Sarah Ruddick and Virginia Held) argue that womens intimate interconnection with others, especially as experienced in their social responsibility for children, suggests a better model of self and social relations than Liberal competitive individualism.

Elaine Showalter: female malady.

Freudian feminists like Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein propose that the organization of the family within patriarchal society produces different kinds of self for men and women, and in particular induces womens nurturing qualities. Chodorow argues that such positive qualities could be used to reform society by spreading them to men. If family life were altered such that boys experienced fathers (men) as nurturing, men too could acquire these qualities.