ROLE OF WOMEN AND FEMALE CHARACTERS
My purpose in this paper is to discuss the role of the female characters and to show how that role is similar or different from culture to culture. The paper will also cover the two female authors, Emily Dickinson and Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz.
There is little room to fit all of what is required in three short pages, so my plan is to briefly review the role and culture for each of the women or women characters and then express my conclusions about the evolution of their roles over the time span of these readings.
Let us begin with Scheherazade from The Thousand and One Nights. She is privileged and educated and creative and intelligent and compassionate and manages as the wife of a murderous king to save her own life through her great creativity and, ultimately, to calm the manÆs heart and heal him and bring him back to a state of love. To my mind, she is one of the most noble and admirable characters covered in the course.
Another woman from a world of privilege is Lady Murasaki, the courtier and diarist from The Tale of Gengi. Despite her high status in the court, her role and manner of expression is proscribed by society and is fixed and rigid. At the end of what is arguably ShakespeareÆs most remarkable play, the dying Hamlet tells Horatio ôto tell my story.ö How fortunate that Lady Murasaki got a chance to tell something akin to her story and give us a glimpse at the culture of GenjiÆs shining world.
Francesca Da Rimini is another aristocratic woman, the daughter of the lord of Ravenna. She is married off for political purposes to Gianciotto, the deformed son of Lord of Rimini, but falls in love with his brother, Paolo. In the end she and her love are discovered and killed by her husband and they end up in DanteÆs Inferno. In the medieval Italy, there was no such thing as ôDivorce, Italian Style.ö The role of women was fixed and the punishment for transgressing ...