Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

Misogyny in John Steinbeck's Books

Misogyny can wear many different faces. Its most obvious face is that of the man or society û or even other woman û who hates women, who sees them as dangerous and evil, a threat to everything that is civilized, a force that can at best be controlled. There are writers, and writings, that are misogynistic in this way. But there are other, more subtle of forms of misogyny, and one of the most pervasive of these is the practice of viewing women only as they appear in relationship to men, as if they had no substance of their own, as if they could not somehow be seen except as reflections of the men who accompany and define them. Women in this kind of world are not evil (or rather, they are not necessarily evil); they simply have no substance of their own. They are only shadows.

This is the more common form of misogyny in the art and literature of the 20th century, and its less obviously virulent form does not mean that it is not deeply problematic. If among the purposes of art is an attempt to unify the people of a given time and place, then such a clear bias against women abrogates any possibility of such a unifying force to art. Moreover, the near ubiquity of subtler forms of misogyny in art help to maintain the culturally sanctioned myth that art is a realm that is properly male. It is the man who is the artist, and woman may be subject or muse but not author. The woman may take off her clothes and stand before the artist to be the loving subject of his gaze, she may be immortalized by him so that other men, hundreds of years later or thousands of miles away, may also look at her. But she is not to speak, not to tell the artist how she is to be depicted, and not to pick up brush or pen herself.

Such a sense of exclusion, of the inability to conceive of a woman as the author of any story, even her own, is a significant element of the writings of the American novelist and short-story writer John Steinbeck. This must limit his ap...

Page 1 of 17 Next >

More on Misogyny in John Steinbeck's Books...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Misogyny in John Steinbeck's Books. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 20:37, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1711900.html