Gendered Speech in 20th Century Poems

What is most striking about the drunken woman's monologue of memory is that it appears to violate virtually all social conventions associated with appropriate female speech. According to Tannen, women, especially those who find themselves the center of attention or in a position of prestige, appear to be compelled to "do a certain amount of conversational work to make sure they maintain the proper demeanor to fit their sense of what makes a good person, which entails not seeming to parade their higher status" (Tannen, Talking 177). The evidence of the poem's title is that the woman at the barstool understands the difference between the experience of social privilege and social deficiency. Yet despite this attention to social decorum, the fact is that the "lady in skunk" has lost all sense of proper social demeanor. Indeed, if Tannen is to be used as an interpretive guide for Kennedy's poem,

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m in China. The fact that it had the sanction of social institutions is shown by the extraordinary beauty of the silken bonds. The fact that it was oppression masquerading as social virtue is indicated by the decorative bonds, by the designation "flower feet" (things of beauty, hence social approval), and by the old woman's memory of both physical suffering and the emotional, smiling approval of her mother (the aristocrat) and her nurse (the servant-class woman). There is a view that mothers in premodern China cooperated in binding their daughters' feet as a means of increasing the value of women's agricultural and reproduction work by physically binding them to the land and symbolically connecting them to China's civilization (Blake 676ff). But Fainlight's poem voices absence of cooperation; a choice of not being bound was not available. So much for feeling either a part of the community or at a privileged place in a hierarchy. That is the meaning of the last line of the poem, in which the modern women are glad that times have changed and that they would not be crippling their daughters (625). The subtext of the poem, i.e., what is not stated, is a womanist critique women's oppression, with foot binding one symptom of the pro
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2975
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)