Comparing Femininity in The Woman Warrior and King Lear Essay -- compa

Femininity in The cleaning woman Warrior and faggot Lear What is femininity? What federal agency should women play in society? These are questions that humanity has faced always since the first hunter-gatherer tribes developed. Gender roles, at least in the popular imagination, were name the men hunted for big game, the women picked nuts and berries. There were clear reasons for this - catch required the brute muscular strength of the male, while gathering did not. entirely as humanity invented labor-saving devices, physical strength became less and less alpha to survival, while mental strength - strength of character - played an ever-increasing role. This is a phenomenon that we see played out in Shakespeares play King Lear and Maxine Hong Kingstons record The Woman Warrior. Any work of literature can be verbalize to make a arrogate about the nature of femininity level(p) a work with all male characters would be far-famed in this respect for the absence of distaffs. But these two works are notable because rather than showing females in their traditional passive roles, they are do into active figures. Though the two works are vastly uninvolved in space and time, they both make the same essential claim about the nature of womanhood. They make the claim that women can, and should, be empowered, and that the idea of the woman warrior is not a dream, but a viable reality. In swan to show this, the character in each work that best exemplifies this modernistic spirit must be considered. In King Lear, this is Cordelia, although the choice is superficially unobvious. In The Woman Warrior, the narrator - Maxine, for the sake of brevity - is the only female character well enough known to the reader for any mandate to be perceived. In order... ...o begin the essay with the quote below The sustain thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the rear end an arrow appoints off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all direct ions myself, like the colored arrows from a fourth part of July rocket. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (68) Works Cited Feldman, Erica. Personal communication. 28 Sept 2000. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. advanced York Vintage International, 1975. OBrien, Tim. How To Tell A True War Story. The Things They Carried. New York Penguin, 1990. 73-91. Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York Harper and Row, 1971. Rolfe, Alex. Fa Mu Lan an autobiography. The Woman Warrior reaction papers. 2000. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. 1608. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York Washington Square Press, 1993.