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Dissertation help again please!!!
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Hi, i'm doing my dissertation on the merging of gender roles (women acting like men and vice versa) and i'm using Jane Eyre. I need some ideas of noveks where a female lead role is shown merging traditional and stereotypical gender roles. Preferabley a young girl becoming a women as this wouold be good in relation to Jane Eyre. I was thinking of Great Expectations but of coure Pip nis male which i'm struggling with. If anyone can help i wouold REALLY appreciate it...think i'm on the verge of a nervous break down....
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Yeah that's the one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Bennett
I know there is a strong impression of a woman coping in a man's world of industry and commerce, and despite her resistance to romance, a bloke fancies her for her strength of character rather than her looks
this is the series that was on TV in the early- mid 70s and it is brilliant
:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159857/
my suggestions may be perhaps more mundane but I have thought of two. One is the character of Jo in Little Women and its follow ups. It was autobiographic. Alcott's female characters are not portrayed very favourably. Jo is largely defined by comparison with the two sisters, Meg who is the goody goody side of femininity and ends up a helpless, lonely widow in Good Wives. The other, Amy, is the "bitchy" side of femininity, all flirty and vain; she ends up a rich bitch through marriage to Lawrie. I do believe in real life L.M. Alcott's sister had poached her fiance and she took her revenge in her book. Jo by contrast is a man in a skirt. She pursues the somewhat reluctant prof. Baer; you get the impression it's more a business deal than a love match. You get the impression that starting the co-educational boarding school was her idea and she is the brains behind the operation.
My second suggestion is more off the wall. You may have heard of Hector Malot's book of 1878 "Sans famille" translated into English as "Nobody's boy". (The famous Remi). Hector Malot wrote another book, "En famille" translated into English as "Nobody's girl" (1893). (Not sure how easy it would be to find it in English now). It is about an orphaned girl who sets off to find her relatives and throw herself at their mercy, not so different from Remi really. I read it as a child and identified myself with her. She does all the things that boys usually do, such as surviving out in the open, fashioning cutlery out of old pieces of tin, getting a job and proving herself in the workplace. As an interesting spin off, in the end we discover that the owner of the factory where she works is her grandfather. She has seen the terrible working conditions of the factory hands and convinces him to build sanitary housing, set up schools and nurseries. In other words she turns him into a kind of benevolent Rowntree-type character. Malot was probably an anglophile; note that Remi travels from France to England, whereas the girl in En Famille travels from England to France.
I did my Eng Lit long essay on roles of women in "Island" novels, such as Robinson Crusoe (not many women in that though!), Foe by JM Coetzee and Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss (amongst other books).
In Swiss Family Robinson, a woman lives alone on the island, fending for herself for many years. She has to take on all roles, both typical male and female ones. She can obviously cope very well by herself, but when Swiss Family Robinson find her, they feel they have to look after her and treat her like a Lady. She falls back into the traditional female stereotype very quickly.
There obviously isn't enough in this book to write a big chunk of your dissertation on, but I found the male/female gender stereotypes in this book very interesting and might be something to add regarding views of women in 19th century literature.
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