scholarly journals Rewriting Dalit Gender Paradigms through the Viranganas and Femme Fatale Archetypes

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (05) ◽  
pp. 594-602
Author(s):  
Arsha Subbi ◽  
◽  
Dr Balakrishnan Kalamullathil ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Character Type ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Greater Good ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
Warrior Women

The true identity of the Femme Fatale character type has not yet been discovered despite the growing interest of authors and writers in this lethal woman archetype, whose extensive presence was seen in nineteenth and twentieth century literary and cultural texts. The Femme Fatale has acquired numerous forms since her arrival into the literary arena. Although typically villainous, or at least morally confusing, and always associated with a sense of mystification and unease, Femme Fatales have also appeared as an anti-heroine in some stories. Some narratives also end with a repenting Femme Fatale, who regrets her past villainy. Some Femme Fatales also pave way for greater good by ensnaring the villain and reforming him through her lethal treatments. Dalit viranganas are a group of warrior women characters who are comparatively novel portrayals within the arena of literature. These characters refurbish the entire ideologies governing the conventional patriarchy which often put women under the control of these patriarchal figures. She denies fitting into the roles of a dutiful wife and nurturing mother that the mainstream society prescribes for her. In these representations there is a blending of history and present and these women become symbols of pride for the community. They are often dressed in masculine manner and displays physical prowess, which is a quality often ascribed to men. She leaves behind a strong picture of an unremorseful, bold and daring woman who adheres to her own ideals rejecting the rules put forward by society.

The Long Road: Catholic Schools and Catholic social integration since 1918 (Cardinal Winning Lecture, 2017)

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-73
Author(s):  
T. M. Devine
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Integration ◽  
Spiritual Formation ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Catholic Schools ◽  
Educational Experience ◽  
Social Division ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
Catholic Schooling

Critics, past and present, of state-funded denominational education in Scotland after 1918 have often asserted that the system has promoted social division, separateness and even fostered sectarianism. This lecture – the Cardinal Winning Lecture, 2017, delivered to the St Andrew's Foundation for Catholic Teacher Education, University of Glasgow – disagrees with these views. Instead, the presentation argues that Catholic schooling, in addition to its recognised importance in Christian spiritual formation, has been a crucial influence promoting the integration of a formerly disadvantaged and marginalised community into modern Scotland. ‘Integration’ is defined for this purpose as the process of incorporation into mainstream society as equal citizens. The lecture considers the long and rocky road to this achievement by setting the educational experience within the broader context of Scottish religious, social, political and economic history in the twentieth century.

What do we value? The questions of Rachel Whiteread’s House

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 155-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elesa Huibregtse
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Housing Policies ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
East End ◽  
Post Industrial

On 25 October 1993, British artist Rachel Whiteread revealed her most ambitious sculptural work to date – House. The solidified space of this Victorian-era, terraced home physically existed for a mere 80 days; yet, during this time it became the subject of an intense media interest and heated public debate which reached the United Kingdom’s Houses of Parliament. While House has been discussed in depth within art historical scholarship for almost 30 years, trends in this academic body of work tend to focus on absence and memory in a highly contested public space, as well as thoughts on loss, death, architecture, the art market, politics and gentrification in London’s East End during the latter part of the twentieth century. What is lacking, however, is an examination of House within the larger context of visual culture and what it may, or may not, mean for contemporary viewers. Analysing the historical context of the work’s location through a Marxist lens, reveals the dehumanization which occurred within the East End’s class constructs throughout the nineteenth century, and its effect on housing policies well into the twentieth century. Reading the sculptural work itself, using the methodologies of semiotics, unveils mythologies regarding what is and is not expendable in our western spaces; particularly, the working class, houses and works of art in post-industrial capitalist societies. The ideologies embedded within these mythologies continue to appear in our mass media images to this day, leaving unanswered questions regarding what is truly valued in our societies. Thus, Whiteread’s unique work is an artistic intervention into an image-saturated environment, asking the viewers and readers of cultural texts to consider at what point in time we will seek to change how we treat that which has been arguably undervalued.

Patriotic Daughters and Isolationist Mothers

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle M. Nickerson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
The Family ◽  
Peace Activism ◽  
Nationalist Sentiment ◽  
The Right ◽  
Conservative Women ◽  
Warrior Women

This chapter examines how women developed forms of antistatist protest in the first half of the twentieth century that posed an oppositional relationship between the family and government. By the 1950s, anticommunism and antistatism became widespread mechanisms of political protest for women on the right much as peace activism and welfare work came to seem natural for women on the left. But unlike the later generation of Cold Warrior women who exerted themselves most forcefully through local politics, conservative women of the early twentieth century made their strongest impact by attacking that national progressive state. They also demonized “internationalism” as the handmaiden to communism, discovering another foe that women's position in the family obliged them to oppose. Consequently, the earliest generation of conservative organizations adopted the habit of calling themselves “patriotic” groups to contrast their own nationalist sentiment with the internationalism of progressives, which they equated with communism. This pattern continued into the post-World War II era.

Three Plays by Deborah Levy: a Brief Introduction

1993 ◽  
Vol 9 (35) ◽  
pp. 230-232
Author(s):  
Irini Charitou
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Women's Theatre ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe

DEBORAH LEVY wrote Pax as the result of a commission from the Women's Theatre Group to write an ‘anti-nuclear’ play. In her own words, she detests ‘those last-two-minutes-in-a-bunker-type scenarios’, so she decided to write an epic play with Europe in the twentieth century as a focal point. Pax takes on board Europe's past, present, and future. There are four women characters in the play, The Keeper, The Hidden Daughter, The Mourner, and The Domesticated Woman. In the published edition of Pax (Plays by Women, Vol. VI, ed. Mary Remnant, Methuen, 1987), Levy describes how she envisaged these characters:I found four archetypes, who represented twentieth-century Europe for me.

scholarly journals Intertextuality and Arthurian Women in David Lodge’s Small World (1984)

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 98-120
Author(s):  
Anastasija Ropa ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Small World ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
King Arthur ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Twin Sister ◽  
Grail Quest ◽  
Traditional Roles

The present article analyses intertextual references in David Lodge’s Small World. An Academic Romance (1984), focusing on allusions to the corpus of medieval and twentieth-century Arthuriana in the representation of women characters. An analysis of Arthurian allusions in the portrayal of women characters shows that Lodge introduces Arthurian women to his academic ‘Camelot’ in response to medieval and post-medieval literature about King Arthur and the Grail quest. In this respect, his representation of academic women in Small World is different from the way they are described in Lodge’s other academic novels, Changing Places and Nice Work. Lodge rarely recasts Arthurian women characters as his heroines with the exception of Prof Fulvia Morgana, who is modelled on the Arthurian sorceress Morgane/Morgause. Nevertheless, in Small World, women appear in the traditional roles of being the object of a ‘knight’s’ quest, such as Persse’s beloved Angelica and Swallow’s lover Joy, and wise advisors (Miss Maiden). Alternatively, women are portrayed as antagonistic or negative characters, the so-called ‘whores’ or ‘demonic temptresses’: such are Angelica’s twin sister Lily and the lusty Fulvia Morgana.

Embodied Antillean women

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-148
Author(s):  
Josephine Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Women's Sexuality ◽  
Women’S Sexuality

This article explores the intersection of gender and cultural identities in two novels, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972) and Suzanne Dracius’s L’Autre qui danse (1989). Through comparative and close analyses, this article demonstrates that these two Antillean francophone women writers reject and renegotiate sexist and essentialist tendencies, in particular the auto-exoticization and disembodiment of women characters across the body of Antillean literature. These tendencies are notably present within Antillanité and Créolité, two dominant concepts of twentieth-century Antillean literature and thought. This article first explores these two writers’ responses to auto-exoticization, demonstrating how their literary treatment of women’s sexuality diverges markedly from hypersexualized portrayals of women by certain Créoliste authors. The article also examines the representation of Creole cuisine and language, and calls into question Antillean literature scholar Celia Britton’s argument that these two elements tend to reduce Antillean texts to ‘edible’ objects of exotic pleasure. In its second section, this article investigates Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacité. It suggests that Schwarz-Bart and Dracius adapt Glissant’s opacité to present women as impervious human subjects whose bodies do not make them exotic stereotypes but rather figures of resistance to masculine violence and colonialism.

Into the Future from Out of the Past

2021 ◽  
pp. 36-54
Author(s):  
Larry T. Shillock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

Contributor Larry T. Shillock discusses the ways mid-twentieth century film forms limit the role of place on women. Shillock tests standard assessments of the femme fatale before detailing the ways in which noir stories change when approached through the women. Following Shillock's argument, these women often occupy the center of the stories. Shillock uses one of the quintessential noir narratives, Out of the Past (1947), and its heroine, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), to support this idea. The adjustments Jacques Tourneur makes to Daniel Mainwaring’s novel, Build My Gallows High (1946), to show the care taken to ensure that Moffat appears as something other than "a dame, a moll, or an object of male affection." Shillock maintains that Tourneur’s Moffat proves herself equal to the men she encounters. By the end of the film, she is their better since she recognizes the constraints her world places on her as a woman.

The ‘Yidishe Paganini’: Sholem Aleichem's Stempenyu, the Music of Yiddish Theatre and the Character of the Shtetl Fiddler

2014 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Character Type ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

ABSTRACTThis article explores the music of Yiddish theatre in early twentieth-century New York by considering multiple adaptations of Russian Jewish author Sholem Aleichem's 1888 novel Stempenyu, about a klezmer violinist, which was transformed into two theatrical productions in 1907 and 1929, and finally inspired a three-movement recital work for accompanied violin by Joseph Achron. The multiple versions of Stempenyu present the eponymous musician as an allegory for the ambivalent role of the shtetl – the predominantly Jewish small town of Eastern Europe – in defining diasporic Jewish life in Europe and America, and as a medium for the sonic representation of shtetl culture as it was reformulated in the memories of the first generations of Jewish immigrants. The variations in the evocations of Eastern European klezmer in these renderings of Stempenyu indicate complex changes in the ways Jewish immigrants and their children conceived of their connection to Eastern Europe over four decades. The paper concludes by viewing changes in the symbolic character type of the shtetl fiddler in its most famous and recent manifestation, in the stage and screen musical Fiddler on the Roof.

scholarly journals Sarat Chandra’s Women: An Anthropological Gendered Analysis of the Works of an Indian Writer of the Early Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-70
Author(s):  
Subhadra Mitra Channa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Insight Into

The works of literary masters often encapsulate history and anthropology of their times. Of several doyens of colonial writers in Bengal, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyaya is well known for mirroring the position of women and also drawing some strong sketches of women reflecting social issues as well as inequality and injustice meted out to them at that period of Bengal’s history. His empathetic concern for women and his keen insight into their minds has often been commented on and appreciated. This paper is concerned with his inter-subjective relationship with the questions of class and caste and how, he as a male member of upper caste and from a genteel background dealt with his innate caste and class concerns in constructing his women characters representing various strata of society.

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