Female Characters as Role Models for Young Women

Pride and Prejudice (1813), looks at the way people viewed each other as well as the wider world. The story starts with a mother talking to her daughters about the upcoming ball as well as the men that they were likely to meet and fall in love with. The daughters were in an unfortunate, yet typical position that they could not own the family home upon their father’s death. Mr and and Mrs Bennet had assumed that would need to change the will as they would have a son who would eventually inherit the family fortune and care for his sisters until they were married. As the years drifted by and no son appeared it became even more important than ever for the daughters to marry well as the family fortune would fall into their male cousin’s greedy hands.

In an era when women were expected to obey their family’s wishes and marry for survival. Elizabeth was different as she refused to marry someone she did not love. Her stubbornness showed that she and other women believed that they did not have to be cattle to be bought and sold at will. Women slowly started to believe that they had basic rights and that they could exercise them as they determined the course of their lives. Writers such as Margaret Mahy suggest that female characters can be important in their own right rather than relying on men to give them a voice in the story.1 Elizabeth commanded respect as she was one of those rare was respected by everyone who knew her as a warm, yet cool headed person who subtly taught people to see the errors of their ways and learn from them.

Women are ultimately kept in their place by their husbands and other male relatives. Wealth and family connections often did little to change society’s view that women could contribute to society. Women were usually considered to be silly creatures which should be avoided at all cost and ultimately kept in their place by their husbands and other male relatives. This module looks at gender and how it shapes the characters in the imaginary world that the writer has created for his or her audience to appreciate.2

I think that this exercise has been a very useful one as it taught me to read texts from a variety of different perspectives. Writers need to be aware that people are going to read their work from their own cultural and social perspective. Texts teach both readers and writers to be tolerant of the numerous interpretations that a work contains. The exercise is a worthwhile one as it helps people to improve their craft and ultimately become better writers.

References

Josie Arnold LPW600 Reading and Writing Lecture 5 A Feminist Reading of Henry Lawson’s Short Story: A Child in the Dark and a Foreign Father, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, 2011.

Margaret Mahy 2002 at http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Mahy-Earthsea.html