Sаmаrkаnd stаtе institutе оf fоrеign lаnguаgеs fоrеign lаnguаgе аnd litеrаturе

THЕ MINISTRY ОF HIGHЕR АND SЕCОNDАRY SPЕCIАL ЕDUCАTIОN ОF THЕ RЕPUBLIC ОF UZBЕKISTАN

SАMАRKАND STАTЕ INSTITUTЕ ОF FОRЕIGN LАNGUАGЕS
FОRЕIGN LАNGUАGЕ АND LITЕRАTURЕ
ЕNGLISH FАCULTY I


The Portrayal of Women in American Literature
COURSE PAPER

5111400 – Foreign language and literature (English)

Sciеntific supеrvisоr: Obrueva.G.H
Dоnе by: Normuroda Gulibonu 2.04-grоup
SAMARKAND – 2021



CONTENT
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………...2
MAIN BODY
1. Postcolonial literary theory…………………………………………………….4
2. Postcolonial feminist literature………………………………………………..7
3. Anticolonial philosopy………………...............................................................13
4. Anti-colonialism as a historical phenomenon……………………………….15
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………..17
LIST OF USED LITERATURE………………………………………………..20

Introduction
The portrayal of women in American novels has often been the subject of controversy since the medium's beginning. Critics have noted the roles of women as both supporting characters and lead characters are substantially more subjected to gender stereotypes, with femininity characteristics having a larger presence in their overall character.
During the Golden Age of Books (a time during which the medium evolved from comic strips) women who were not superheroes were primarily portrayed in secondary roles, with some examples being classified as career girls, romance-story heroines, or lively teenagers.Career-oriented girls included such characters as Nellie the Nurse, Tessie the Typist, and Millie the Model, each of whom appeared in comic books working jobs that non-wartime women of the era typically worked. Romance heroines were popular in the romance genre, pioneered by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Typically, the heroine was either a "good girl" or "bad girl", with both roles having small effect on a male character's decision. In the Archie Comics, the titular character can never definitively chose between his two love interests Betty and Veronica, who typify this dichotomy between the good Girl-Next-Door and the dangerous allure of her foil respectively. The duo got their own title in 1950, Betty and Veronica (comic book), which quickly became a popular comic, featuring the two lead characters continuing to obsess over boys and fight over who would get to date Archie.
Female costumed crimefighters were among the early characters. One of the comics' earliest female superheroes appeared in newspaper strips, the Invisible Scarlet O'Neil by Russell Stamm. The tough-fighting Miss Fury, debuted in the eponymous comic strip by female cartoonist Tarpé Mills in 1941. As Trina Robbins, in The Great Women Superheroes wrote: Most of [Fiction House's] pulp-style action stories either starred or featured strong, beautiful, competent heroines. They were war nurses, aviatrixes, girl detectives, counterspies, and animal skin-clad jungle queens, and they were in command. Guns blazing, daggers unsheathed, sword in hand, they leaped across the pages, ready to take on any villain. And they did not need rescuing.

1. 
   The portrayal of women in American novels
   

Women began to play more active roles in American literature during the American Revolution. The popular dramatist Mercy Otis Warren (sister of James Otis and friend of John and Abigail Adams) was at the center of revolutionary politics, and her early plays satirized British military and political leaders. After the revolution, Warren stated that women’s role in the new republic was to rear patriotic sons; hence, her later works promote the value of motherhood.
Popular British sentimental and epistolary fiction such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740-1741) and Clarissa: Or, The History of a Young Lady (1747-1748) sparked American interest in novels. After the revolutionary war, two-thirds of the American population was under the age of twenty-four, women far outnumbered men, and the average marrying age for women was twenty- two. Women were not yet attending college—Oberlin College was the first to admit women, in 1837—and even secondary education for female students was rare. Therefore, women spent their years from adolescence to early adulthood looking for suitable husbands. Women had to choose carefully because under the laws of coverture, husbands had total control over their wives’ possessions and bodies. In a society where women could not choose freely from many men, living vicariously through fictional heroines’ experiences allowed young women to develop some understanding of what kind of man they might want to marry. A good early example of a novel serving this role is Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette: Or, The History of Eliza Wharton (1797). Eliza sees several types of marriages: her mother’s to a clergyman, her cousin’s to a thoughtful and loving young officer, and her best friend’s to a gold- digging womanizer. Eliza rejects all these models and eventually makes a fatal error in letting a man seduce her. By reading this story, young women not only learned their marriage options but also were warned of the perils of succumbing to sexual desire. Abandoned by her family and friends, Eliza dies alone after giving birth to her seducer’s child.
In early nineteenth century America, writing was one of the few professions open to women. The didactic message of sentimental and domestic fiction promoted the Cult of True Womanhood—the domestic ideal of woman as wife, mother, and moral center of the household. The American idea of true womanhood was similar to the British Victorian “angel in the house,” described by Coventry Patmore’s sequence of poems of that name (1854-1863). Fictional characters who adhered to the true womanhood model were rewarded, while those who strayed from it were punished.
The only other proper literary subjects for nineteenth century American women were the social and moral issues addressed by the humanitarian reform movement that began in the 1820’s and lasted into the Progressive Era. Suitable topics included temperance, evangelical religion, education for American Indians, the abolition of slavery, and social purity. Regardless of the type of reform, women’s fiction always stressed the underlying message that the best way to help a cause is by being a true woman—an upstanding domestic and moral role model. Examples of such reform issues in women’s fiction are Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s romantic adventure Hope Leslie: Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827); Susan Warner’s story of an orphan’s moral development in The Wide, Wide World (1851); Harriet Beecher Stowe’s exposé of the horrors of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1852); E. D. E. N. Southworth’s valuing of Southern womanhood in The Hidden Hand (1859); and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s discussion of labor reform in The Silent Partner (1871). Novels directed to young readers, such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-1869), also espoused the model of true womanhood.
Women’s domestic and sentimental fiction accounted for most of the nineteenth century’s financially successful literature, while such male writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, whose subjects were generally more aesthetic and less didactic, achieved little recognition in their own lifetimes. Their resentment of female writers (whom Hawthorne once called a pack of “scribbling women”) was clear. In Hawthorne’s fiction, intelligent women are often dominated, silenced, and even killed by men. Hester Prynne’s punishment for adultery in The Scarlet Letter (1850) is particularly harsh because of her strong-willed resistance to questions about her lover’s identity. In addition to wearing the scarlet “A” upon her chest, she is prevented from speaking in public.
In fact, the ideal true woman is often silent, implying that men should do both the talking and writing. Such attitudes toward the role of women and female writers have had a tremendous negative impact on the literary canon (the list of works that scholars and educators deem most important and suitable for teaching), and most early women’s literature remained out of print until the rise of feminist publishing houses late in the twentieth century.
One type of fiction that suffered at the hands of male critics was late nineteenth century local color writing, a subgenre of realism characterized by strong references to place, use of dialect, and descriptions of local traditions. Most local color writers were women who created strong and independent female characters. A good example is Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), in which a female journalist spends a summer living among a community of women in a small Maine fishing village. Most of the village men have either died at sea or moved west, but the strong women make due without them.
Most male-authored literature between the Civil War and World War I portrayed women either as members of the elite (in the works of Henry James and William Dean Howells) or as poor slum girls and prostitutes abused by their surroundings (in the works of Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser). James valued the concept of true womanhood, and his fiction affirmed rigid standards of beauty and morality. The title character of his novella Daisy Miller (1878), the daughter of a newly rich industrial leader, thwarts custom by publicly meeting with men unchaperoned. Proper society promptly snubs her. The fates of working-class girls who “go wrong” were equally severe. The heroine of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) is abandoned by her family and friends after having an affair with a traveling salesman.
While turn-of-the-century fiction such as Kathleen Thompson Norris’ Mother (1911) celebrated domesticity, other women’s writing challenged it as an oppressive lifestyle. In The Awakening (1899), Kate Chopin’s heroine escapes an emotionally sterile marriage. Charlotte Perkins Gilman similarly challenges the ideal of marriage in her novella The Yellow Wall-paper (1892) and her feminist utopian novel Herland (1915).
White male modernist authors often used stock characters in their fiction. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway portrayed women as nonintellectual, sexual objects, and John Steinbeck portrayed strong, nurturing mothers such as Ma Joad and Rose of Sharon in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) or lusty whores such as Dora Flood, the madam of Cannery Row (1945). Male authors of this time often praised their female counterparts, but specifically as women writers. Meanwhile, authors such as Edith Wharton were creating superior female characters more diverse than those of her male contemporaries.
Modernist prairie literature offered specialized female images. In Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913), an intellectual young woman inherits her father’s farm, and her faith in the land is rewarded by abundant harvests. Later, she marries her soulmate and enjoys sexual and intellectual fulfillment. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie (1935) taught young girls to value marriage, motherhood, and hard work, reinforcing traditional roles. Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles (1916) shows a less idyllic side of prairie life—a woman virtually imprisoned by her husband. A pet bird brightens her life, but her husband kills it and she kills him. Prairie life was a dismal trap for women not fortunate enough to find soulmates.
Socialist writers Estelle Baker and Agnes Smedley also used literature to challenge traditional women’s roles. Both Baker’s The Rose Door (1911) and Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929) expose prostitution as a social problem generated by traditional views of womanhood and marriage. Such innovative images of womanhood became more common as the century progressed.
Many American women, represented by the stereotypical figure of “Rosie the Riveter,” went to work in factories while American men fought in World War II. After the war, some gladly returned to domestic life, but others were not so content. Post- World War II America witnessed great shifts in women’s work from housekeeping to industrial and professional employment. Improved methods of family planning lowered birthrates and decreased family sizes, changing prevailing concepts of motherhood. These factors also influenced literary portrayals of women. A constant stream of domestic literature flowed through the end of the century, but growing numbers of works such as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) celebrate alternative female experiences.
Beginning in the late 1960’s, women’s writing branched into several experimental genres, including science fiction and “cyberpunk.” Utopian writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ used imaginary cultures to critique contemporary values. In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Le Guin chronicles a man’s visit to an androgynous society where everyone can bear children and be held responsible for their upbringing. Le Guin wrote Always Coming Home (1985) as an archaeology of a future civilization, contrasting its militaristic patriarchy with a productive communal ecological culture. In The Female Man (1975), Russ presents a self-consciously subversive fiction about four women from different times: a soon-to-be-married woman from the Great Depression, a 1970’s feminist, a member of a women-only utopia, and a woman from a future society where the sexes battle against each other.
Other writers used the science-fiction and cyberpunk genres to explore the effects of contemporary science, reproductive technology, and multinational capitalism. After surviving a nuclear disaster, the African American heroine of Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn (1987) finds herself among extraterrestrial genetic engineers attempting to transform humanity through interbreeding. “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973), by James Tiptree, Jr. (the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon, a popular writer whom most readers falsely assume to be male), relates the cyberspace Pygmalion story of a squalid streetgirl physically redesigned for stardom in a consumer culture. Pat Cadigan’s cyberpunk novel Synners (1991) questions the role of gender and race in virtual reality technologies. Borrowing, plagiarizing, and cannibalizing literature from Shakespeare to cyberpunk, Kathy Acker rewrote the textual body as a desiring and desirable site. Her novels, including Don Quixote (1986) and Empire of the Senseless (1988), express a brutal need for freedom from a sadistic patriarchy.

2. Women in Ethnic American Literature

Generations of American literature have stereotyped American Indian women as mysterious, quiet helpmates to white settlers. Combating this Pocohontas image, American Indian female writers sought recognition for vital feminine qualities in native culture, especially its rich tradition of oral narratives dating back to stories of goddesses in nature. Pueblo Laguna and Sioux critic and novelist Paula Gunn Allen devotes much of her work to promoting the American Indian worldview—feminine interconnectedness rather than rigid masculine order. Chippewa Louise Erdrich uses oral tradition to produce communal stories in her novel Love Medicine (1984).
Representations of African American women in literature are complex. Early writers such as seventeenth century poet Phillis Wheatley were not taken seriously by white readers, who doubted her authorship. Women were also conspicuously absent from male slave narratives, such as those of Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, which described the men’s solitary quest for freedom. Representing only a small fraction of that genre, female narratives such as Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) offered a communal voice focusing on issues of family separation, friendship between women, and sexual exploitation by white masters. This image of black womanhood was overshadowed, however, when Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin introduced the untameable slave Topsy to American literature. Although Victorian womanhood considered families a saving force for slaves, black women’s depictions of family were not always positive. The pre-Civil War literary work most contradictory to domestic values was Harriet E. Wilson’s novel Our Nig (1859). Constantly abused by her own family and the family in whose service she is abandoned, Wilson’s heroine struggles for self-advocacy but is repeatedly silenced by other women—both white and black.
“Mammy” stereotypes such as Stowe’s Aunt Chloe and William Faulkner’s Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury (1929) helped maintain domestic values. More recent black women’s fiction such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) challenge these values by showing how family members, through mental, physical, or sexual abuse, can prevent young women from establishing confident identities. Much of African American women’s writing suggests that salvation rests in larger communities of women rather than immediate biological families. Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982) depicts a community of women living in an urban housing development to illustrate this point: Separate, the women are powerless, but together they gain recognition. Since novels with such feminist messages often portray abusive men, these popular female writers have drawn much criticism from black men. Ishmael Reed’s novel Reckless Eyeballing (1986) is a thinly disguised attack on Walker and other black female writers.
Some African American heroines’ conflicts arise from other issues. Like other modern women, they have to decide between being housewives or working outside the home. The title character of Gwendolyn Brooks’s novel Maud Martha (1953) and Zora Neale Hurston’s heroine in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) are expected to be wives and mothers but are not fulfilled by these roles. Skin tone also influences the portrayals of black women. In Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929), a dark young college student is ostracized by lighter blacks, and a young African American girl in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye desperately longs to resemble popular white models and film stars. Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) suggests that although lighter women might have had an easier time by passing for white, in doing so they sacrificed a major part of their heritage. In Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta’s words, black women wear a “double yoke” of race and gender.
Female American writers of Asian descent have made particular use of autobiography because writing helps them mediate an identity between Asian traditions and new roles in North America. Perhaps the best-known example of such autobiographies is Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), which chronicles Kingston’s childhood in a Chinese American family dominated by her strong-willed mother. Asian American women’s fiction draws from similar themes. Chinese American author Amy Tan, in her novels The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), and The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), portrays different generations of women (both immigrants and American-born) negotiating the barriers between traditional and modern values. Tan’s older heroines bravely struggle against hardships of arranged marriages and war in China, only to face racism and sexism in the United States. Such themes are not new to Chinese American fiction. In Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), Sui Sin Far (who used the pseudonym Edith Eaton) describes racial discrimination faced by the first wave of Chinese immigrants to North America.
Language and race are also important issues for Hispanic women who, as recent immigrants, also face prominent class issues. Sandra Cisneros’ female characters in The House on Mango Street (1989) wrench loose the fetters of race, class, and gender to forge vital identities amid hostile surroundings in the United States. Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) explores similar themes as four sisters from the Dominican Republic work to assimilate into American mainstream society. In Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), white author Marge Piercy portrays a working-class Chicana heroine institutionalized in a mental asylum after trying to protect her sister from an abusive pimp. In the asylum, she imagines two possible futures: one with communal equality and healthy ecology, the other totalitarian, rigidly technological, and exploitative of all people, particularly women.

Women in Canadian Literature

Whereas women’s literature has traditionally been overshadowed by men’s writing in the United States, female writers dominate Canadian literature. Canada produced the first North American novel: The History of Emily Montague (1769), by Frances Brooke, the wife of a British Chaplain stationed at Quebec City. Much like women portrayed in early U.S. fiction, Brooke’s heroine considers marrying different types of men—Englishmen, Frenchmen, and even an American Indian. While U.S. literature often presents masculine settlers struggling to tame Mother Nature, Canadian literature more often suggests feminine heroes struggling against a harsh masculine landscape; the best early example is Major John Richardson’s Wacousta: Or, The Prophecy, a Tale of the Canadas (1832). U.S. fiction often portrays young male characters hiking into the wilderness to find themselves, such as Huck at the end of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Canadian literature, on the other hand, often sends women into the wilderness. In Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel (1964), Hagar Shipley leaves her retirement home to seek her identity in the wilderness.
Canadian writers have traditionally portrayed their nation as an oppressed (female), struggling for individuality against the overshadowing (masculine) United States, Great Britain, and France. Susan Swan cleverly illustrates this phenomenon in her novel The Biggest Modern Woman of the World (1983), when the identity of a Nova Scotia giantess is overshadowed after she married a giant from Kentucky. Perhaps because of Canada’s colonized status, its literature (including that of male writers) gives more validation to women’s experience. For example, Hubert Aquin’s early novels lament dysfunctional heterosexual relationships, but his Neige Noire (1974; Hamlet’s Twin, 1979) celebrates a lesbian love affair.
Beginning in the late 1960’s, Canadian literature went through a tremendous renaissance, lead by such prominent female writers as Margaret Atwood. Asserting an independent Canadian identity, the feminine nation was no longer a guest in someone else’s house but mistress of her own. Atwood’s jeremiad The Handmaid’s Tale (1987) suggests what might happen if women failed to seize control of their social liberties and reproductive rights. To stabilize a chaotic world of talk shows, substance abuse, broken families, and sexually transmitted diseases, a totalitarian patriarchy establishes rigid roles for women based on their function as wives, daughters, Marthas (housemaids), econowives, or handmaids. Reproduction is strictly regulated so that only those whom the patriarchy deems worthy can bear children. Handmaids only have sex during fertilization ceremonies with their masters, and sex for other unmarried women is strictly forbidden and punishable by public execution.
Most ethnic Canadian women face the same issues as their U.S. counterparts, but early French Canadian fiction was more didactic than other Canadian writing, encouraging women to stay home, raise families, and promote French Canadian heritage. A good example of this genre is Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine (1916; English translation, 1921), whose heroine is torn between marrying a wealthy New England manufacturer and living a life of luxury with him in the United States or marrying one of her countrymen and facing a life of hard work and sacrifice. Her selection of the latter is presented as an admirable decision to young female readers. More recent Quebecois women, however, have been greatly influenced by French feminism, particularly the works of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. As a result, they use more experimental genres to challenge masculine epistemologies and master narratives.

3.