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so He Continued To Think Of Himself As A Man As His Mother Had Taught Him (watt, P. 69)
Discuss how Modernist texts engage with the construction of gender.
Date : 04/02/2017
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Uploaded by : Nicola
Uploaded on : 04/02/2017
Subject : English
Modernist texts engage with the construction of gender by challenging and highlighting the stereotypical Victorian set up of female and male personalities and relationships. Within literature, as with society, masculinity has been associated with strength, education, power and activeness. Contrastingly, fragility, submissiveness, expectations of beauty and even failure are often associated with women and femininity. Joyce, Beckett and Woolf were able to decompose these societal constructions of gender formed since the Medieval era. The relatively new device of the stream of consciousness, introduced by Freud, enabled this decomposure. Ulysses and Murphy particularly engage with the construction of gender by emphasising and criticising the masquerade of femininity and masculinity. Joyce and Beckett achieve this by separating the male and female characters in certain aspects, such as occupation and education. They also question the construction of gender by assigning typical feminine attributes to men and certain stereotypical masculine attributes to women. Bloom and Murphy are prime examples of this role reversal. Both men have qualities that society may view as feminine. Joyce challenges the construction of gender in an ironic way by incorporating nationalism, aggression and power into masculinity and depicts this through the Citizen. This character is a mock of the expected extreme masculinity men are expected to emit. Ulysses and Murphy engage with the construction of gender by underlining and opposing the gender roles and constructions of masculinity and femininity throughout their novels.
This resource was uploaded by: Nicola