Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland," although having been written and published 1915 in the Modernism period, contains many distinctive traces of other periods of American literature, mainly of Realism and Modernism. Attributes of the Modernism period include an aim towards explaining the different facets of society and its behaviors, physically as well as psychologically. I have noticed that Gilman provides a glimpse of the way men viewed women - the stereotypical view of women's inferiority - with her trying to redefine the boundaries of gender roles and speak up for women. This had been a pretty radical idea, considering how women were accustomed to not having an active voice in the public. "Most men do think that way, I fancy. "Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether."" (17.) He introduces the perception of how women had been viewed by standards of her society.
Gilman's bold experimentation with atypical writing styles is demonstrated throughout the first three chapters of the novel. She drifts away from the emphasis on poems as it had been in the Puritanism period, the patriotic pieces of the Rationalism period, the reprimanding critiques of the wrongdoings of society in the Romanticism period, and the importance of being one with an individual's intuition and nature during the Transcendentalism period. She includes such an analytical, distinctive voice which is so completely different from the typical writing style of third person omniscient and uses a personal first person in Herland.
No comments:
Post a Comment