Female Images In Literature Essay

3706 words - 15 pages

IMAGENS FEMININAS NA LITERATURA - UMA ANÁLISE DO PAPEL DA ESPOSA
E DA DONA DE CASA NA POESIA DE ANNE SEXTON
Isabela Christina do Nascimento SOUSA 1
ABSTRACT: Literature holds to archetypes and stereotypes and human beings have been represented
through them since the beginning of the time. When it comes to women, the images of wife, mother, sex
object, madwoman, idealized woman, among others, fill texts whichever they are poetry, prose, letters,
biographies or any other genre. These concepts are reflections of images standardized by groups that
many times concern to an excessively simplified idea and hides prejudice. In this paper I intend to show
briefly some of the main images of women in literature, in particular the images of the housewife and
wife, based on the ideas of Mary Anne Ferguson in her book Images of Woman in Literature. We are
going to look through two poems by the American writer Anne Sexton, Housewife and Ghosts both of
them from the book All My Pretty Ones (1962), and throughout their analysis explicate how she
demythologize and rebuilt the traditional idea of marriage and the relationship between the members of a
family.
KEY-WORDS: Woman. Literature. Images.
1. Introdução
Por muito tempo a mulher foi negligenciada em várias áreas da arte e do conhecimento,
inclusive da literatura. Teóricos e críticos se indagaram a cerca da existência de uma tradição
literária feminina propriamente dita e por que os considerados cânones não incluíam mulheres. A
exemplo da sociedade, dentro dos textos literários, prosa ou poesia, a mulher vestiu sempre as
mesmas fantasias, atuou sempre os mesmos papéis, impedindo que tomassem consciência de si e
que pudessem construir seu próprio senso de self. Dona de casa, empregada doméstica, mãe,
esposa e outras representações femininas mostram os ideais que a cultura mistificou como ideais
femininos, fazendo com que uma mulher, quando se desviasse destes, fosse estereotipada com
imagens negativas como as da louca e da bruxa. Discorreremos aqui sobre as principais
representações da mulher dentro do texto literário, examinando as funções dos estereótipos
femininos, assim como as ideologias que se escondem atrás destes sendo ele prosa ou poesia,
dividiremos essas imagens em dois grupos distintos, o primeiro explorando aquelas imagens que
seguem a risca as regras ditadas pela sociedade onde a mulher é passiva, submissa e isolada
dentro do ambiente doméstico, são estas: a mãe, a esposa, a dona-de-casa etc. O segundo grupo
1. Graduada em licenciatura em letras - língua inglesa e suas respectivas literaturas pela Universidade do
Estado do Rio Grande do Norte - UERN.

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