Women\'s and Gender Studies
This essay considers Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and Stein's "Composition as Explanation" in conjunction in order to reveal the means by which patriarchy perpetuates itself. In particular, these three texts demonstrate how control over education and writing allows patriarchy to reinforce stereotypes about gender that have no bearing to reality. Ultimately, denying access to education and writing can be seen as the underlying basis for all other forms of gender discrimination, because this is the means by which all other culture is produced and controlled.
Old Nurse\'s Story by Elizabeth Gaskell
This is a six page critical analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell's The Old Nurse's Story. It uses some outside resources to engage the text through dialogue and interaction. The paper is organized and structured. The core themes of patriarchy, social structures, family values, evil, death, and decay are examined through the lens of the short story and the act of literary analysis. It is an astute analysis.
Social Context of Hysteria in Freud\'s Time
The concept of hysteria has long been believed to be a mental affliction which primarily affects women, with the prevailing belief being that a female’s inherent frailty left them to succumb to the psychological pressures of extreme stress. The first physicians to emerge from ancient Greece coined the term hysterical to describe the mental state of women who suffer a loss of self-control, bouts of paranoid delusion, and other erratic behavior. Indeed, the word hysteria itself id actually derived from the Greek word hystera, which means uterus, because the limited extent of medical knowledge during this era left men to believe that disturbances or dysfunction within a woman’s womb. Despite the pace of progression throughout the centuries which expanded mankind’s understanding of both human anatomy and cognitive processing, this outmoded belief as to the cause of hysteria managed to survive through the age of Freud, with psychological experts at the time largely attributing the episodes of unexplainable behavior characterized as hysteria to women unable to cope with stress. By subjecting Freud’s own work on the concept of hysteria to a comparative analysis with contemporary literature and scholarly research published during Freud’s lifetime, one can begin to grasp the impact between his investigations and experiments and our modern understanding of the psychological syndromes covered by the catch-all term hysteria.