Who Ignores Women: Not Only Man

Year 2012, Volume: 9 Issue: 2, 373 - 378, 01.04.2012

Yeşim Mersin

Abstract

Keywords

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Who Ignores Women: Not Only Man

Abstract

Throughout the history, as it can be clearly understood from the word his-story,1 women cannot have their own identity or social roles; rather they are forced to take on a lot of gender roles imposed upon them by the patriarchy and carry them as their identity. They have had two labels: either “angel in the house” or “mad women in nowhere”. Unfortunately, they cannot put a stop to this situation since they are not able to found a real, powerful sisterhood which would provide them with the world where they can realize their own selves. On the contrary, they make them fall into a bottomless hole as Charlotte Brontë does in her novel Jane Eyre by leading her character Jane ignore Bertha, “the mad creature in the attic” and call her “it,” meaning that she has lost all her humanity in the eyes of others who transformed her into mad, alienated and lonely “other”. 

Keywords

Ignores, Women, Only

References

• Brontë, Charlottë. Jane Eyre (New York: Penguin, 1966).
• Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1977).
• Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea (Harmondsworth, Penguin, (2001).
• Woolf, Virginia. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942).
• Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin Classics, 2000).
• Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, pp.76-77.