Feminism

[Big brotheR]

"Frailty, thy name is woman!" Hamlet

Act 1 scene II

[Big brotheR]

Ophelia I shall the effect of this good lesson keep
As watchman to my heart. Ophelia is the passive, obedient one who believes she can avoid the shocks of life by staying within the norms of society and following all the rules. She lacks the spirit of a seeker; when she is confronted with the profound later, she truly disintegrates.

[Big brotheR]

Ophelia I shall obey, my lord. In such meek fashion, with these simple words, Ophelia cuts perhaps the only lifeline left to the already distraught Hamlet and abandons him to his fate. The pain her betrayal causes is almost tangible.
If Polonius is unreasonable, Ophelia must appear even more so. But she is meek and seeks to avoid the harsh realities of life by sheltering under the tame submission to convention. Ironically, her actions probably accelerate her eventual confrontation with the profound, something she is totally unprepared for.

[Big brotheR]

1- Feminist criticism


Contemporary feminist literary criticism begins as much in the women's movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s
For the women's movement of the 1960s and early 1970s the subject of feminism was women's experience under patriarchy, the long tradition of male rule in society which silenced women's voices, distorted their lives, and treated their concerns as peripheral. To be a woman under such conditions was in some respects not to exist at all.
Feminism asks why women have played a subordinate role to men in human societies. It asks what about women's experience is different from men's, either as a result of an essential ontological or psychological difference or as a result of historical imprinting and social construction.
Feminist literary criticism studies literature for how it addresses or expresses the particularity of women's lives and experience.
And it studies the male-dominated canon in order to understand how men have used culture to further their domination of women.
According to feminist theory, the subordination of women originated in primitive societies in which women served as objects of exchange between father-dominated families.
Men hold almost all positions of political and economic power, and economies work in such a way that women are more likely to be poor and men more likely to be rich.
Feminist literary criticism moves with time from the criticism of writing by men and the exploration of writing by women to a questioning of what it means at all to engage with or in language.
If all language carries worlds within it, assumptions and values that lie embedded in the simplest of utterances, then how can women take up such language, the language of patriarchy, and hope to use it to forge a better world for women? Or is language neutral, an indifferent instrument that can be wielded in any number of socially constructive ways? And what does it mean here to speak of "a better world for women"? Is that not to nominate into an indifferent identity a splintered multiplicity of women's lives around the world and around any one com*munity or society? - Feminist criticism, like any other school of criticism, speaks with many different voices. Common to all feminists, however, is the desire to challenge and change assumptions about gender, illuminating the way in which sexual stereotyping is frequently embodied in a text. Literature and the ways in which it has been writing about it in the past are seen as having contributed to the maginalisation of women and to denying women a voice.
- It has been noted that in 'Hamlet' neither Gertrude nor Ophelia is developed as fully as Hamlet or Claudius; quite simply Shakespeare gives them far less stage time and far fewer lines than Hamlet's concern with them might lead us to expect. Rather than see this as a compromise dictated by pragmatic theatrical considerations, feminist criticism looks at the 'silencing' if the women as an important part of the play's meaning.
- A sequence of this 'silencing' of the women however, leads feminist critics to examine the way different productions of Hamlet, on stage and screen, can use non-verbal language to make statements about the place of women in the world of the play. Such criticism reminds us forcibly that what we have in Hamlet is something not just to be read but to be acted.
- Feminist criticism has also explored the ways in which readers, audiences and other artists have responded to Shakespeare's Gertrude and Ophelia, the latter having achieved a degree of autonomy from Shakespeare's play and become, particularly through paintings, an icon of woman as victim.

[isra]

There are "Feminism" or "Feministic role" in "The Merchant of venice"
How?? Can u explain it please ?