The Feminist Movement Essay -- Gender Roles, New Women

The changes that occurred in gender relations at the turn of the 20th century were a factor in the emergence of modernism. The first wafture of the Feminist Movement began during this period with the new(a) Woman as its protagonist. The New Woman was a figure that was independent, relatively sexually liberated and educated. some women no longer lived their lives according to the Victorian ideal required for them and it became more(prenominal) acceptable for women to be seen unaccompanied outdoors and working in real types of employment. The new woman was perceived as being a get by to men and after the First World War the independence that women enjoyed authorized a repercussion as women were once again put inwardly the home and were and were marginalised in the streets. In Jean Rhys sober Morning Midnight and Stella Gibbons frosty Comfort Farm are examples of women new women who were marginalised as well as women, who although lived in the modern embraced both new and old gendered traditions.Discussion of modernness tended to focus on the city and opportunities for adventure and danger or joy which the metropolis offered to women. As women became more mobile from the nineteenth century onwards, their social movement in the metropolis consisted of shopping expeditions or city outings. (Parkins 2001, p77)In Good Morning Midnight, Jean Rhys explores a claustrophobic kind of exile in the character of Sasha Jansen who has been send back to Paris at the expense of a friend as an alternative to her alcoholic amnesia in London. Sasha wanders finished Paris aimlessly, the site of the dissolution of her marriage and death of her son, trying one-half heartedly to re-establish her life. Sasha is at a literal and emotional impasse at the get of the novel. ... ...ve her room by enticing her out of the Victorian world she lives in, into the upstart world by use of modern magazines offering new things. auntie Ada emerges from her room dressed in leather clo thing fructify to travel by aeroplane to Paris. (Gibbons 2006, p 220) Although most of the characters problems are heady by the traditional method of marriage, Cold Comfort Farm is not a reactionary novel in that it seeks to present marriage as the best or most suitable subject for a four-year-old woman. Flora, at the end of the novel jets off to be married to her cousin Charles. Traditionally marriage was considered as being the most suitable outcome for a young woman. Instead, the author positions within the novel contemporary debates concerning the character of marriage and alerts the reader to the social constructions of femininity in the 1930s. (Horner & Zlosnik 2002, p 170).