How do the writers present sexuality and gender in Tales Of Ovid?

G prohibiter roles switch been continu onlyy redefined throughout literary history. The develop gentlemans gentlemanpowert of awakenuality and g depoter is maped in Behind The Scenes At The Museum, A Streetcar Named Desire and Tales Of Ovid as drive by context and in particular patriarchal society.From Hughes classical exhibit of a human affectionateness in extremis1, so satisfying that it combusts, levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural2 to Streetcars succes de s tidy sumdale3, dealing with sex to an extent, and in a manner not yet encountered on the stage and then Museums unfertilised and comical view of sex, the mutability of sexual urge and grammatical gender has transcended generations tho has been subject to airing literary perspectives. The class of fluidity of gender can be forgively seen to mirror the context of societal and historical metamorphose within which the three works were created.In the introduction of Ovid, Hughes describes the significance of the tales being written at the upshot of the birth of Christ within the Roman Empire. The classical/ Roman pantheon had fallen in on mens heads4 and Hughes makes a clear attempt to equate A tangle withis with Jesus Christ, describing him as the miraculous baby5 and perfection6. For all its Augustean stability, Rome was at sea in hysteria and des geminate, caught in a guidance between the sufferings of the gladiatorial atomic number 18na and a searching for spiritual transcendence.This era of volatility is reflected in the marked fluidity of sexuality in Hughes Ovidian world, where men and women becomes birds and trees. As such, identity itself-importance is problematic gender can no longer be exclusively prescriptive. According to Leo Curran, Ovid recognised the fluidity, the breaking round of boundaries, payable to the uncontrollable variety of nature and the unruliness of human passion. 7 Hughes unsettlingly explores this in the story of Salmacis and Hermap hroditus, where the carnal nymph Salmacis rapes the timid boy Hermaphroditus.You can read alsoSimilarities and Conflicts in a Streetcar Named DesireAs he continues to struggle, she prays that we neer, never/ shall be separated, you and me8. Her plea is hubristically answered and, with a smile, the gods look on as the two bodies/ melted into a single body/ seam little as the weewee. 9 The conjunction of the two sexes seems incompatible as detect in the drowning of what a modern audience would recognise as a hermaphrodite. Hughes selection of this myth, with the same foul conclusion as Ovids original, conveys the commingling of the two sexes as resulting in the debilitation of the male qualities, rather than their enduringnessening, therefore contri justeing effeminacy pejoratively.The dissolution of gender boundaries is reiterated by Hughes in his story of Tiresias. Tiresias passage through femininity, having lived and love in a womans bodyand also in the body of a man10 le aves him with the crotchety experiences of both sexes. His knowledge about feminine pleasure, that women do, as Jupiter contends end up with nine-tenths of the pleasure, angers Jupiter and his revelation proves damaging as she blinds him. It takes moreover one man, formerly a woman, to destroy the reassuring view that placed wives beyond the influence of pleasure.Social upheaval was also explicit at the beginning of the 20th century. Two cosmea Wars had, temporarily, shifted the gender power balance with women filling vacant male roles moreover for these to be reassumed in the 50s. William Streetcar is an astute depiction of the continual metamorphosis gender roles were encountering in the struggle for supremacy, both at home and nationally between the Old South and the New America. In Streetcar, Blanche, as a grammatical construction of the ante gongum, is taken a behavior, expiration Stanley holding his new son.The new decedent acts as a type of the end of the decaying Du Bois line and a sort of victory for the new Kowalski family. As the Cambridge Companion To Tennessee Williams states Theatregoers did not easily quaver off lingering apprehensions that were born of the 1930s depression and nurtured by the 1945 unleashing of nuclear weapons in this climate, the loose organize and morale ambiguities of Streetcar struck a chord of truth. 11 Furthermore, when Williams describes Stanley shouting Sttellah 12 in a heaven split up voice, we see the unless power of the Kowalskis, who corroborate rocked the spatial relation quo to the same extent as genus Venus doomed love13 in Ovid, that means she has neglected even Olympus14. Ted Hughes exploration of gender fluidity is a more progressive one, in that a 21st century audience is much more receptive to transgender and sexual deviance than Tennessee Williams contemporaries. Williams homosexuality was illegal for the dandyer part of his bearing, but he found ways, establish or oblique, of speaking of them in his plays.There is, indeed, a real guts in which Williams is a harvest-festival of his work. When he began to write he was plain Tom. The invention of Tennessee was not merely coterminous with the elaboration of internal representation fictions it was of a piece with it. In that sense it is not entirely fanciful to suggest that he was the fruit of the discourse of his plays. Indeed he created female alter egos, such as Blanche in Streetcar, before he began, as he did in later life, to dress up as a woman15. Where did his work end and his life begin?The man who consigns Blanche to insanity later found himself in a straitjacket. As amateur Hana Sambrook more explicitly notes there be those who believe that the tragic figure of Blanche Dubois is a transsexual presentation of the promiscuity of Williams himself16. Certainly, Blanches m whatsoever a(prenominal) intimacies with strangers17, her unfeminine like licentiousness and charade of hypocrisy aligns Williams with his protagonist. For a man for whom the concealment of his true sexual identity was for long a necessity, the fragmentation of the self into multiple roles offered a possible refuge.Blanche enters the play an actress and Williams creates her character as a serial publication of roles, by using structural techniques to focus the audience upon her even when off stage heard bathe serenely as a bell18 whilst singing obliviously in contrapuntal19 contrast to the lurid revelations of her past being detailed by Stanley in the adjoining room. Blanches desire for disguise is a phony affectation, using the smoke and mirrors of her alcoholicism and fine clothing, to trump up an elaborate alternative reality she can abscond to, enabling her to put on soft influence, the colours of butterfly wings, and glow20.This indirect, dramatic language and vivid imagery is typical of her escapism and her view of herself as delicate21 reinforces the image of Blanche as a fragile moth that pervades Williams stage directions. Despite this, Williams does not wholly present Blanche as a faded Southern belle22 as some critics claim, but rather sheds a favorable light on Blanches attempts to protect and preserve the genteel values of the old Southern civilisation.Williams states that Blanche was the close rational of all the characters hed created, evident in her contradictory wilful ignorance of the causes of the loss of Belle Reve, yet her understanding that the rootage cause was her familys epic fornications. Williams also reveres Blanche as his strongest character in many ways23 and her singular internal integrity of Never inside, I didnt lie in my heart24 has seen her resist the atrocity and savagery of a relentless modern society. Thus, even to the very end of the play, Blanche has never yielded to any usual violent actions and rude behaviour, crying FireFire during Mitchs attempted rape and fighting Stanley to her material limit with a broken bottle when eventually violated. When the big Matron tries to subdue her physically on the appal, she never stops resisting until the Doctor gently offers her his arm like a real gentleman. Blanches dignified leaving further indicates her spiritual integrity, as critic Robert James Cardullo25 claims Blanches ascension from crucifix pinioning on the floor and her spirited slip awaying the way out of the hell of her sisters home creates a locomote tragic catharsis for the audienceBlanches defeat has considerable aesthetic dignity. Williams literature was strangely unmoved by the issue of gay rights and the issue of homosexuality that was so prominent in his semiprivate life, while clearly a strand in his work, was never a central theme and certainly never defended or promoted, neither publically nor politically. He seems to use Blanche as an expression of a deviation which clearly existed between his morality and sexuality, never to be resolved and never aired fully in his plays, despite its pertinence in the plays political context.By contrast, in Behind The Scenes many aspects of life seem constant and the stability of gender roles seems to reflect this. In Museum, the past permeates the present and the present is doomed to replicate the past. The shop ghosts and objects such as the pink glass button that goes rolling down the years act as chronological touchs expressions and history repeats itself through the lives of successive women. Sophia, Alice, Nell and Bunty all lead lives vitiate by misery, disappointment and domestic drudgery.None of these women marry for love and all encounter marital strife. Alice, an poerty-stricken widower marries Frederick in order to give up teaching, Nell marries Frank out of desperation, her two previous fiances having been killed in the war, and Bunty marries George when abandoned by her American fiance Bick. Thwarted in potential, trapped and unhappy, the women sh be a sense that they ar living the wrong life26.Parallels between past and present create a sense of historical inevitability that is endorsed by a series of echoes between the lives of different women. Nell falls for Jack who has high, piercing cheekbones like razor clam shells27 and by the end of the novel, Ruby has fallen for a strikingly standardised Italian with cheeks as sharp as knife blades28. Bunty looks like Nell and Ruby looks like Alice. The latter pair both believe in destiny29 and embrace it in the mistaken form of men.Alice, Bunty and Ruby have all had enough30. With typically perceptive narration for her tender age, Ruby com locateions for this hereditarily as one of those amusing genetic whispers crosswise time dictates that in moments of stress we will all (Nell, Bunty, my sisters, me) brush our hands across our foreheads in exactly the same way that Alice has just done31. The reference point to genes by Atkinson implies that behavioural patters are inherent and inescapable.Even Adrian, as the sole gay man in the novel, is presented in clich ed footing as having an interest in hairdressing, his intimate conversation with a barman prompting a dramatically ironic exclamation of thats queer32 from the unwitting Uncle Clifford. Gender roles within all three texts are enforced through the sexual dominance of men over their female companions. Critic C. W. E Bigsby note that the shock of Streetcarlay in the fact that this was the first American play in which sexuality was patently at the core of the lives of all its characters, a sexuality33.Williams presents sex as having the power to salvage or destroy, to compound or negate the forces, which bore on those caught in a moment of great social change. The gaudy seed bearer34 Stanley is a bestial representation of the new South and he uses his intense virility and sexual power to great effect. His sexual magnetism is exemplified by the attributeic piece of ground of meat thrown to a visibly delighted Stella in the opening scene. The connotations of his sexual proprietorshi p over Stella and her sexual infatuation with him are not mixed-up on the watching Negro woman.In unconditional contrast, Bunty feigns deafness at the butchers innuendo laced conversations35, exposing him as a bluff hoax of himself36. Her caustic description of him as a pigsmooth shiny skin stretched tightly over his buttery flesh37 is both comical and telling in her uptight rejection of his smutty behaviour. This mordant tone continues into the awkwardly comical depictions of male sexual supremacy in Behind The Scenes fornications.Rubys designing by a typically tipsy George and equally typically stoic Bunty who is pretending to be slumbrous38, summarises well Atkinsons presentation of a tired female submission to male virility in the repressed society of 40s England. Georges demise is with his trouser round his ankles, a less than dignified epileptic penguin39, as the World Cup final carries on regardless40 in another(prenominal) typically callous death of Behind The Scenes. T his dominance leads to a trapping sexual dependence of women upon men, symbolically reflected by Williams in the eponymous streetcar, bound for Desire, and then for the Cemeteries41.The streetcar stands for Blanches headlong descent into fortuity at the hands of her lust. Like the streetcars destination, Desire, the stop called Elysian Fields is an obvious symbol an ironic fantasy however, as the Elysian Fields the abode of the blessed dead in Greek mythology turns out to be a rundown street in New Orleans. The very same symbol of the rattle trap streetcar42 is used by both sisters in scene 4, as a euphemism for sexual experience. They speak explicitly of the blunt desire43 that decides their choice. In answer to Stellas question oasist you ever ridden on that street-car? 44 Blanches bitter riposte of it brought me here45 displays both self-knowledge and self-condemnation of her accepted destitution. Ominously the matter-of-fact Stella offers no words of self-criticism prior t o the only fleeting moment that she confronts her guilt oh god, what have I done to my sister? 46. Moments later, in the middle of her luxurious47 sobbing, she yields to Stanleys lovemaking, compounding her guilt. This dependence is echoed in Tiresias from Ted Hughes Ovid where women are said to take nine tenths of the pleasure48 during sex.Men are vital for women to experience any sexual satisfaction and female desire ultimately renders them reliant and weakened. Their dependence is compounded by a financial reliance. Marxist feminist theory argues an economic dependence on men deprives women of the right to miss their own fate, reducing them to existence by male affiliation. On a teachers recompensebarely sufficient for her living expenses49, Blanche had to come to New Orleans for the summer as she didnt save a penny last year50.In the wake of her husbands suicide and the epic fornications51 of her grand vexs and father and uncles and brothers52, she is forced again to turn to m en for financial support, depending, as is her mantra on the kindness of strangers53. Her attempted allurement of Stanley is based on the recognition that maybe he is what we need to mix with our blood now that weve lost Belle Reve54. Her spiral of desperation turns to Mitch and finally the nebulous millionaire Shep Huntleigh who comes to stand as a symbol of material strength of dependence and guarantee for women, more exactly for Blanche.Blanche recognises that Stella could be happier without her physically abusive husband, Stanley, yet her alternative of Shep save involves complete dependence on men. When Stella chooses to remain with Stanley, she chooses to rely on, love, and believe in a man sooner of her sister. Williams does not necessarily criticise Stellahe makes it quite clear that Stanley represents a much more practiced future than Blanche does. That Shep never materialises strongly suggests that if women place their hope and fortune on men, their oppressed and subor dinate status can never be changed.Bunty, like Stella, who has to request that her husband better give her some capital55, confirms her reliance on George in having no intention of working after her marriage56. Buntys quest for stardom and self-discovery conflicts with a mode of motherhood that requires service, sacrifice, and selflessness. As she moves into adulthood during World War II, Bunty tries out a series of different quixotic identities in the search for selfhood Deanna Durbin57, Scarlett OHara58 and Greer Garson59.However, as her family grows, her dreams diminish, and Bunty is forced to forgo a self she has not yet fully realised. The erosion of self is symbolised by the abbreviation of her name for Bernice, to Bunty, which George truncates to Bunt60. Ironically, George marries Bunty only because he thinks she will be a big help in the shop61 and thus Bunty is comically presented as trapped in the role of the Martyred wife62 despite her belief that marriage to George woul d free her from the graft that she imagines herself to be above.Rubys mock expression of pity in her narrative gives an account of Buntys woes in a sardonic tone her tranquilisers are Buntys little helpers63 and Atkinsons silly portrayal of Bunty as put out but ultimately accepting of her role as a married woman contrasts with Williams poignant subdual of Blanche and Stella. Sexual and financial dominance coalesces in another tool for the seduction of women rape. Hughes presents his women in terms of capital value Philomena is a priceless gift, available to cash in your whole kingdom for64.As a result of rape in Streetcar and Ovid, the victimised females are presented as devalued and diminished in worth in the views of patriarchal society. Myrrha, utterly disgusted with her life65 is described as polluted66 and contaminated67 in the wake of her incestuous act, which removes her from life and death in some nerveless limbo68. Male exploitation of Blanches sexuality has left her wit h an equally suffering reputation.This notoriety makes Blanche an unattractive marriage prospect, but, because she is destitute, Blanche sees marriage as her only possibility for survival, trapping her in the roll of submission to men. It is telling that Blanches rape is not condemned, and it can be argued that Williams portrays her violation as ineluctable in patriarchal culture and also self-inflicted by her provocative behaviour, a controversial thought for a modern audience. In her ingratiation of Mitch, she uses all kinds of strategies to deceive him enough to make him-want69 and conceals her true age, because Men dont want anything they get too on the loose(p).But men lose interest quickly when the missy is over-thirty70. This represents the internalisation of patriarchal society that her behaviour has precipitated. Her trunk, symbolic of her own displaced and materialistic identity, is full of the flashy pretension of fake finery that she perceives men to desire, and the Chinese lampshade softens the glare of the Mitchs gaze on her fading mantrap and adds to the magic Blanche desires the dressing up of ugly reality. However, both are ultimately violated with a strong sense of dramatic irony.When first Mitch and then Stanley tear off the paper lantern, she cries out as in pain. The opening of the trunk becomes a divesture of interiority Stanleys question what is them underneath? 71 becomes a central one as the trunk functions as a metonymy for some unchartered territory about to be fundamentally disrupted, but to no condemnation from the playwright. Similarly, even when the male hunter Actaeon is punished upon inadvertently offending the nakedly bathing goddess Diana with his sight, Hughes suggests that Actaeons crime was one of fortune Destiny, not guilt, was enough/For Actaeon.It is no crime/To lose your way in a dark wood72. Hughes suggests here that Actaeons death is the necessary ordeal to lead him through hell to paradise. When sexual aggres sion or rape is exhibited by females however, the result and portrayal are markedly different. Salmacis and Blanche are remarkably alike in this respect. Salmacis is a naiad (a nymph who presided over springs and brooks) and as such is described in typically natural imagery as perfect / as among damselflies73, aggregation lilies for a garland74.This peaceful language of the natural world is tinged however with a more prevision aggression in the viper75 like elegance of her sinewy otter76 like body, which portends her sexual experience in contrast to the innocent young boy Hermaphroditus, who blushes at the naming of love. Hughes places the emphasis on the feminine snares of the lascivious water nymph, who is aggressively sexual in a very Blanche like manner. She knows she had to have Hermaphroditus77 and proceeds to unashamedly flirt, checking her encircle her cleavage78.Her sensual language is heightened by its inference of a taboo love with the incestuous reference of what a lu cky sister As for the mother/ Who held you, and pushed her nipple between your lips/ I am already sick with envy79, exemplifying her sexual command over the boy, who refuses her advances without really knowing what she wants. He desires only to bathe and his obliviousness to her advances are indicative of his youth and inexperience but also his male gender precluding him from the experience of passion, as echoed in the nine tenths of the pleasure80 that the female takes in Tiresias.Thus he becomes an easy prey and Like a snake81 she flings and locks her coils/ around him82, a tangle of constrictors, nippled with suckers83 the disturbing organic metaphors further exemplifying her atypical literary position as the female aggressor of rape. Throughout this scene however, Salmacis is never rendered as in sexual control Hermaphroditus will not surrender/ or yield the to the lowest degree kindness/ of the pleasure she longs for/ and rages for, and pleads for84. Hughes implication of the ir demise as a result of their unnatural union is clear the only way in which a woman can rape a man is if he is not clearly male.To conclude, in the words of an anonymous critic gender roles figure so conspicuously in literature that they begin to take on a life of their own, whereas to become fluid in the mind of the writer and reader alike it is evident that when working with ambiguity, man and woman, whose boundaries are few and far-off between, become locked in a dimension of transmutation. These words said of Ovid, offer a compact summary of the three works, applicable mainly to Hughes characters such as Salmacis and Tiresias, and Williams Blanche.Ultimately however, despite the differing time periods in which they were written the role of gender is an inextricable fibre in ancient, southern and modern literature. The three writers posit sexuality and gender contrastingly Williams uncompromising personally and socially powerful85 play, Hughes matter-of-fact narration and At kinsons comically cliched bildungsroman. A prominent similarity in the treatment of gender by all three authors is the ability of each to manipulate and intertwine not only their ideas of the gender line but also those of their contextual popular culture in order to effectively and complexly examine its role.