Women and Commodities
In both Jonathan Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room" and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market," women are presented both in a world of commerce and as commodities themselves, but only Rossetti's text is critical of this formulation. In both poems, the value of a woman is dictated by her physical appearance, but whereas Swift seems to be arguing that the value produced by a beautiful woman outweighs any of the undesirable or otherwise unattractive elements which go into maintaining that beauty, Rossetti suggests that the woman who allows herself to be tricked into believing that a woman's value comes from her physical appearance will ultimately be doomed to waste away and die. By examining the conclusion of Swift's poem in conjunction with certain relevant scenes from "Goblin Market," one may see how the former serves to reinforce the notion that women are essentially semi-autonomous commodities, existing solely for visual consumption, while the latter attempts to challenge this ideology by proposing that in matters of money and exchange women are no more or less commodities than men.
The first instance in which "The Lady's Dressing Room" commodifies women comes when the narrator proposes to give "an Inventory" of the various things Strephon finds in Celia's dressing room (Swift 10). The poem reduces Celia to a manufactured product, complete with a list of the required ingredients, as if one were compiling an inventory of all the ingredients necessary for making sausage. Thus, at the outset the poem makes clear its interpretation of women, as any and all agency is stripped away from Celia. "Goblin Market," on the other hand, takes care to establish that the two central women are autonomous, capable people. For instance, Laura and Lizzie live in their own home without any need for male oversight or companionship, and even after Laura has been tricked into exchanging with the goblin men, the two sisters are still able to be "neat like bees, as sweet and busy," as they perform all of the duties necessary for maintaining their house and farm (Rossetti 202). Only after Laura has been ill for some time does she finally stop doing this work, and her weakness is a direct result of her willingness to be commodified (Rossetti 294-299). In...
Thompson "Disenchantment or Default?: A Lay Sermon," The Romantics. In the article "Disenchantment or Default?: A Lay Sermon," author E.P. Thompson explores the restoration of literary works by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Specifically, Thompson is interested in the moment when the poet became politically aware and disenchanted with the environs around him, turning his distaste into pieces of literature. While making his argument, Thompson delves heavily into the possible psychological profile of
Pierre Bourdieu, "The Field of Cultural Production" from David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, the Book History Reader, London: Routledge, 2002. Bordieu's work is interesting in terms of analyzing contemporary media production. It is interesting that a person's profession defines and narrows is or her perspective. To wit: Bourdieu spoke about 'culture'. Now, even though his intention was culture in the conventional sense, fields including science (which in turn includes social science),
Violence should best be seen in the context of an individual alienation caused, most likely, both by the apparent lack of moral norms and, at the same time, by the continuous development of the individual, in a constant quest for the absolute (and this can be the absolute feeling, the absolute perception, the absolute manifestations and sensations etc.). With the underlying belief that everything is permitted, the modern or the postmodern
217+). It is not only the consumer, then, who might be affected by cost; producers also might be reluctant to grown or process organic foods unless they believed that consumers would continue to be willing to pay the price of the organic foods. Their study focuses "on the benefits associated with segregation and labelling strategies that are commonly gauged by the size of premiums consumers are willing to pay
Ross (1988) notes the development of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century and indicates that it was essentially a masculine phenomenon: Romantic poetizing is not just what women cannot do because they are not expected to; it is also what some men do in order to reconfirm their capacity to influence the world in ways socio-historically determined as masculine. The categories of gender, both in their lives and in their
And yes -- so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked older, this year, turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now