Beauty And The Female Body Poem Analysis

Entry 5: For the analysis of Public Women, we focused on the era of the early to mid 1800s. Specifically we read the speech of Angelina E. G. Weld. She stood in front of a large audience of curious southerners to address the controversial subject of slavery. This was her first break at becoming a public woman. She confronted the stereotypes of a woman’s place in the industrializing American country and found a space, her public, to exhibit her strengths and opinions. Weld did this by not touching on the light and impersonal topics, but rather diving into the provoking and controversial subjects. Slavery was something that even of the time, men didn’t care to discuss. Many saw the problems existing in such a system of establishment, but many …show more content…
We read Kathy Davis’ essay “Beauty and the Female Body,” which addressed the formation and representation of the female body in the media. Davis started her essay by describing how the body was used in nineteenth century poems. That is, the female body in its purest form was when it was nude. There was something graceful and majestic about the nude female body that many Romantic poets of the time thrived on in their messaging. As the ideal female body type became more mainstream, the alteration of such bodies began. Such that, in the nineteenth century one of the most popular customs was that of the corset. Women would imprison themselves in this contraption in order to satisfy the desire for a beautiful body. As time moved forward into the twentieth century, beauty standards became much more prevalent. It became a major concern for women to achieve the beauty standard set by their community as an attempt to belong in the system that worked to confine …show more content…
There was an introduction to sex in the American mainstream that was rejected by many but accepted by many more. This opened the chance for the male gaze to achieve the level of power that it now has. For example, the typical set up of a romantic comedy is one that involves a male and female. The female is in need of someone, specifically some man that can help her through the plot twist and turns of the story. In order for the female protagonist to find this man she must be the object of his gaze. As he targets and pursues her, the story can unfold into a fairytale that young boys and girls grow up to believe is their reality. The life that men hold the power in choosing the female by the simple action of a look, and women must work to find the opportunity to be the subject of such a