Emasculation

Richard Dunn’s A Tale of Two Plantations is the product of four decades of exhaustive archival research encompassing the lives of over two thousand slaves on the Jamaican sugar plantation Mesopotamia, and the Mount Airy plantation, located in Virginia’s tidewater region. His two primary goals are to reconstruct the lives of these individuals, and through comparative analysis, highlight the differences between the two slave societies (1). To accomplish these objectives, Dunn relies heavily on the…

In Umberto Eco’s Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt, Eco contemplates on what fascism is. He offers a list of 14 “typical” features to recognize fascism, a political system Italians got to name. He refers to these features as “Ur-Fascism” or “Eternal Fascism.” Eco makes clear that these points are unique to fascism and that they “cannot be organized into a system” as “many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism” (Eco,…

The period after the Second World War witnessed a struggle of women’s rights. Although women were very appreciated during the war, the return of the patriarchal society rejected the idea of women working. Such contempt for women is expressed in Plath’s poem, ‘The Applicant’. The poem may first appear humorous but its underlining context of the objectification of women turns it bitter. This is evident in the title. The word “Applicant”, itself is dehumanising, is associated with jobs, employers…

America is well known for the place of freedom and prosperity; it holds a various amount of lifestyles lived by different people. In the novel of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the two main characters, Huck and Jim portray the American Dream through their attempt of freedom. The novel was written two decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War. Even then, America was still struggling with racism and the aftermath of slavery. When writing this novel, Mark…

that men are the ones whose judgment is important suggests that women of the Bottom value their men’s opinion and that men in the Bottom have the power in decision making over African American women. The men’s need to dominate and their threats of emasculation may also be observed in the different ways they talk about Sula and her mother Hannah. Both Sula and Hannah engage in sexual relationships with numerous men from the community and are sexually free but men never gossip about Sula’s mother…

The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison presents characters who are left powerless because of their age, race, and gender. Toni Morrison displays many characters through her work. The one thing which connects these characters is their lives. All of which consist of abuse, and mistreated for one reason or another. Reasons for abuse depend solely on the character and differs from one to another. Reasons for the characters abuse derive solely from attributes they can not change about themselves, like age.…

love and the purposeful actions which it inspires suggest that all Lancelot's strength and honour as a man have been directed toward his lady’ In Chrestien’s retelling, Lancelot becomes metaphorically emasculated by his love for Quenevire. This emasculation is showcased many times throughout the text. When Lancelot catches a glimpse of Guenevire being held captive, “he wanted to throw himself form the window and shatter his body on the ground below’ (538-9). Lancelot doesn’t think about his…

By 1865, bloodhounds were seen as a weapon by which the planter class oppressed not only slaves, but white unionists and northern prisoners of war. The savagery of the bloodhounds illustrated what Northerners considered to be the true brutality of the culture of the Southern planter class. In the war’s second year, newspapers in Iowa began to discuss the new use of bloodhounds in the Southern states as literal instruments of control over Southern Unionists. Dogs were indeed deployed by the…

their brutality and power, was not. To kill Butler’s bloodhounds stripped him of his power, deprived him of an instrument by which he asserted the domination of the slaveholding class. The bayoneting of the bloodhounds served as the emasculation of the man: an emasculation necessary to allow the Reconstruction of a South which mirrored the free labor system of the…

Assumptions of Homosexuality in 18th Century Composers Phillip Brett begins his article on issues of sexuality in 18th century music with an observation from 20th century composer Virgil Thompson, who noted that no one in music ever talked about homosexuality. This assertion is quickly contradicted with a quote from Havelock Ellis, who states that “It has been extravagantly said that all musicians are inverts.” Ellis uses the dated psychological term “inverts” to refer to those displaying…