Issues on Female Stereotype in Woman Poetry

Hi there! I'm just trying to learn on how to analyse female stereotype in woman poetry. It was really interesting!

1. First of all, you should know that there are four basic characters type presented by woman:
     - mother
     - daughter
     - wife
     - the mistress.

2. These roles portrayed the mind set of culture that woman should be passive, helpless, weak, illogical, emotional, passive, nurturing, caring, timid, dependent, irrational, empathetic, gossipy, homely, sweet or romantic and etc. We can see it through novels, plays, poems and movies and we are so used to them and comfortable with them that we often just accept them as true and believe that they represent the way the world really is. 

3. These following outline will help us to further identify the stereotype in woman poetry. For example :

I. The Virgin is . . .
- pure in thought, word and deed
- chaste
- angelic
- innocent
- untouched
- passive
- worshiped in a spiritual way
- religious/pious/spiritual
- comforting/healing
- life-giving
- asexual/nonsexual

Symbolically she may be described in terms of lightness, clarity, whiteness, shapelessness, with an ethereal luminescence.
II. The Seductress/Goddess is . . .
- attractive
- sexual/sensual pleasure producing
- exalted/adored by men in an earthy way
- envied by other women
- free of wifely-motherly qualities or tasks
- powerful in a limited sense can bring men to failure or also move them to great works
- somewhat evil by nature of her sexuality

III. The Mother/Wife is . . .
This role may overlap with the Virgin in its motherliness, but is seen as more worldly, more flesh and bones than the Virgin.
• When she is good, she is . . .
- submissive/totally dependent
- supportive
- life-producing/nurturing
- comforting/healing
- a workhorse
- selfless/sacrificing
- confined
- kind/sweet

But when she is bad, she is . . .
- strict/the disciplinarian/punitive
- domineering/dominating
- a nag/shrew/witch-like
- nasty/harsh
- unattractive/matronly/dull/dowdy/not very sensual
- driven (always behind her man or her children)


Last but not least, is it important to fight against the stereotypical presentation of women in literary text because texts are a model for life – novels, plays, poems and movies all affect our way of thinking about the world and what the world should be like. We should live in equality and remove the stereotypical of those gender rules.