Preview

Amarilly Of Clothes-Line Alley Analysis

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1731 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Amarilly Of Clothes-Line Alley Analysis
Women are not play things. Women are not worldly. Women are not allowed to vote. Women are completely morally upright. Women are sexually chaste and submissive. Women are center and upholder of the household. Women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were laden with these societal rules, especially in Victorian communities. According to Kyle Potter of Georgetown College, “women (of this period) measured any spiritual exercise by the extent to which it denied oneself personal comforts and pleasures.” Women were also the ones solely responsible for the raising of the children of the family. With all of this weight and responsibility, women were not even considered strong or independent enough to vote in elections or to work outside …show more content…
Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley, a film starring the legendary Mary Pickford, accomplished the task of demonstrating the change women made from Victorianism to progressivism exceptionally well. Amarilly depicted accurately the torn mindset between Victorian values and modern independence. The film showed Amarilly (Mary Pickford) possessing a great deal of agency compared to Victorian women of the period. Also, Amarilly in the movie reflected many of the same aspirations and desires in life that Mary Pickford herself held in reality. Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley offers a porthole into historical moment where the dynamic metamorphosis of Victorian women into modern women was taking …show more content…
A movement was happening from Victorian to progressivism. Amarilly offers us a vantage point into the world of the new woman. The torn mindset of Amarilly between Victorian value and modern self-fulfillment was a reality that was happening in America too. The agency that Amarilly had in the story in being able to choose her own husband and find her own work points to that very same thing happening in contemporary women. Also, the overlapping story of Mary Pickford and Amarilly show that the fictional story of Amarilly was being played out in reality too. The Victorian woman was beginning to yield to a voting, leading, and strengthening new woman known as the modern woman. Amarilly depicts this for us in a unique

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    Despite the growth of industry, urban centers, and immigration, America in the 19th century was still very rural. The “Cult of Domesticity” first named and identified in the early part of the century, the beliefs embodied in this “cult” gave women a central role in the family. Women’s god given role, it stated was a wife and mother. Pulling against these “beliefs” was the sense of urgency, movement, and progress in the industrial and political changes affecting the country. Women could not help but see themselves in this growth. Women wanted new options, jobs, education and more. Not many women pursued their dream though because many had little to no support, but that difficulty didn’t stop some women from pursuing their goals. Rosa Cassettari and Luna Kellie were two of the women from the same era that decided to pursue the wishes in order to have a better and prosperous life and be able to provide for their families as best as they could. These two women were great examples of how hard but not impossible it was to gain their own freedom and rights aside of what society believed a women’s role was. Even though the faced many hardships and obstacles these two women found the courage to overcome all the…

    • 1286 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Throughout time, scholars have wanted to understand American women’s history. Gender has played a role in shaping the behaviors and ideas within societies. The gender role that women played can be looked at in a historically specific manner. In the early 1500s through the late-nineteenth century, women have had a silenced place in society and within their home. This ideology silences real women’s voices under patriarchal structures. In the time period of Early America, women were silenced through various factors such as the laws and ideas created within marriage, views of women given by society, and…

    • 2180 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Susanna Rowson and Judith Sargent Murray saw women’s roles in the early United States similar. In the 1700s women had a basic education of reading and writing and most were trained to become mothers and house wives. Women’s job was to take care of the children at home, cook, clean, and do housework;…

    • 1676 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In the years 1890-1925, the role of women in American society had changed politically, economically, and socially. Women were no longer considered the servant of men. She was considered an important part of society, but wasn’t able to lead in areas dominated by men. In this time period this is when things started to change for the women.…

    • 491 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    In the Victorian era, women and men were assigned different gender roles. The notion of gender roles entailed that man may go outside the home and subject himself to mistakes, while women must tend to the household and stand as an example of exceptional morality. According to John Ruskin, a man is “the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for…war, and for conquest.” However a woman’s “intellect is not for invention or creation but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims, and their places” (Ruskin). A man is free to adventure and subject himself to mistakes and questionable morals, while a woman must stay at home and provide a peaceful and morally sound shelter. Ruskin claims that despite expecting women must remain enclosed in the household, that they possess a different kind of power than men. A woman is “incorruptibly good” and “infallibly wise.” She is free to judge the man’s morality as she is never at fault. Ruskin asserts this assumption by saying that as a woman “rules, all must be right, or nothing is.” He claims that women are…

    • 1290 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    All of her life Janie is told what to do by other people. Her grandmother and first two husbands limit her independence and force her to conform into roles that she does not want to fill. She is coerced into marrying an old man, performing laborious tasks, and dressing a certain way. Yet despite Janie’s history of being oppressed by her surroundings, she uses her past experiences to shape who she becomes. Janie reflects on her change in independence, stating, “Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now Ah means to live mine” (110). Unlike Gatsby, Janie is willing and ready to move forward in her life. She understands her past, and turns it into a driving force behind her desire for independence. Hurston highlights Janie’s willingness to move on from past events, showing readers that it’s important to overcome adversity and to grow from it. This novel was iconic during the feminist movement of the 1970’s, primarily because of Janie’s sense of independence and freedom as a woman. Hurston’s message of overcoming prior adversity and growing stronger resonated with women in the 70’s. Since then, this novel has inspired individuals to speak up and find their voice, no matter what has happened before…

    • 853 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Fay Weldon’s ‘Letters to Alice on First reading Jane Austen’, through the didactic literary form of an epistolic novel, serves to encourage a heightened understanding of the role of women in Jane Austen’s social, cultural and historical context, and also aims to present the parallels of women in both texts. In doing so, it inspires the modern responder to adopt a more sincere appreciation for the perspectives of Austen and Weldon of women inherent in both ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Letters to Alice’. Through the inclusion of relevant contextual information from Austen’s time and didactic assertions of the fictional character Aunt Fay, Weldon implores the responder to accept her opinions on the role of women in both her and Austen’s context. Her discussion of this, which delves into marriage, feminism and the patriarchal influence, transforms a modern responder’s understanding of the themes and context explored in both texts, and moreover, alters the way in which the responder perceives the events and decisions of the women within the novels.…

    • 1643 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the first half of the 19th century, even though a few women such as Susan B. Anthony started social reform activities, majority of women were restricted by a strict female virtue consensus. Most of them were recognized as domestic workers with their legal rights largely incorporated into the men’s in their families. Before the 1860s, many middle-class white women received education, but mostly were only enough for child nurturing. Rarely would a woman attain equal education as men; however, she would still be considered as intellectually inferior to men in the society. In the early 1800s, most women’s primary concerns were family affairs. Girls and women’s primary education were to learn to manage new domestic devices such as stoves and…

    • 281 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Throughout Literature the role and position of women has been constantly one of debate and controversy. For centuries women have struggled to exert any power or individual identity through times of male dominance. The novel The Great Gatsby as well as the play A Streetcar Named Desire and lastly the poetry of Anne Sexton, were all written during the 20th Century in America. Throughout the 20th Century, attitudes towards women in the USA were changing, the war had given an opportunity for women to realize and prove that they could look after the household without men. This called for much debate about the rights and roles of women which carried on throughout the 20th Century and inspired many of the characters and themes within Literature. In all three texts interactions between men and women are explored and represented in different ways. Each painting pictures of women whose compliance and submissiveness have resulted in their portrayal of being male dominated victims of society’s double standards.…

    • 3734 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the nineteenth century any form of social change was serious t to an attack on woman's virtue, if it was correctly understood.. American would boast if their daughters were innocent. Women understood her position. Woman were told to work in silence, not for money, just for affection. Women who worked for there husbands were known as “True Women”…

    • 900 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    This bond of female friendship is responsible to shape Eliza’s thoughts and actions to some extent and helped the plot of novel to grow in a significant manner. The theme of sisterhood remains prominent with Foster’s work; The Coquette and The Boarding School can be quoted for example. Such bond of female love and enmity is evident at various junctures across popular romantic novels, where women come to the rescue of each other, but somewhere down the line happen to scrutinize each other for the prospect they are vying as women. Jane Austen’s masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice offers a parallel theme of female love and rivalry, where the female characters, though bears enormous love for each other, but are also competent with each other in pursuit of a better match making for themselves.…

    • 3807 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    This paper goes into detail about the struggles women faced back in the 1800’s, as well as how they were treated verses men. Women weren’t able to vote, work, learn, and were considered “less powerful” than men. They were strictly known as “mothers” and their job was to take care of their family.…

    • 315 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The lives of women in the nineteenth century were greatly shaped by an attitude that believed women should be domesticated, pure, pious, and submissive; true women focused their lives around the family and the home, influencing husbands and children by providing them a moral compass. These women, however, were shielded from the outside world and were neither influenced by nor a part of the politics and business taking place on the other side of their doors. The idea that women were meant for households, unable to complete demanding labor, developed into the idea of the “cult of true womanhood” and limited the interactions of women to their homes and families. However, strong conflicts arose between the traditional and untraditional idealists…

    • 1031 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Women today in 2016 couldn’t last two minutes living the life of a woman in the 1900s. 100 years ago, females were known as the weaker gender but more virtuous and were not allowed to do anything unless they had a husband. They didn’t have any rights, authority, or opinion about ANYTHING! It was illegal for women to do a lot of things, and here we are 100 years later, we can do whatever we want, when we want, however we want without anyone’s permission. To sum things up, a woman is her own boss and controls everything in her life. She can follow her dreams without anyone stopping her and a woman can make her own decisions. Everything…

    • 1527 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Cult Of Domesticity

    • 788 Words
    • 4 Pages

    During the late 19th and early 20th century, strict and confining gender roles existed for women throughout the United States. While men were able to pursue out-of-house careers, women were trapped in a Cult of Domesticity, disabling them from acting in a “manly” manner in fear of losing their reputation. In this Cult of Domesticity, women were born and bred simply to marry a man with a higher social status and monetary value, and procreate with them to form a family. However, because the women of this era were raised as if they have few rights and only live for money, the inflated, bratty and materialistic lives of these 20th century women irritate me. In Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth, she explores the struggles of a woman, Lily…

    • 788 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays