How Is Gender Represented in “a Surgeon’s Care” a Mills and Boon Novel?

How Is Gender represented In “A Surgeon’s Care”
A Mills and Boon Novel?
Gender socialization is the process of learning the social expectations and attitudes associated with gender. Socialisation itself, marked the beginning of sexism – the discrimination against others based on their gender. Many say, that this bias relates back to the Bible, as it’s said that man (Adam) was created first, and woman (Eve) was created second from one of Adams’ ribs. This strongly implies that male is the more dominant sex and is therefore superior to females. This idea has been practiced throughout history and could be due to the fact, that religion was more prominent in the past. For example, school and education was originally only intended for boys, as women were expected to be homemakers. This, in many ways devalues and degrades women as it suggests they are somewhat incapable of doing anything but raising children. Additionally, this can be seen through the English language and the use of unmarked terms. The word “waiter” an unmarked term referring to a man, has had a suffix added to the end in order to make “waitress” the term for a woman. This form of lexical asymmetry reinforces and gives and insight into how women were degraded and are still being patronized as this particular word is still used in modern society. Some may argue against this, as “stay as home dads” and career women are accepted today and many females hold powerful jobs, however, gender socialization still occurs subconsciously through diverse means, such as schools, peer interaction, the media and parental attitudes – as girls are often brought up performing household chores like cleaning, whereas boys are sometimes required to perform more “manly” tasks such as mowing the lawn.
The following essay will analyse how gender is represented in the popular romance novels, by Mills and Boon.
The story is written in third person, but from the point of view of “Dr. Penny Hatfield” – the main character. The main character could be a woman so the target audience (stereotypically, middle-aged housewives) can relate. The idea that this character is a doctor and a woman rules out some ideas of sexism as a doctor is a highly respected and qualified job, implying that society is not is patriarchal as it’s said to be as a women holds that job. This is reinforced by the idea that the story was written in 1996 as it was most likely seen as “progressive”. Moreover, she is not referred to as a “Lady Doctor” which could imply that a women doctor is not out of the ordinary. Despite this, a large amount of lexical asymmetry and male dominance is shown as despite the female character, Penny, being a doctor – her male love interest is “Professor Chadwick”, a professor being something significantly higher than a doctor.
Moreover, this story still relishes in clichés and follows the same ideas of other Mills and Boon novels, for example the woman appears to be love-struck and infatuated