Summary Of Hannah Kent's Burial Rites

Set against the austere Icelandic terrain, Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites delves into the life of a condemned woman, Agnes Magnusdottir and explores how the people who live and work with Agnes transition from feeling antipathy to sympathise with her and her plight. Structurally the text marks this transition and the six months of her stay at the Kornsa farm also allows Kent to frame the transition metaphorically through the changing seasons. Moreover, By granting Agnes the ability to voice her view – readers can sympathize with her fate as a powerless woman in a patriarchal milieu that punishes intelligence when it undermines the subservient and dependent archetype that masculine arrogance permits. Integrated within a third person narrative the first-person reflections allow readers to judge Agnes outside the dehumanizing
Kent juxtaposes the prevailing societal perceptions of Agnes of a murderess with her internal voice and first person narration to challenge the misogynistic stereotype of clever women to evoke sympathy for her. The novel opens with Agnes’s voice.” those who are not dragged to their deaths cannot understand how the heart grows hard and sharp until it is a nest of rocks with only an empty egg in it.” that established her as a victim prompting empathy for her. By contrasting this with the perspective of society and associating society’s portrayal of Agnes as a murderess and a witch with Agnes’s dehumanization “I feel the same as when I was little and hungry, as though bones are growing larger in my body, as if my skeleton is about to shiver out of me.” Kent positions readers to question who the real monsters are. When at Kornsa even Toti and Margret are offended by the visible signs of abuse on Agnes and respond aggressively to her jailors. “Every time I said something they would change