Pamela

A few weeks ago we read some chapters of Pamela by Samuel Richardson  in our English Literature class. It is an epistolary novel in which Pamela, the main character, tells us her story. This novel belongs to the eighteenth century sentimental novel a period in which we can see some important themes such as vanity, charity, the nature of goodness, but here I am going to focus on the topic of appearance.

We talked about this topic in class and I found it very interesting because while I was reading Pamela, I felt it, like Pamela said to her parents if she was acting in a correct form, the way in which she asked her parents, her words and expressions used to it, she needed another opinion, because she wanted her parents to be proud of her and she didn’t want to do something that may put them in danger. I felt it because it is true that each one needs some opinion to know if you are wrong or not. I could see myself represented in Pamela because our parents are the most important people in our lives or at least, they should be and if they tell you are acting correctly I think that you can breathe easily.

So I think that in this book we can find some moral advices very useful for our daily life. Pamela gives us an important lesson: chastity is a precious virtue that eighteenth century women had to have.

Women and "The Duchess"

In our English Literature class we watched a very good film called The Duchess in which we could see the role of women in the 18^th Century. It is a very real film; it showed us a lot of aspects that we do not know about how women were in this century.

We saw how women were only for having children although they started to take part in politics themes. From my point of view it was a little shocking. We watched how the protagonist, Georgiana, was raped by her own husband, but I think that he was not so bad with her. She knows that the duke made love to other women but she is a woman and she does not have the right to do the same.  Although she knows it, she asks her husband if she can be with her lover, Charles Grey, the love of her life, and the husband does not do anything bad to her when really this is a very hard thing for a man of his age to accept it. She is a very strong woman who fights for her love but I think that she has good luck because at least she can stay with her lover some days.  Another husband would never have let his wife and much less if he knew it, and he does nothing bad to her. We saw how Lady Bess Foster’s husband hit her.

In conclusion, I think that The Duchess is an amazing film to see how the women has grown during the centuries, and how a woman with a strong character could be very famous and very wanted by everybody.

The Rape of the Lock or … the Rape of Belinda’s Virtue

    The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope has been the first English long poem that I have read understanding it; with this poem I have done my first role. I have been the director and I had to read it looking for some interesting and second sense questions that I asked myself while I was reading the poem. It was a difficult homework for me, but finally I got to do it and I did three important questions which we could talk in class, but now, in my second blog I would like to talk about one of these three questions. It is about one of the most trivial but difficult themes in the poem, and we can see it, the first time, in the title: Is it a literal title or is it trying to show us another thing. In the poem Pope never tell us than really the lock is the Belinda’s virginity but he gives us some clues. I found a clear example of this. In Canto II, verse 116, we find that Ariel ask an army of sylphs to look after of Melinda’s earrings, watch, favourite lock, and he sent fifty to defend Belinda’s petticoat, I think that he did this because the petticoat is the battlefield that requires the most extensive fortifications.  This fact furthers the idea that the rape of the lock stands in for a literal rape or at least represents a threat to her chastity and is more serious than just a lock.

Aphra Behn and her Fiction

         Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was the unique woman author in the Restoration. She wrote a lot of types of works but in this essay we get to see her original or different fiction’s works. She was the only female dramatist and in the Restoration was when she became in a major writer of prose and so, of fiction. Probably she turned to prose because she enjoyed it, with it she could do different things like play with authorial control and use news themes of love and obsession impossible in drama. Fiction could use it, as she discovers with her first effort, Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, a long novel about the politically tempestuous years when James II began to lose his throne. The novel was obviously anonymously published and it was a remarkable production. It gave to Behn confidence in her virtue to write prose. One special thing in Behn´s fiction is the narrator; it could be female or of indeterminate sex and this narrator is not omniscient like normal nineteenth-century fiction. We can see this type of narrator in her famous novel Oroonoko.
          I have written about Aphra Behn and especially I have explained a little her prose because although prose is the genre in which she less wrote she was very good at it.