Ji Hu
Faculty of Foreign Studies, Hubei University of Automotive Technology, Shiyan, Hubei, China.
*Corresponding author: Ji Hu
Abstract
Shakespeare lived in the English Renaissance period in the late 16th and early 17th century, which like our present world, was also dominated by patriarchal ideology. As a social subject, Shakespeare was inevitably influenced by the patriarchal ideology pervasive in society and internalized this kind of ideology. The internalization had an impact on his literary creation. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, the female characters are usually negatively portrayed. In this paper, I will provide an analysis of the female characters in three of Shakespeare's tragedies, The Tragedy of King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth from a feminist critical perspective. I will argue that these three tragedies demonstrate Shakespeare's typical influence by patriarchal ideology, leading him to portray female characters in negative ways, whether consciously or unconsciously. The negative-portrayed female characters in the three tragedies are only foils to the positive images of male characters, and through this kind of negative characterization of female characters Shakespeare justifies and thus promotes the patriarchy.
References
Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick. (eds.). 1915, The Cultural Moment, The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art & the New Theatre in America. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
Alfar Cristina León. Speaking Truth to Power as Feminist Ethics in Richard III. Social Research, 2019, Vol. 86: No. 3, 789-819.
Aughterson Kate and Ailsa Grant Ferguson. Shakespeare and Gender: Sex and Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Drama. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2020.
Bloom Harold. Macbeth: A Dagger of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc, 2019.
Faculty of Foreign Languages of Sichan University, China. Symposium on Foreign Language and Literature and Culture. Chengdu: Sichuan University Press, 2009.
Levin Joanna. “Lady Macbeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria” ELH 69.1 (2002): 21-55.
Shakespeare William. Othello, the Moor of Venice. Raleigh, North Carolina: Lulu Press, 2020.
Shakespeare William. The Tragedy of King Lear. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Sinfield Alan. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Tyson Lois. Critical Theory Today. New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2023.
Woodbridge Linda. Women and the English Renaissance. Brighton: Harvester, 1984.
How to cite this paper
On the Patriarchal Ideology Represented in Shakespeare’s Three Tragedies: The Tragedy of King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth
How to cite this paper: Ji Hu. (2024) On the Patriarchal Ideology Represented in Shakespeare’s Three Tragedies: The Tragedy of King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 8(6), 1429-1433.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2024.06.021