Critical Quotes

•          " Feminist critics showed how often literary representations of women repeated familiar cultural stereotypes. Such stereotypes included the woman as an immoral and dangerous seductress, the woman as eternally dissatisfied shrew, the woman as cute but essentially helpless, the woman as unworldly, self-sacrificing angel, and so on." - Bertens, H (2001) Literary Theory: The Basics, (The Politics of Class: Marxism), (pp 94-5, 97-99), Abingdons Routledge.

•          “Female independence (in the seductress and the shrew) gets a strongly negative connotation, while helplessness and renouncing all ambition and desire message is that dependence leads to indulgement and reverence while independence leads to dislike and rejection.” - Bertens, H (2001) Literary Theory: The Basics, (The Politics of Class: Marxism), (pp 94-5, 97-99), Abingdons Routledge.

•      "All those eager, aroused young women are defined by their 'golden and silver slippers', the 'shining dust' suggests their luxurious environment while at the same time implying that youth is transient. The faces are not individualised, they are 'rose petals' blow about the floor, and the effect emphasizes their transience and the fragility of feminine beauty." - Kathleen Parkinson (1987), Penguin Critical Studies: The Great Gatsby (pg 70)
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•      "Daisy could only be a passive object waiting for some force to shape her life, and that force materialised with the arrival in Louisville of Tom Buchanan. By contrast, the girls at Gatsby's paties have no social status to consider, they just want a good time in the frenetic scene of the early 1920's. All these girls, Daisy Fay too, are portrayed as the centre of sexual interest." - Kathleen Parkinson (1987), Penguin Critical Studies: The Great Gatsby (pg 70)
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•      "The suddenness and violence of this shocks the reader by making Myrtle a victim of Tom's aggression. Whereas Tom merely bruises Daisy's little finger (p. 17), he breaks Myrtle's nose because she dares to storm the social barrier." - Kathleen Parkinson (1987), Penguin Critical Studies: The Great Gatsby (pg 73)
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•      "Oliphant argued that the novels themselves expressed a kind of 'feminine cynicism' arising from Austen's position as a woman intelligent enough to percieve people's selfishness, meanness and stupidity, but unable, partly because of her sex, to do anything to mitigate them." - Joanne Shattock (2001), Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900 (pg 40)
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•      "The fate of Miss Bates in Emma is a warning of what failing to capture a husband may mean - reduced circumstances and the pity and ridicule of those more priveledged." - Tony Cavender, Emag, Issue 59, February 2013, English and Media Centre (pg 58)