Comparing Women in The Bell Jar and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

Exploitation of Women Exposed in The buzzer agitate and Enormous Changes at the utmost Minute In their manifesto, the Redstockings argued that the relationship in the midst of men and women was a class relationship, and that the men repressed and controlled the women. The women were objects, and the men own them. They said that, as a class, women are exploited as switch on objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor by the male class(Bloom, Takin it to the Streets, 486). Many of the women characters in The Bell Jar and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute flag us examples of this repression and growing. In both(prenominal) The Bell Jar and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, we often see women as being subordinate to men. For example, in Debts, one of Grace Paleys characters is happy because she has found a preserve to aid(Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 11). Her life has no meaning aside from her role as wife. She is defined by her husband. The id ea that women are defined by their husband is so pervasive that we even find it in the language of the stories. In The Burdened Man there is a report article describing the shooting of a wife and her lover by her husband. The husband and the lover are called by name, Sgt. Armand Kielly and Alfred Ciaro, respectively. The wife is simply referred to as Mrs. Kielly. In The Bell Jar, when Buddy Willard proposes to Esther, he asks her How would you like to be Mrs. Buddy Willard?(Plath, The Bell Jar, 75). In both these instances, the language used defines the women in terms of their husband. This fooling indication of dominance says a great deal about the culture. The exploitation of women as sex objects is also easy to find. Both works take over extreme i... ...(Bloom, 486). As a class, men exploit them for personal use, both economically and sexually. They do everything they can to keep women in an inferior position. This repression is so pervasive that it is even found in the lan guage of the women themselves. Correcting this problem is non a matter of changing individual relationships within the society. As the manifesto says, the conflicts between individual men and women are political conflicts that can only be solved collectively(486). In order for things to improve, there moldiness be some change in society at a base level. Works Cited Bloom, Alexander and Wini Breines, eds. Takin it to the Streets. Oxford University Press, New York, 1995. Paley, Grace. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York, 1974. Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Harper and Row, New York, 1971.