Even though we have not read any literature by female authors in the semester yet, the description of women has been very intensified from the perspective of male authors that we have read. It may seem that male authors of the nineteenth century have been leaning to characterize women as sexual objects with no further importance to their existence in the works of literature that we have read. This type of characterization of women can be seen in both the poem “A Carcass” by Charles Baudelaire and “The Lady with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov.

The poem A Carcass by Charles Baudelaire describes the event of two lovers who go out for a walk and then stumble upon a dead corpse in the middle of the woods. In the second verse of the poem Baudelaire starts off by saying “With legs raised like a lustful woman, Burning and sweating poisons, It spread open, nonchalant and scornful, Its belly, ripe with exhalations.” In this sentence Baudelaire describes the women as an object of sexual depiction. He doesn’t care nor does he have any remorse for how the woman may have died and ended up there. All he cares about is seeing that her legs are wide open and that she is not breathing. A person in contemporary view who would stumble upon a dead body in the woods in the middle of a peaceful walk would be in shock and disgusted by the image. The narrator in this case is the total opposite and is amused by the view of seeing this dead woman spread out in the woods as if she had no meaning to her life. The view that women have no importance and are just looked upon as sexual objects can be significantly seen in the depiction of the narrator’s reaction to the dead corpse.

The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov, is a story of a man named Dmitrich Gurov who escapes his boring daily routine life  to go on small gateways to a place called Yalta. While he goes on these mini vacations he has affairs with plenty of women who he has no emotion or feelings towards. This is shown in the quote “Time had passed, he had met one woman after another, become intimate with each, parted with each, but had never loved. There had been all sorts of things between them, but never loved. And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life.” He did not love his own wife and up until he met a girl named Anna Sergeyevna he never loved a women. He only used women for sex. Anna and Dmitrich started to have an affair and fell in love with one another even though the both of them were married.  Dmitrich may have fallen in love with Anna at the end of the story but in the beginning he used her for sexual adventures and saw her as a play toy just like he did with the many women before. In one of the parts of the story it describes a time when Anna poured her heart out to him and Dmitrich did not show any emotion towards her. “Gurov listened to her, bored to death. The naïve accents, the remorse, all was so unexpected, so out of place. But for the tears in her eyes, she might have been jesting or play-acting.”  He used her for his own sexual needs and didn’t care about her feelings until he fell in love with her. This shows the description once again that women were just used as a sexual object with no further significant importance. He didn’t respect her nor her emotions and feelings and that shows that men did not really care about females unless it had to do with something sexual.

The role of women as sexual objects has been seen in many literature texts in the past and especially in the two pieces from the nineteenth century mentioned above. Men have used and seen women in these texts as sexual creatures that have no further importance. This shows that the view of women in the earlier centuries wasn’t a respectable one and that men didn’t really care about women. The view of women was negative by male authors and as we read works written by female authors hopefully this view will change.