Women in 19^th century..

In the 19^th century, the head of family was the husband or the father. Everyone in that household followed and respected him as a leader in that family. Women were “lower race” like Gurov described his wife in the text. They were restricted and limited their work within their household. Women in that period were portrayed as only child-bearer or sexual instrument in many literature works although it had been changed since then.

The lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov tells a story about the love affair between unsuccessful married guy “Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov” and a young lady “Anna Sergeyevna” who was taking a vacation in Yalta. They both were unhappy with their marriage and wanted to getaway. First, Gurov described his wife in a very negative tone “his wife now looked nearly twice as old as he did” , “he secretly considered her shallow, narrow-minded and dowdy, he stood in awe of her, disliked being at home”  They met and married while they were in college and have children in teenage. However, Gurov is unfaithful to his wife and cheating with lady that he thinks “the lower race.” Sadly, his wife had never found out her husband’s unfaithfulness what so ever. I think because she is so limited within the house. She always stays at home and takes care of children. She doesn’t have a chance or a time to doubt her husband’s unfaithful behave. Next, Anna Sergeyevna who has fallen in love with Gurov lives in a grand scale, luxuriously, kept carriage-horses house but long gray fence with inverted nails hammered into the tops of the palings as described in the text. Her life seems luxurious without any problems, but she feels bored and she has a negative attitude about her husband as she described. A gray fence with the nails in indirectly alludes Anna’s life would be nothing different than Gurov’s wife. Because women’s life at that time period was restricted and limited and considered as lower than men’s status.

Women were described as a lower race or even as a sexual instrument in “A carcass by Charles Baudelaire.”  “her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore” , “her stinking and festering womb”  In this poem, Baudelaire describes a rotten carcass which is obviously woman’s. As his description, women were negative and only thoughts he had of women were sexual instrument just like toy. This gets much clearer when we find out how his life was, how things gone in his life. This poem’s main theme is death, but he used a woman’s body to describe decay and a rottenness of his situation.

In the 19^th century, women were characterized as a lower status than men’s. They were so powerless, restricted and limited within the society. Many of art works in that time describe this thoroughly like Chekhov and Baudelaire did in their works.