Most of the works we have read this semester have portrayed women as inferior characters when compared to men. In the Inferno, throughout Dante’s journey into hell, he encounters and speaks to countless souls—some of which he had met during their time on earth. However, these souls tend to be of the male rather than female gender, rendering a certain kind of male domination in the epic as a whole, especially since Dante—the main character—is also a man. In the same way, the stories told by Scheherazade in The Thousand and One Nights are usually stories with a male protagonist rather than a female, once again emphasizing a superiority of men to women. Write an analytical essay addressing this tendency for women to be inferior to men or possibly proving otherwise.
The Inferno, Antigone, and The Odyssey all bring forth the notion of an afterlife. The Inferno, unlike the other two works actually explores what that after life would look like by describing Dante’s journey into hell. Antigone, although it provides us with no vision of what the afterlife could be, it places an emphasis in honoring dead bodies in order to please the God of the Underworld. The Odyssey on the other hand, tells us of Odysseus’ actual journey into hell—in less detail of course than Dante’s—and highlights a few characteristics such that of Odysseus not being able to hold his mother, one of the souls he encounters. Write an essay in which you analyze this notion of death and the underworld and how the inclusion of this in Antigone, the Inferno, and The Odyssey relate to the work as a whole. Why did the author feel the need to include the idea of an afterlife, and in the case of the Inferno even go so far as to specifically describe it.
