Why are Gilman, Rich and Plath so concerned with patriarchal (male) definitions and conceptualizations of womanhood?

I. Essay Components and Structure — Your essay should contain a title, an introduction, a thesis, a body, and a conclusion:
The title of your essay should not be the title of the book you are discussing, nor should it be Essay #1. It should be descriptive in that it alludes to the topic and focus of your discussion. Do not underline or italicize the title of your essay as it is not a published text. (Also, do not bold it or put it in a different font.)
For a 3-5 page paper, the introduction should occur in the first paragraph and should not be more than a paragraph long. In your introduction, you should introduce the author and title of the text you are discussing, and you should appropriately punctuate its title. If it is a novel, play, or long poem, it should be italicized. If it is a short poem or short story, it should be in quotation marks. The introduction should not be too general (“since the beginning of time”); it should be concrete, specific, and to the point. It should provide the basic plot, setting, and main characters of the work (any background info your readers need to know to understand your argument). It should conclude with your thesis.
The thesis of your essay should consist of a claim, and the main points you will use to support your claim. Since you are being asked to write a literary argument, your claim should be debatable; that is, it shouldn’t be something everyone will automatically agree with. Your goal is to argue a specific interpretation of a given text or texts. In addition to stating your claim and main points, your thesis should also make clear the significance of your argument – why it matters. In other words, it should answer the “so what” question.
This paper should not be a summary of a text, but rather an analysis of some aspect of it. Therefore, your thesis should be partly descriptive, and partly analytic. It will be descriptive to the extent that you summarize something you have observed about the text. However, it will be analytic to the extent that you interpret the meaning of what you have observed or argue the significance of it.
Your thesis should occur at the end of your introduction. If your main points are complex, you probably won’t want to try to list them all in a one-sentence thesis. Doing this often results in thoughts that are not adequately expressed and a thesis that doesn’t make sense to readers. It’s okay to use a few sentences to express the thesis, i.e., a sentence for your primary claim, a sentence for each point, and a sentence to express the significance of the argument. If your thesis is complex, you can express it in a separate paragraph following the introduction.
The body of your essay will consist of paragraphs that develop and support your thesis. Your supporting evidence should consist of summary of and passages from the text you are analyzing. Make sure to document your supporting evidence (both summary and quotes) using parenthetical citations that follow MLA format. As long as you properly introduce the text you are writing about in the introduction to your essay, you do not need to do a Works Cited page for this assignment as I am familiar with the versions of the texts we are reading.
You are not asked to incorporate external sources for this paper. You should write your paper based on your own ideas or on the ideas presented and discussed in this class. If for some reason you still choose to use an external source, you must cite that source within the body of your paper using parenthetical citations and include a Works Cited page. You must do this even if you don’t quote your source but simply take ideas from it. Taking ideas from an external source without properly crediting it is plagiarism.
Each of your body paragraphs should begin with a topic/transition sentence that introduces the main idea of that paragraph and links it to the previous paragraph and to your thesis. (Transition sentences link and relate ideas between paragraphs; transition words and phrases link and relate ideas within paragraphs.) Each paragraph should be unified around the one main idea (thesis point) introduced in its topic (first) sentence.
While there’s no hard and fast rule against using the first person, the first person often shifts the focus away from the argument and onto the writer (your personal beliefs and response to/feelings about the work). It also tends to lead to too much informality. For this reason, I ask that you use the third person in your essays for this class. Do not use the first person (I, We, Us), or the second person (You). If you have trouble with this, email me and I will try to help you understand how to re-word things.
Along these same lines, the body of your essay should be devoted to literary interpretation and analysis — to supporting your thesis points with a close reading of the text (summary, examples, passages/quotes). THE BODY OF YOUR ESSAY SHOULD NOT DISCUSS YOUR PERSONAL BELIEFS OR RESPONSE TO/FEELINGS ABOUT THE TEXT. IT SHOULD ALSO NOT DISCUSS THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE TEXT OR MAKE UNSUPPORTED SWEEPING GENERALIZATIONS ABOUT THE PAST OR THE PRESENT. It is important to connect the text and your argument to the outside world, but this should be done briefly in the introduction and/or conclusion, while the body of the essay focuses on textual analysis.
Your conclusion should, if necessary, reiterate your central argument and main points. The conclusion should also emphasize the significance of the discussion (why it matters), broaden it out in some way (connect the text to the world outside of it or to the modern day), introduce some new element or raise some questions leaving the reader with something further to think about, etc.
1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Sylvia Plath (“Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Morning Song”); and Adrienne Rich (“Diving into the Wreck” and “I Am in Danger — Sir”). Also see the author bios (Gilman, Plath, and Rich) and relevant course handouts and links provided in relation to these works: Women’s Movement, Feminism and Literature, Early Medicine and Women, “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper,” “To the Indifferent Woman: A Sestina,” and the Lecture Notes.
Why are Gilman, Rich and Plath so concerned with patriarchal (male) definitions and conceptualizations of womanhood? How are these definitions related to the denial of women’s rights and to discrimination against women? In other words, how have these definitions of womanhood been used historically to preclude women from any or equal participation in various aspects of culture and society (education, work, civic life and politics, art, sports, etc.)? How do you see these concerns reflected in these works?

Last Completed Projects