Women in the Renaissance Essay Example for Free

Women in the Renaissance Essay â€Å"What was life like for Renaissance women? † â€Å"If you were a woman in that time, would you have liked it? † and â€Å"How was the treatment towards women? † Questions like these keep pestering my mind as I research about the Renaissance. It is preposterous at how little freedom women were given compared to this day and age. Not only that, it is clear and obvious that men in the 14th to 16th century in England were given special privileges, while females were not. This is absurd. Women should have been treated as equals with men and without inferiority. The English Renaissance was a period of time filled with great injustice, harsh treatment, and unfair consequences. The life that most women live currently is a luxury compared to the Renaissance since females may major in whatever career she wants, choose who she wants to marry, and in general, make her own decisions. Yet, it has not always been this way. In the Renaissance, females were deemed inferior to males and there were laws that restricted women’s rights. For example, Protestantism â€Å"underscored women’s wifely and maternal roles and simultaneously closing down religious orders that had heretofore offered women a realm for their exercise of spiritual and social power† (Smith 25). Men could not even give females any power, even if was just religious powers. Any authority for females was looked down upon, for men believed women would misuse it since â€Å"as inheritors of eve’s sinfulness, women were pronounced disobedient, lustful, and physically foul† (Smith 25). Females were assumed that way so thus were the inferior gender and treated differently. As males were superior, it was accepted that they had the higher authority so their wives and daughters followed his orders. The daughters had no say to who her father married her to. The main purpose of daughters was as a bride. If they could not marry or lacked the dowry to become nuns, they had to find work (â€Å"Women† 324). Almost all girls were not allowed to decide who they could wed. Their father mainly chose the groom and marriages were often a matter of business. It did not matter whether or not his daughter loved the guy. In addition, the fathers expected â€Å"certain values for girls: chastity, obedience, and silence† These were thought to prepare daughters for their second stage of life, as a wife (â€Å"Women† 324). Chastity was needed because girls could not be married without it, obedience for listening to the betrothed, and silence to not argue with the husband. Sometimes, young girls married men twice or three times their age (â€Å"Women† 324). Imagine having a spouse as old as one’s father, or worse, grandfather! In nobles, the girls had their husbands chosen already at the age of ten or eleven. After five or six years, on the actual wedding, they would meet each other for their first time (â€Å"Women† 324). They were usually married to men with power and wealth; the main reason of the wedding meant sharing a lord’s property or a noble name and continued success. Many women married men they barely knew, or never met. After following her father’s orders, she then had to obey the demands of her new husband (â€Å"Women† 324). Women in the family had different roles depending on what social class they were. The roles of mostly upper class women consisted of different struggles than that of lower class women. For example, upper class women were, â€Å"placed [with] crippling limitations [on] developing artistic or intellectual skills a woman might possess† (â€Å"Women in the Renaissance†). If a woman had sophisticated abilities and wealth, there were more marital offers that came from other nobles. Also, the girls, from a young age, were taught needlework, etiquette, and other talents. In the lower classes, women tended to have â€Å"less freedom of movement in lower classes; they were always handicapped by the physical strains and dangers of constant childbearing and by endless hard labor to provide for [the] family† (â€Å"Women in the Renaissance†). Most of the lower class had to do all their work themselves instead of hiring helping hands or servants since the majority could not afford it. All the cooking, shopping, and cleaning were usually done by the females. They had no time for etiquette and needlework but for other labors in the household. Marriage in households was not the best either. â€Å"Man ruled, women was his property, and he was free to humiliate, strike, and even murder her† (Gail 40). That sounds harsh but it happened. The husbands were even able to murder their wives if their wives were caught in adultery. Adultery was consistently viewed as a wife’s crime; punished by execution and viewed as treason† (â€Å"Women† 317). It was not unheard of for the husband to kill her since divorce did not exist. It seemed that it was always the wife’s fault for seducing other men (â€Å"Adultery†). Regularly, men engaged in sexual relations outside marriage without having to be killed. Women were often married as a matter of business and not by love so of course they would be unhappy and unsettled in their relationships with their husbands. Most tended to simply submit their lives and deal with the marriage. Others refused to accept their fate and looked to satisfy their own desires elsewhere. Yet, â€Å"for a woman who gives into her desires is thought to be deviant; however, the male supremacy in early modern England only perpetuates the female desire to be unbound by societal expectations† (â€Å"Adultery†). Would it not be frustrating to have to be with a man one did not love? Since males controlled females, it was only predictable that women would want to rebel. There were women who wanted to express their opinions but in other ways. The only way â€Å"women could rise [was] through education and struggle† (Gail 42). It was only reasonable that women could finally be noticed through their intellectual abilities. However, â€Å"most men of the day, including churchmen, scholars and educators, stood together against women, and constantly spoke of them with contempt† (Gail 42). Males believed it ridiculous for women to be able to have a formal education instead of learning how to be a proper wife. In spite of all this, the Renaissance was known as the time of the rise of women. It was Spain that â€Å"was known as the country of learned women† due to the Saracen influence (Gail 42). The Saracen women were â€Å"granted spiritual equality to men and women† because of the Prophet Muhammad, whose followers invaded Spain in 711 (Gail 42). Juan Luis Vives, a tutor in Spain, educated Queen Isabella’s four daughters and then traveled to England, where he stirred interest for educating girls (Gail 43). He published books that supported schooling for girls. He began this idea and others took it up. The notion of having almost all females literate was a new thing. Not everyone agreed but there was a slight change. â€Å"During the Renaissance women lost economic power, but, at least briefly, gained status and opportunities for education† (â€Å"Did women have a renaissance? †). The women would finally have literacy instead of lighter, more informal material. Not only that, the time of questioning of women’s inferiority was the beginning of â€Å"Querelles des Femmes,† or the disputes about women (â€Å"Women† 325). â€Å"The educated daughters of humanists, businessmen, and clergy wrote to counter arguments for female inferiority and subordination to men† (Nym Mayhall 45). The women were finally taking actions for their treatment. No more would they keep waiting on men. One such woman was Christine de Pisan who wrote Livre de la cite des dames, or Book of the City of Ladies (Nym Mayhall 45). This was the first important impact of a woman to this discussion. Pisan argued about the schooling and training of women and how it was what made them inferior to men. Not only that, she disputed that â€Å"women’s subordination resulted not from women’s natural inferiority but from men’s envy of women’s virtue† (Nym Mayhall 46). Men know what females can achieve and feel threatened by the competition! That is why there is subordination between the genders. Other European women elaborated upon these opinions. Some include the French writer Marie de Gournay, British playwright Aphra Behn, and Venetian poet Lucrezia Marinella (Nym Mayhall 46). Many early feminists wrote texts that â€Å"contradict[ed] notions of women’s inferiority inherited from classical authors and Christina texts and arguing that women were fully human, not restricted by their natures or biology† (Nym Mayhall 46). This led more females and males to participate in this heated discussion. The idea of equality between genders was beginning to change for the better bit by bit. There were famous females who began to defy men and act upon their beliefs. Some wrote and published their views, others simply followed their dreams that men had taken away, and a few noblewomen used their wealth and status to influence things. The females showed that women were as good as men, whether they liked it or not. For instance, Isabelle d’Este was a noblewoman who was the Marchesa of Mantua. She was not only a patron of the arts, but [also] an inspiration to great artists [like Titian and Da Vinci]† (â€Å"Isabelle d’Este†). To name a few other women, there was the French writer Marie de Gournay, Venetian poet Lucrezia Marinella, and British playwright Aphra Behn (Nym Mayhall 46). These people tried to defend the reputation of women and show the excellence in females by creating literal works. Further women such as Italian Gaspara Stampa and French Louise Labes wrote poetry, romances, stories, novels, and plays (â€Å"Women† 326). Many other females wrote but compared to males, the published works were little. Yet, it’s the thought that counts. Women writers published their thoughts and opinions. Life in the English Renaissance was comparably challenging to that of our current life. There were more limitations and expectations for females. It would terrify most girls in this day and age to marry at such young ages and not even know who the groom is! What if he was twenty years older? Such things were one of the many worries of girls in the Renaissance, alongside with household chores and duties. It was all because of the chance of being born female. Four hundred years from the Renaissance, there is finally equality between both genders. Though there may sometimes be evidence of inferiority, overall females have the freedom to choose and decide what they want and never have to be restricted by rules. There is no need to fear the consequences of reading a book in public or disobeying one’s father in a matter of marriage.

Magical Realism in Gabriel Garcias A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Magical Realism in Gabriel Garcia's A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings      Ã‚   "A Very old Man with Enormous Wings" (1955) is a short story by Garbriel Garcia Marquez, a Latin American author. This story contains many elements of Magical Realism, such as having one fantastic element while being reality based, having a deeper meaning, and having no need to justify or explain events or human actions. The magical elements in this story are the old man (that is assumed to be an angel) and the girl who was turned into a spider because she disobeyed her parents. The angel is the element in Magical Realism that discovers the mysterious parts in life. Most people believe in supernatural beings like angels. Angels are usually thought of as protecting and taking one to the afterlife. The angel was believed to have come to take the baby to heaven. Another magical element was the sicknesses of the people who came to be healed by the angel. There was "a poor woman who since birth had been counting her heartbeats and had ran out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleep-walker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake" (527). The realistic elements include everything else in this story. The people's curiosity to the angel and the lady spider are authentic. This element shows the curiosity of everyday people. Another trait of people is shown by Peylo and Elisenda, who take advantage of the angel by keeping him in a chicken coop and charging admission to see him. The purpose of the lady spider may have been to scare children into obeying their parents. The girl was normal until one night when she went against her parents wishes to a dance. On her wa... ..., an angel and an everyday world are crossed, and no one doubts the appearance. The deeper meaning is told though the life of the angel after he was caged and has an impact on any that would read it. This short story would be good for anyone to read whether he or she had read many Magical Realism stories or if he or she have not. Gabriel Garcia Marquez does a perfect job of "transforming the common and everyday into the awesome and unreal" (Flores 114). I thoroughly enjoyed this story. Works Cited Flores, Angel. "Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction." Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham; N.C.: Duke UP, 1995: 109-118. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings." The Norton Introduction to literature. Ed. Jerome Beaty. N.Y.: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996: 525-529.   

Development of a SAN

Introduction:A Storage Area Network (SAN)  is a company storage system of numerous hard drives administered by an intelligent mechanism. This allows a dominant and proficient  utilization of the entire vacant storage space decreasing the Total Costs of Ownership (TCO) and increasing Return on Investment (ROI), while the most prominent feature is that if some system crashing or failure occurs, the data remains safe and unharmed (Preston, 2002).Development of a SAN:SANs often utilize a  Fiber Channel framework – which is a set of related physical layer networking standards because it supplies rapid and dependable access to the protocols then any other networking protocols. In the development of a SAN a distinctive Fiber Channel is used which consists of a certain respective amount of fiber framework. Nowadays, all main SAN tools are offered with Fiber Channel course-plotting key, and these carry extensive scalability advantages to the SAN design by providing access of data to traverse among different frameworks without integrating them.After development, server’s appliances converse with  a SAN via fiber channel framework and the SAN finds out  where information is stored.   If any hard drive fails due to some cause then the further hard drives in the storage system fundamentally restore the information and no data is misplaced (Clark, 2003).The information on the drives  is checked every day to record and store off site too, thus defending against the appalling organization’s cooperation.Conclusion:So, the development of SAN is getting essential in some organization due to its features.References:Preston, W. C., (2002), Using SANs and NAS, 1st edn, O'Reilly Media, USA. Clark, T., (2003), Designing Storage Area Networks: A Practical Reference for Implementing Fiber Channel and IP SANs, 2nd edn, Addison-Wesley Professional, USA.

Sucker And Araby Summary - 2083 Words

A Comparison of Adolescence in the Short Stories â€Å"Sucker† and â€Å"Araby† Originating from the Latin verb â€Å"adolescere†, adolescence is the period in which an individual develops personal identity and autonomy in the pursuit of comfortable affiliations, goals and convictions. Narrated by Pete, Carson McCullers’s story â€Å"Sucker† Pete and his cousin Sucker struggle to transition from childhood to adulthood. The story covers a flashback in which the narrator reflects on his relationship with his younger cousin, who has lived with him since his â€Å"folks were killed in a wreck when he was a baby† (McCullers 2). Pete treats Sucker with little respect causing the latter to isolate himself. However, once Pete falls for a girl named Maybelle their†¦show more content†¦This is in due of the fact that primarily, adolescent love is an attempt to arrive at a definition of ones identity by projecting one’s self image upon another person. Adolescents seek self-affirmation in their partners, and Pete is no exception. He learns nothing about Maybelle but much about himself. Recognizing that towards the conclusion of the relationship he is the only one involved. He showers Maybelle with gifts and services, asking only for her affection in return. However, his romance is never realized:â€Å"I met her going to the drug store and asked for a date. She told me she was sick and tired of my being around and that she had never cared a rap about me. She said all that. I just stood there and didnt answer anything. I walked home very slowly† (McCullers 5). Furthermore, it is clear that to Pete, Maybelle is a purely physical entity in that, every description of her portrays only her beauty and indescribable perfection â€Å" ..her hands†¦are very little and white†¦It is impossible to describe† (McCullers 2). Similarly, in Araby, the narrator shares the same blind obsession with the idea of winning the love of his perfect woman. The boys infatuation with Mangans sister drives him away from childhood towards adulthood. He breaks ties with childhood friends and luxuriates in his isolation. Like Pete he can think of nothing but how ecstatic she makes him feel, describing