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Taming Of The Shrew Feminist Analysis

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As readers we explore and traverse through time, being able to go to places unimaginable or out of reach. Literature has its way of preserving a certain history depending on when it is written and leafing through pages of even a fictional story gives us ripe and supple knowledge of how maybe life would be at that given time. William Shakespeare, an author most high schoolers dread and professors squeal upon, allows us a glimpse of what life would be like in his time through his numerous plays. In a specific comedy, The Taming of the Shrew, he paints out a portrait of what love, marriage and the treatment of women were like in the Elizabethan period. There have been thousands of readings of this play, reproductions, analyzations and even controversy …show more content…
Though, there are times where she speaks little or not at all, Katherine is a strong female character that voiced out opinions unlike most of her other counterpart female characters. Shirley Nelson Garner examines the way in which Kate was “tamed” and silenced throughout the play by her husband Petruchio. She first states that as a woman herself she is unable to find the play comedic and cannot put herself in the Elizabethan setting because of how the play is directed towards men and their desire to manipulate women by taming them. She also stated that many of her female graduate students were flabbergasted at how the play conducted the mistreatment of Kate. Garner then begins to examine the Induction in which a Lord plays a trick on a drunkard. The Lord puts on a façade with his servants to make the drunkard, Christopher Sly, believe he is of noble nature and present him with a wife so utterly beautiful that only comparisons of Greek tales will do. Garner believe this shows an underlying male fantasy of beauty and though that may be true, we also believe it shows how beauty is of utmost importance in a woman to be considerably womanly in that time. She also intelligently notes that most tales involved in the Induction involved rape or even unwanted attention. Women were at the hands of men and sometimes even …show more content…
In an agreeance with Garner, her points and evidence to prove that Kate’s taming is not much of a comedy, but rather almost tragedy, hits hard. Throughout the essay, we can see that Garner is disappointed, just as we are, by the fact that Kate has lost her voice which she had in the beginning of the play.This was written in intention of it being comedic, which tells us a lot about the society in which Shakespeare resided in. To the general public, this taming was possibly hilarious, but to many of us today, it may not be so because it allows the downplay of being shattered by someone

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