7 Aesthetic Needs
Maslows says that the need of human beings for beauty is very deep, and ugliness makes them sick p.44.
By understanding the theory of needs, the writer can examine what the main character trully needs in her life, and how the needs motivate her to do particular action.
5. Theory of Gender Role
In an article titled Gender Terminology, USAID 2007 gives an explanation on what gender role is:
“Communities and societies create social norms of behavior, values, and attitudes that are deemed appropriate for men and women and the relations between them.
These roles are assigned by social criteria rather than biological. For example, childbearing is a female sex role because men cannot bear children. Although
both men and women can rear children, these duties are socially assigned.” source:
http:www.usaid.gov
From the definition above, it can be concluded that the function of gender role is to assign what roles both men and women should have in social life. Gender of
men and women are different from one another. Men have roles to finance and give protection to the family, while women have to bear children and take care of the
family and households. It is an obligation for men and women to fulfill their roles in family life and in society.
Robert Brannon, as cited by Linda Brannon 1996, also gives an explanation on gender role. He says that gender role looks like a script that men and women
follow to meet their appropriate parts in acting mascculine or feminine. He depicts
gender role as “…socially encouraged patterns of behavior exhibited by individuals in specific situations. Thus, a person acts to fulfill a role by behaving in the expected
way in the appropriate situation.” p.168. Gender role is not created by innate reasons, but by the activities which are associated with men and women, whether
being feminine or masculine.
6. Review on Gender Roles of Victorian Women
This study focuses on gender role of a noble Russian woman in the late 1800s. Therefore, to make it clear and more specific, the writer would like to add some
reviews related to the gender role of women, especially in Victorian Era. In her blog titled Life of Women in the Victorian Era, Nickson 2009 states that the role of
women in Victorian Era was really limited. Their life was forced to fulfill family commitments. Their only roles were to get married, raise children, and look after the
households. The groomed young ladies should be innocent, virtuous, biddable and dutiful in a marriage. They were obliged to learn French, dancing, drawing and
singing to help them get a perfect suitor. According to Soames 2004 in a website titled Marriage in the Victorian Era,
women married because they had limited options. They were not formerly educated and were only encouraged to find a man to marry and to have children. It shows that
women only have to fulfill their domestic duties as a wife and as a mother.
In his book titled Sex and Suffrage in Britain 1860-1914, Kent 1990 writes
that an arranged marriage was applied to women for the sake of their survival. Since
