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Joseph Conrad is widely recognised as a writer of sea stories with predominantly masculine themes. This book argues that despite this established reputation, Conrad did not neglect women's themes in all his works. The evidence of his biography, correspondence, and fiction indicates a complex and intriguing relationship between Conrad, the women in his life, his female characters, and readers of his work. He began in the Malay fiction by producing prominent female figures whose position offered an important critique of imperialism, a role that women continued to fulfill in the political works of the middle years, such as Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes. He increasingly turned to the issue of gender, female identity, and in relation to romance, how women are invited to conform to its conventionalised gestures and plots.

This chapter discusses why the practice of the male dan (male actor playing female roles) flourished in this period despite public censure on moral grounds. It examines how Cheng Yanqiu, a male dan, transformed the role's performance art by giving his female characters a strong personality. It describes Cheng Yanqiu (1904–58), as one of the Four Great (male) Dan who specialized in the qingyi role. It further describes that Cheng was a middle-aged man, 5 feet 9 inches tall, heavily built and weighing about 200 pounds, with hands that had become rough and covered in calluses through working in the fields harvesting sweet corn and sesame seed.

This chapter examines the role of female characters in the two legends, and the implications which this had regarding the inclusion of women in the contemporary British state. In particular, it looks into the complexities as they related to the role of women as members of the British nation in an era in which they did not enjoy full rights of citizenship. Much recent literary scholarship has focused upon the misogynist attitude which the Arthurian legend displays towards its female characters in the nineteenth century. Guinevere, for example, came to function as the scapegoat for Camelot's downfall. The legend of Robin Hood, however, demonstrates that Victorian attitudes towards women were not always so one-dimensional. Nineteenth-century authors treated Maid Marian as an extremely positive female character, despite her failure to conform to traditional gender roles.

In this final chapter, I revisit my discussion of the female voice in mainstream cinema to explore the aural representation of women in contemporary chick flicks. In examining this category of films, it is clear they have some evolutionary links with the screwball comedy genre discussed in Chapter 1. This is evident in the female characters we encounter in modern chick flicks who, like their screwball predecessors, are often strong, confident and quick-witted, engaging in verbal battles to achieve their ‘happily ever after’ either with their lead male character or with fellow female characters, or sometimes with both.

This chapter begins by examining theoretical models for the study of narrative provided by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and Tzvetan Todorov. For a period from the early 1930s until the mid-1950s, Hollywood films were subject to regulation by censors who had the power to alter the cause–effect logic of the narrative in order to make it comply with their patriarchal moral ideology. This included the rule of ‘compensating moral values’, which assured that a character who committed an immoral action had to be either punished or redeemed within the narrative. Melodramas position the central female character as a victim, and are narrated from her perspective. The melodrama narrates a female predicament and offers female viewers a lesson in how (or how not) to behave. Meanwhile, films noir are typically narrated from the male perspective and position the male detective/hero as a victim of female manipulation or betrayal. The ‘femme fatale’ is a male construct; she represents male anxieties about women's changing roles in society, especially her sexual and economic independence. Neo-noir films deliberately subvert the rule of ‘compensating moral values’ and offer female viewers a rare opportunity to derive pleasure from narcissistic identification with the femme fatale.

This chapter assesses what difference it makes that Neil Marshall's party is women only, and investigates The Descent's contribution to the thorny issue of the representation of women in horror films. Marshall admits that his original concept for the film involved a mixed group, and that he was attracted to a colleague's off-hand suggestion of making the cavers an all-female group for its novelty. This highlights the first, obvious point: it is a selling point, a distinguishing feature. As Marshall points out in 'The Making of The Descent', the film is unique among what Marshall describes as 'action horror' films in having an all-female cast. Given that the cast is all-female — and young, athletic and attractive to boot — Marshall's treatment of them is remarkably desexualised, arguably working against this selling point, for at least some of the film's audience. The decision to present the women neutrally — not only desexualised but also, perhaps, defeminised — relates to the underlying themes in the film.

Chapter 3 explores the role of the senses. Visual clues and hearing rumors are among the most common triggers of jealousy. The senses are crucial to the arousal of jealousy and provide an opportunity for the poet to focus on the initial stages of the emotion. Yet there is a marked difference here between male and female characters. While women are portrayed as hesitating to believe the truth of something suspicious they have seen or heard, male lovers are depicted as already convinced of the mistress’ betrayal.

In this chapter, the author offers a reading of William Faulkner from his point of view of as a writer. He begins by discussing one of Faulkner's unique narrative techniques, “reticence,” and explaining that when he reads Faulkner's novels, he always puts the translations beside the originals, whenever they are available. He claims that he experiences Faulkner through a triangular circuit for the transmission of verbal symbols—Faulkner; the translator, who is a specialist; and himself, a reader of the words of the other two. He also reflects on his response to Faulkner's attitude toward writing novels and to his way of activating the imagination. Finally, he considers Faulkner's way of manipulating his male and female characters by focusing on his novels The Hamlet, The Mansion, The Wild Palms, and Absalom, Absalom!.

This chapter studies the Jewish female character in French literature. The Jewish woman's difference from feminized Jewish men and marriageable Christian women is not enough to delineate her specificity and hence her function as a fictional character. She is also seen through the lens of orientalism, because of the constructed image of her roots in the Middle East as a member of the ‘Hebraic’ or ‘Israelite’ race. The French Romantic writer Chateaubriand suggested that the treatment of Jews by Christian society varied according to their gender and physical appeal. He argued that Jewish women were exempted from perpetual misery and persecution by the grace Jesus accorded to Mary Magdalene, and that this was the root of Christian men's attraction to and sexual associations with Jewish women. The chapter then presents specific examples of representations of Jewish women: in this case the Jewish woman in Paris of the 1830s and 1840s as she appears in Honoré de Balzac, one of the nineteenth century's most popular and influential European writers. While Balzac had limited contact with actual Jewish women in Paris, the figures he created had a tremendous influence on the rhetoric of representing what has come to be known as la belle Juive.

The Introduction describes the vital rebirth in sentiment’s lived and literary form that occurs in interwar America. The result is an aesthetic of “modern sentimentalism.” The chapter defines this aesthetic of mixed feelings as it captures the conflicted affective dynamics of icons of modern femininity and the stylistic practices of interwar female novelists. The chapter discusses the assumptions that have led scholars to overlook this aesthetic’s purchase in modernist literature and culture, and indicates its consequences for understandings of modernity, sentiment, and interwar gender and affect. The chapter lays out the study’s methodology, which synthesizes traditional and quantitative research methods, features a transatlantic archive of period discourse and critical theory, and establishes a novel approach to evaluating literary affect. The chapter concludes that the crisis in female character can be best understood as a matter of practical experience and lived reality, not a problem of abstract representation.

This chapter discusses Harris's ideas about the role of women as seen in the characters of her novels. Often she venerated domestic tradition in the popular press and blamed and condemned women for straying from the security of domesticity, yet in some of her fictions she disclosed a marked uncertainty and equivocation on the traditional roles of women. Several of Harris's female characters with whom she clearly identified were women who did not celebrate traditional roles and resisted in subtle ways the prescribed and traditional role of women. Some of her characters reveal a clear feminist insight while others reflect confusion on gender identity. This chapter examines six characters from her novels: Jessica Doane inThe Jessica Letters, Mary Thompson and Sal Prout in A Circuit Rider's Wife, Sylvia Story in The Recording Angel, and Miriam Ambrose, and Millicent, the narrator, in The Widow Ambrose.

This chapter evaluates gender representation in SAW (2004). In the confined male landscape of SAW's world, it is significant that 'the only one who made it' is female; and also perhaps important that she had to conquer another male victim to survive. Significantly, no female character dies in SAW, compared to the confirmed five, possibly seven, male deaths: a ratio that is in sharp contrast to typical horror body counts. Meanwhile, the theme of paternity is further investigated in SAW's other male representations, but mainly through Lawrence Gordon. The representation of men in SAW acts as a counterpoint to the representation of Amanda, providing deliberate balance to the film's ideas regarding gender. There is the abiding sense that Gordon is imprisoned for his failure to adequately fulfil the basic responsibilities of the expressly male archetype — the husband and father.

This chapter argues that in contrast to older iterations of the franchise, Star Trek: Discovery is not only centred on Michael Burnham, First Officer and later mutineer/science specialist, and thus departs from the usual focus on a starship Captain as lead character, it also introduces a wider variety of female characters – human and Klingon – who are instrumental in resolving the first and second season’s central conflicts. Thus, Discovery, through including of so many different and fully-fledged female characters not only continues in the franchise’s liberal tradition, it also explores new ways in which female characters can be represented in televised (American) science fiction series. This paper will argue that the show’s female characters push against and sometimes transcend generic tropes that have limited characters like TNG’s Deanna Troi and Dr. Beverly Crusher, picking up on and contributing to contemporary debates about gender and gender identity.

This chapter analyzes the “new buddy movement” that pairs black female characters in supporting roles with white female leads in two Disney Channel shows, Shake It Up (2010–) and Good Luck Charlie (2010–). It suggests that Disney presents diversity in such a way that reifies the position and privilege of white culture and white cast members. Drawing on recent Pew Research Center reports that document income inequities along lines of race, the chapter suggests that viewers read these shows through a colorblind lens and see diversity without seeing (or understanding) difference. Keeping in mind the fact that television plays a central role in the articulation and construction of racialized identities in the United States, the chapter explores the impact of Disney's representational strategy on its children and tween viewing audience through Stuart Hall's theories of encoding and decoding.

Throughout her career as a writer, Joanna Russ has continuously transformed and developed androcide as a means to give female characters power and credibility. This is evident in the stories collected in The Adventures of Alyx, where the female characters have the ability to control their actions and kill the opposite sex. This chapter examines the narrative function of androcide within Russ's texts and considers androcide as a narrative device and not to celebrate violence or advocate mass murder. It shows how androcide as a narrative device in Russ's fiction represents women's claim to agency and destroys established gender-specific narratives in the handed-down set of basic story lines available to (genre) fiction writers. It looks at a number of killings committed by women from various points in Russ's development.

This chapter focuses on the representation of gender and sexuality in Ken Russell's The Devils (1973). In terms of gender and sexuality, The Devils possess, at its core, a very traditional outlook that is quite a good fit with the philosophies of many of those responsible for the film's critical opprobrium. The protagonist, Grandier, is a red-blooded male and apparently a heartthrob for the majority of Loudun's female population. As he is being tortured in the film's latter stages, Grandier confesses, ‘I have been a man. I have loved women’, clearly seeing the two things as being concordant. This statement also serves to further emasculate Louis XIII. More problematically, there are numerous female characters in The Devils, and the bulk of them are defined through their relationships to/with the louche Grandier—most are in love/lust with the priest and/or driven hysterical by him. Regardless of where they stand on the Grandier spectrum, one thing all these women have in common is that they are infantilised through their relationships with/to the priest. Whether fantasising about Grandier-as-Christ or giving in to her onanistic urges in clear view of one of her equally sex-starved charges, Jeanne is a hysteric whose happiness completely depends on the feelings of a man she's never even met.