In ancient Rome, there was but one aspect of a woman’s life that she had almost complete dominion over: how she decorated and adorned her body. Although she did, in most cases, require a man to provide articles of adornment and servants to do her hair and make-up, the Romans believed that it was a man’s responsibly to ensure his female family members’ appearances were consistent with his rank.[1] Roman women used jewellery, clothing, hairstyle and make-up to project their wealth, power, influence, rank in the community and status as an adult woman, as well as, to control their public image and how they were perceived. In essence, women used adornment to have control over their own bodies. This essay will explore how women used each category of adornment to display their wealth, rank, status and image, and how doing so was significant to their life as it gave them an opportunity to have power in their relationships, influence in their community and control their bodies in a world where nearly every part of their life was governed by a man. Continue reading
Author: Melissa Harrison
How to: Wash Your Shoes
One spring time ritual I really look forward to is boxing up my winter boots and bringing out my summer shoes. If you are anything like me, this ritual takes place while you are in the midst of an overwhelming compulsion to make your interior as bright and fresh as the new spring time exterior, making the dinginess of your favourite summer shoes the first thing you notice as you revive them from storage. The good news is, your shoes are easier to clean than your windows, walls, ceilings and all the other places you’ve suddenly noticed are in dire need of a good bubbly scrubbing. Continue reading
Gender Dynamics in Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and Eliot’s “Adam Bede”
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and George Eliot’s Adam Bede seem different on the surface. While Austen’s novel provides a voyeuristic view into the trivial concerns of the idle upper class in Regency England, Eliot’s novel delves in to the dark consequences of Murphy’s Law for the working class of rural Regency England. However, both novels explore the universal fundamentals of what it means to be a man or a woman in the pre-Victorian time period. Though these two novels differ in the level of autonomy granted to the female characters, the consequences of failing to marry and their depiction of strongly defined gender roles, they similarly show female characters that choose their own spouses, maintain a similar societal view of spinsters and work with the same social constructs of gender. The differences shown between the women of different realms of society belonging to the same time period, along with the similarities between the conventions governing the interactions between men and women in both Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Eliot’s Adam Bede result in two novels that conform to the standard drama of the sexes. Neither of the two novels substantially deviates from the constant that requires a plot involving a relationship between two or more members of the opposite gender to explore gender roles, cast a critical glance at the society the characters exist in and address the repercussions that result from a character deviating from the rules of society. This paper will primarily compare and contrast the characters of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice with the characters of Adam Bede and Dinah Morris in Adam Bede. Continue reading
Alberta’s Top Baby Names of 2011
The decision of what to name a child is not one made lightly by any parent (I’ve been thinking of the perfect name for years, and I’ve got a few more years to go before I need to decide). Consequently, the new parents of Albert came up with some pretty interesting names last year, as the Edmonton Journal’s Brent Wittmeier discovered in “My name is Moo, how do you do?” I wonder how unique it is to be named Unique when you are not the only one.