The female subject: Portrayal by male authors in the 20th century

• Main Author: Guatno, Leann Lois S.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2016
• Subjects: Women in literature; Comparative Literature
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/2807
• Institution: De La Salle University

The study analyzes the portrayal of female characters in a selected short story written by eight male writers who were born in the 20th century. The stories to be studied are: N.V.M. Gonzalez's The blue skull and the dark palms , Nick Joaquin's The summer solstice , Cameo by Jose Y. Dalisay, Jr., Woman of Am-Kaw by Charlson Ong, Dean Francis Alfar's The kite of stars , Luis Joaquin M. Katigbak's Kara's place , The painted lady by Ian Rosales Casocot, and Everybody gets off at Cubao by Carljoe Javier. The stories Cameo , The painted lady , and Everybody gets off at Cubao have male narrators describing their experiences with the female character, while the other stories have the narrator not actively participating in the narrative, with exceptions in Woman of Am-Kaw and Kara's place . The following concepts are used to analyze how these female characters are portrayed in their respective stories: subjectivity from post-structuralism, the male gaze, and the angel and monster image from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The madwoman in the attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination (1979). The main female characters are the subject, and the study calls into view how they are addressed within their respective narratives, as well as show the images that are used to contain and describe them. The study shows that there have been minimal changes to these portrayals of the female subject, despite the passage of time. Despite being born after at least three generations afte the oldest writer selected, the youngest writer selected-- Carljoe Javier-- as well as the younger writers have not completely departed from the angel images used by the older writers in their respective stories.