The images of women in 10 Filipino novels in English

• Main Author: Castro, Teresita S.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 1997
• Subjects: Women in literature; Novels, Filipino; Philippine literature (English); Feminism; English Language and Literature
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/1146
• Institution: De La Salle University

This dissertation attempts to place in critical perspective the study of the images of woman in ten Filipino novels in English written between 1921-1991, as reflected in the novels of ten Filipino male authors: Zoilo Galang, Maximo Kalaw, Stevan Javellana, N.V.M. Gonzales, Emigdio Alvarez Enriquez, Nick Joaquin, Bienvenido Santos, Edilberto Tiempo, F. Sionil Jose, and Paulino Lim.The study seeks to inquire into the representation of women as embodied in texts written by male authors and to prove/disprove Kate Millet's argument that women are highly marginalized, degraded, and trivialized in all male-authored texts.Though the methods of delineation and attempts at interpretation vary in their complexity, the woman emerges, at the end of the study as having a positive image in the novels of Maximo Kalaw, Edilberto Tiempo, and Paulino Lim who are seen as pro-feminist.The negative representation of woman is projected in the novels of Zoilo Galang, Nick Joaquin, Bienvenido Santos, Emigdio Alvarez Enriquez, and F. Sionil Jose. Their women characters are seen to be lustful, weird, masochistic, and passive.N.V.M. Gonzalez and Stevan Javellana are found to be having a balanced view of the images of a woman because they allow their female characters some degree of moral freedom which is not often enjoyed by many principal female characters in texts authored by men. The results of my analysis using the images of women approach have proved enlightening but obviously, much is still to be done by other researchers since the claim of Kate Millet has been disproved. That other researchers should look into novels both foreign and local using other approaches like that of Elaine Showalter's gynocriticism and other feminists'.