The play Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare is a very interesting play. I have never read it before and after reading, watching the play, and doing a bit of my own research to understand it more. Shakespeare involves a huge part of gender roles. Men are expected to be aggressive and dominant. Meanwhile, the women are passive and docile. A scene that begins focuses on Hermia’s father who argues with him to let her chose her own mate. It doesn’t meet Egeus’s standards of who is Hermia’s father. In the part itself, it demonstrates how women in that time had no control over their life. They were to marry the man that the father had chosen for them for their liking, not the daughters. If the daughter is to disobey her father she would be sentenced to death or live as a nun. Another scene that shows deeply how gender role is high is when Helena demonstrates her love deeply for Demetrius and he ignores her and tells her to go away that he wants nothing to do with her at all. Helena speaks on Act 2 “I am your spaniel, and, Demetrius. The more you beat me. I will fawn on you. Use me as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me, Neglect me, lose me, Only give me leave. Unworthy as I am, to follow you”. In this quote, Helena shows subjugation towards Demetrius. Demetrius wants nothing to do with her, but because if a woman does not marry a man she will be less valued. During a scene at the beginning of the play. A father strikes her daughter for talking back to her. Arguing saying that she will marry Demetrius because it’s to his liking and not hers. Continuing in the play Hermia says if he like him that much why not go with him. Both the play and reading the play were good I enjoyed them both very much. All of Shakespeare’s work is incredible on how gender roles played in his time compared to now in the present.
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” You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.”
This quote breaks my heart. I wasn’t aware of how bad racism was till the BLM movement took place and my friend told me ” keep an extra eye on your surroundings, the black person in the room is always eyed down”. As much as I wanted my peer to be wrong , he wasn’t. The amount of police brutality because of a pigment on someone’s skin has increased over the years. For example George Floyd. There was no reason the man had to die. Even after his death, racist people made jokes around his death. Another example who is Andrew Brown Jr. He was assumed to use his car as a ” deadly weapon” even though they stated he hadn’t had any weapons to begin with. All these innocent souls being lost because of the color of skin, The same skin that covers our bones and no matter what shade, we all bleed the same blood.
“I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.”
This quote hit home. The American dream is to come to America and get the perfect house, family gatherings, all of it but you must understand how to work the system to possibly get there. There’s so many things that roots from the systematic issues we have but how do you put food on the table , when all you have is enough to pay for exactly that? People come here searching for opportunities and even though finding a job is known to be “easy” , its a minimum paid job to get you surviving but that’s it. In this quote, he mentions it from his perspective and how the color of his skin affects this ( my assumption ) . It’s the dream for him but the way America is and that includes the injustice, it just doesn’t seem like a dream worth thinking about.
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