In Thomas Middleton’s play Women Beware Women (c.1623-24), which I wrote about here, women are presented as their own worst enemies. At the centre of the play is the character Livia, who engineers the downfall of two young women, Bianca and Isabella, persuading them to embark on dangerous sexual relationships (Bianca’s adulterous and precipitated by a rape, Isabella’s incestuous) which bring about their downfalls and ultimate demise. In her dying breath Bianca, realising what Livia has done, laments ‘the deadly snares / That women set for women’. Continue reading “Dangerous women”
Tag: Fay Weldon
Food and feminism
Not surprisingly as the literature I’ve written about has moved into the domestic sphere (early 19th century onwards), so the food described has tended to be prepared by women. Whether it be Charlotte Lucas’s mince pies in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the dinner party prepared in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or the welsh cakes made by Evans the Death’s mother in Under Milk Wood, it is largely women who are responsible for the food preparation. Continue reading “Food and feminism”