Although Frankenstein speaks exclusively through the voices of men, feminist ideals persist through the characters’ conflicts with each other as the novel unfolds. The prime example is Frankenstein’s protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, whose main conflict manifests between himself and his creation. This relationship parallels the emotionally complex experiences of women through the journey of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood. Shelley uses Victor, to introduce issues of birth and creation without disrupting the status quo of male-dominated narratives popular at the time she was publishing. Shelley effectively creates a monster, both literal and metaphorical, that induces the same fears of getting pregnant and giving birth that women encounter in a society that already restricts and controls most aspects of their lives.
Read MoreIn 1279, the last lingering hope of Southern Song was annihilated as the Mongolian warmongers triumphed in the naval battle of Yamen. Kublai Khan declared the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty, and China, for the first time, fell to foreign rulership. It is a subject that still puzzles the scholars today as to how one of the most epochal periods of Chinese culture prospered under the reign of “barbarous” alien nomads. The artistic creativity of the Yuan scholar-artists was not strictly circumscribed by the already well-established pictorial conventions.
Read MoreThe feminist critique on the politics of space was central to Virginia Woolf’s conception of the private space in many of her works. Scholars have discussed at length Woolf’s interrogation of the private space as “the site of middle-class female domestic confinement” and its duality as “the site of dynamic female potential” in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and her later works The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938). Beyond Woolf’s preoccupation with gendered spaces, what is perhaps less widely addressed is her portrayal of “the imbrication of space and individual consciousness” and the complex relationship between physical space and the identity one manifests within it.
Read MoreI am a man of two faces. A question that we as humans all ask ourselves throughout the course of our lives is “Who am I?” The answer to that query is never concrete, but rather dynamic as it is always developing and changing as we navigate our way through the tempestuous hurricane that is life. For each person the answer will have its metaphysical variations based on the many intricate components that (make up who they are) or delineate their being. As I’ve journeyed through my four-year liberal arts education here at a predominantly white University, very sparingly I have been presented with the academic tools to introspectively examine myself within the framework of that question.
Read MoreIt is estimated that there are at least 235,000 homeless Canadians every year. Despite these large numbers, anti-homeless architecture is widespread across Canadian cities. For instance, the #DefensiveTO project has collected and mapped over 120 anti-homeless architectural structures in downtown Toronto alone.
Read MoreThe fields of anthropology and art history have long been intertwined. Symbols are at the core of human communication and in order to decode a set of esoteric images, overlapping practices within the fields of anthropology and art history can be employed. The discovery of the remote practice of human bodily inscription by non-European people ignited a desire to uncover and understand the nature of the inscribed symbols.
Read MoreIn his seminal lecture, "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy," William James described the history of philosophy as that of a clash of certain human temperaments. This clash is also reflected in the history of the philosophy of democracy. Attempts at outlining the form of democracy have most prominently taken either of the two definitions: procedural or substantive, minimal or maximal, thin or thick.
Read More