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Student Name
Student Number
Family Name Manilah
Given Name Gandah
42626722
Date
Unit Code
ENG110
SP3
Assignment No.
Essay Two
Assignment Title
WOMAN---a poetry
Due Date
02 November 2012
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Word Count
Applicable)
(If
1500 words
30 October 2012
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COE USE ONLY
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ENG 110 SP3 Essay TWO MQ OUA
WOMAN
a poetry
GANDAH MANILAH
UNDER-GRADUATE CREATIVE WRITING
TUTOR: Ms Lucyna Swiatek
Macquarie University
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1527 Words
Page 1
WOMAN is feminine: she’s poetry
eva-woman...is beautiful
graceful skunk tango
gliding...sliding...pause
dip... dip... and circle
lightness of heaviness
heaviness of lightness
reflects in her face
eva-woman...smiles with laughter
she laughs a smile
careful she steps not on its foot
Dysfunction photo
its black and white stripe fur
gives comfort and warmth
she got to smile
or its fowl fumes puke.
eva-woman...crowd’s watching
no one guffaws...
the judges no hoo ha
she pivots...pivots...pivots
music’s done
elle est heureuse (she is happy)
eva-WOMAN is feminine...she’s
..............................poetry.
“French
utterance; we lack jouissance and jouir, as Barthes uses them here.” The Pleasure
of Text pp. v. *2
Page 2
Woman, ‘eva-woman...is beautiful. Roland Barthes has commented that unlike
English language, the French’s language is amorous. His thought and theory about texts
parallels that of eva-woman’s emotion. ‘graceful skunk tango / gliding---sliding---pause’,
measures Barthes’s ‘utterance of pleasure and joy’... She is constantly bullied, taunted,
discriminated by some skunk adam-man yet she dances the tango with grace. At times, she
is mistaken as timid or shy, dumb or stupid, looking dainty and naive. Yet her body
language in spite of ‘dip... dip... and circle’, (severity of conflicts): amongst family,
school, community, money, etc., she is well composed at crisis.
Barthes’s*2 “French writers have a vocabulary of eroticism, an amorous
discourse which smells neither of the laboratory nor of sewer, which just--attentively, scrupulously---puts the facts.”
“The semiotic notion of intertextuality” introduced by Julia Kristeva, shadows her
levitation of ‘lightness of heaviness / heaviness of lightness’. The horizontal and vertical
slants of her face; her eyes and the sensuous sway of her hair conforms; duplicates her
outside image crisscrossing with her inner emotion: setting it in balance. The dignity and
the intellectual ranges she exudes in her decisions, typify the ontology of her soul...
‘reflects in her face‘ /at the height of those adversaries. She is eva-woman.
Julia Kristeva referred to texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the
author and reader of a text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other
texts.(Kristeva 1980, 69).*7
She ‘smiles with laughter / she laughs a smile / careful she steps not on its foot / its
black and white stripe fur / ...she steps not on the skunk foot...which goes side by side with
Bakhtin’s genre’ searches for more studies. In her life she makes right choices, not only
for herself but for a whole. She may not be happily married but she has to decide for
the best of the whole.
Bakhtin*1 “calls for a dramatic expansion of the field of genre theory to embrace
the entire spectrum of verbal activity.”
Page 3
The many portraits of an eva-woman:
Eva-woman is Lola Bensky (Things Could Be Worse, pp.165)*5, the thinker, who back
tracts her life events---who became a good wife, a good mother, a good journalist, but she
admits she is an skewwhiff at an odd angle: she discovers herself.
She has the sarcasm in The Waltz, (by Dorothy Parker 1893-1967)*12. Men being too
forward in accommodating themselves informally, as if a woman would smile and jump
at the sight of him.
Eveline*9, is another portrait of eva-woman, a typical ‘torn between two lovers’: to go
or not to go---meditating between analepsis and prolepsis of events. Her magical solution
at her phase of ‘lightness of heaviness / the heaviness of lightness’, pictures her regal
stature when besieged by trivialities.
Beowulf (8th or 9th cent.)*4, an old English poem of 3,182 lines, is hailed as a hero, a
youthful, super-strength being, where he can defeat-kill three monsters: while eva-woman
is imaged as a meagre worshiper of men, an adornment with no important role.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight*16 (anonymous), Late 14th century (c1380-1390s), a
poem consisting of 2,530 lines in longlines, characterised men as warriors, a lover, but
who gets dishonest in order to save his life. His eva-woman is just a decorated-wife, an
accessory or helper for the king’s wants and needs.
Macbeth*13 by William Shakespeare, is about a man and wife (Macbeth and Lady
Macbeth) whose greed for power has brought them to their tragic death. Lady Macbeth,
the eva-woman, is depicted as an evil-scheming woman, who will use all means; sex
and id provocations, to challenge Macbeth’s manliness:
Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
What thou art promise. Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o’th’milk of human kindness (1.5.13-15 Lady Macbeth
I have given suck, and know
How tender tis to love the babe that milk me;
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
and dashed the brains out, (1.7.54-58). Lady Macbeth.
Page 4
By Joe Hildebrand, / Article / The Punch. (20 October 2012 / 05:55) “I was delighted to
learn this week that you can make up a new definition for a word and all of a sudden the
dictionary will change it for you”. Mocking the feminists.
What your handbag says about you...Cartoon: Mark Knight
Whether a Prime Minister, USA Secretary of State, an Attorney General, a billionaire or a
famous actor is not spared. In the above illustrated cartoon, eva-woman is mocked and
bullied.
02 comments out of the 76 people Recommend this:
Esteban says: 12:59pm. /20/10/12. / “Phil S. In my opinion common usage amongst a
small minority of the population (extreme feminists movements) plus its misuse on a
couple of occasions (Clinton and Gillard) does not pass the common usage test.”
Luc Belrose says: 012pm. / 20/10/12. / “Macquarie should have stuck to misogyny (hatred
for women). Anyway the whole undergraduate style debate that was going on last week in
Parliament was a smokescreen forcefully put up by the PM to hide the paucity of policy
achievements that would benefit the electorate at a time when the Swan budget is going
into rough territory.”
However, few men like Warren Farrell*10 in his book he argues that, “the widespread
perception of men having inordinate social and economic power is false, and that men are
actually systematically disadvantaged many ways. Farrell defines power as control over
one’s life. Both sexes had roles: women’s role was to raise children: men’s role was to
raise money.”
Page 5
Simone de Beauvior (The Second Sex)*3, an existentialist philosopher, argues that evawoman is just the ‘other’ of man (adam-man), she is just a ‘helper’ equal to nature and
other animals. She ask, “what is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero’, says one, ‘woman is a
womb’. ‘Woman is losing her ways, woman is lost.” Simone was one of the feminists who
cannot accept not to be in equal footing with adam-man. She is eva-woman, the radical.
Then the Lord said, “it is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper
suitable for him.” (Genesis 1:17).*11
Sigmund Freud has insisted men is stronger than women. Donna Stewart, M.D., a
professor and chair of women’s health at the University Health Network, explained,
“Freud was a man of times. He was opposed to the women’s emancipation movement and
believed that women’s lives were dominated by their sexual reproduction functions,”*15
Women has been at battle from the medieval ages up to 21st century.
Many moods and many faces of eva-woman:
The Angela Carter’s tale, Little Red Riding Hood*6---shows a naive, weak, stupid girl
raped by a wolf who willingly submitted her body but outsmarted the wolf at the end.
Charlotte Smith’s sonnet (nee Turner (1749-1806), On being Cautioned against
Walking on a Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It was Frequented by a Lunatic*17--cautions eva-woman: to be wary of men. They are lunatic in a sense that they are
domineering and demands eva-woman to be submissive.
Mary Oliver:*14 (1935 ) translates nature: flowers, water, sky, animals, foliages and
mountains to human life meanings...“The poppies send up their / orange flares; swaying /
in the wind, their congregations / are a levitation / ; meaning while one is young, he
moves, runs, fly, jumps; as if the day is forever but death will always catch up one
day... a romantic writer eva-woman.
Page 6
The ‘eva-woman...crowd’s watching / no one guffaws... / the judges no hoo ha / ... she
has won. The world has accepted her important role as a woman; she is a beauty, an
intelligent human being, and has an exquisite charm. Like Barthes’s French texts, she is
amorous and a pleasure; she pivots...pivots...pivots / music’s done / elle est heureuse (she
is happy) / , applies Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality; Bakhtin’s search for genre,
patterns eva-woman’s relentless efforts to give her contributions to society. Eva-woman as
a piece of writing, has the story, the plot, the character, the theme, the abstract motif and
symbol, but her most special structure is her rhythmic movement;
eva-WOMAN is feminine...she’s
........................POETRY.
Page 7
References/Bibliography:
*1 Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. trans. Vern W. McGee, ed.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp.
60-7, 78-81, 96-101. Print.
*2 Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of Text. Translated by: Richard Miller. Hill and Wang.
New York 10011. A division of Farrar, Strause and Giroux. pp. v.
*3 Beauvior, Simone de. The Second Sex. Introduction: Woman as Other 1949. Print.
*4 Beowulf. Trans. Ed. Seamus Heaney. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. W. W.
Norton & Company: 1st edition, 2001. Print.
*5 Brett, Lily. University Of Queensland Press. Print. (pp. 165).
*6 Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber AndOther Stories. With An Introduction by:
Helen Simpson. Vintage Books. London. Prints.
*7 Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge,
Print.
*8 Davenport, Tony. Medieval Narrative: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004. Print.
*9 Eveline.The Corrected Text with ExplanatoryNote by Robert Scholes. Jonathan Cape.
London. Print.
*10 Farrell, Warren. The Myth of Male Power. (N.Y.: Simon and Schuster. 1993).
Personal Introduction. Print.
*11 Holy Bible. Zondervan NIB Study Bible. Copyright@1973, 1978, 1984, by
International Bible Society. Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530. U.S.A Joyce, James.
*12 Hart, James D. The Oxford Companion To American Literature. 6th ed. New York.
Oxford. 1995. Print.
*13 Macbeth. Shakespeare, William. Edited by: Robert s. Miola. Norton & Company.
New York. London.
*14 Oliver, Mary.The Poppies. Windgrove. Life on the Edge. print.
*15 Sigmund, Freud. Freud & Women: Freud’s Perspective on Women.be Kendra Cherry,
About.com Guide. Print.
*16 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Translation by; Deane, Paul; Copyright@Paul
Deane, (1999). Print.
Page 8
*17 Smith, Charlotte. The New Penguin Book of English Verse. edited be: Paul Keegan.
Print.
Skunk. a cat-sized American mammal of the weasel family, with distinctive black-andwhite-striped fur. When threatened it squirts a fine spray of foul-smelling irritant liquid from
its anal glands toward its attacker.
Tango. ballroom dance originating in Buenos Aires, characterized by marked rhythms and
postures and abrupt pauses.