Angels Or Monsters

Female characters of the male writers are usually stereotyped into two extreme kinds—angels and monsters. An Angel is endowed with the feminine virtues of modesty, gracefulness,purity, delicacy, obedience, reticence, chastity, affability, politeness, which the patriarchalsociety enforces on females. Females with self-sacrifice and altruism are ideal females glorifiedand praised by male writers. On the contrary, a Monster is a magical creature that is an oppositeimage of an Angel. She incarnates her own “presumptuous” desires rather than the angelichumility and dullness for which she was designed. She usually appears to be fierce, ruthless,selfish and hardhearted. She pursues personal desires relentlessly and realizes her self-worth,instead of adhering to her ordained female roles. According to the conventional male criticaltheories, Ophelia and Desdemona are “Angels”, while Goneril and Lady Macbeth belong to“Monsters”.Based on the textual analysis, this paper analyzes the four female characters inShakespeare’s four great tragedies from the feminist perspective. According to the analysis, it’sfound that the Angel women also own their self-awareness, which winks but extinguishesquickly. Besides, Monster women also have inner-weakness which is overwhelmed by theirstrong power. So the conventional patriarchal critical theories which simplify female charactersas two extremes—Angels and Monsters, cannot be used to analyze the female charactersoverall because they usually represent distorted pictures of females. The aim of such theories isto make a standard for the females to adhere to, to impose the androcentric value system onfemales, to ask females to model themselves after the “angels”—self-renunciation, self-denial,and compliancy to the tyranny and authority of males. Otherwise, they will be regarded asdespicable “Monsters”.