This weeks class consisted of discussions surrounding Oscar Wilde's Salome and how Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations accompany and further add on to the concepts presented within the text. Many of the discussions surrounded female sexuality during the fin de siecle and how Beardsley decided to portray Salome despite this.
Out of all the readings I have done for this course, I found Oscar Wilde’s Salome to be the most difficult. I felt that the text, as well as the images were complicated and rooted in symbolism. I found the presentations today to be very helpful in understanding this symbolism. I saw a lot of gender representation throughout the illustrations, weather that be through non-conforming gender or a character very specifically being a man or a woman.
With this weeks discussion of Oscar Wilde's Salome, I noticed the ways that the illustrations accompanying the text play on the idea of the male gaze, as was discussed by many of the presentations. Especially when analyzing how Salome's character is being depicted in the illustrations, it is easy to idenfity the ways in which Beardsley's images draw on the male gaze by the visual cues that they feature.
Portsmouth is the village where the Price family lives with their nine children. This is also where Fanny returns to after she leaves Mansfield Park.
Irish Immigrants were discrimminated against during the Victorian Era. They were thought as incompetent and criticized throughout the novel by Gaskell. There is energy, power and courage in the struggle of the Irish immigrants to provide themselves a better life. The Irish were brought in after a workers strike in the novel and provided cheap labor for the mill. The Irish have been the largest source of immigrants to Britian. They immigrated to England to escape famine in their homeland of Ireland.
