This week in class, we were discussing the role of women in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. One of the main themes that we came up with was the idea of the word Lady, versus the word Woman. As a class, we decided that the word Lady has a connotation of delicate, polite, refined, and ornamental, and that the word Woman seemed stronger, and less delicate.This reminded me of a song that I remembered hearing in the musical Sweeney Todd, called "Pretty Women". The song somewhat contrasts what we came up with in class, because rather than using the word Lady, it uses the word Woman with a delicate, ornamental connotation. Here is an excerpt of some of the lyrics:
Pretty women
Fascinating...
Sipping coffee,
Dancing...
Sitting in the window or
Standing on the stair
Something in them chills the air.
In this song, and much throughout Huck Finn, women are objectified. Rather than being praised for their intelligence or personality, they are praised by looking good. This can be seen on page 124 of the book, where Huck describes a woman as looking like "the most loveliest parasol". I think that we can still see examples of this kind of objectification towards women today. If you look around you can see cases of this objectification in movies, television shows, and music videos. I'm not saying that this angers me beyond belief or makes me disgusted with men, but it's interesting to wonder why women have always been portrayed this way.
I definitely agree that women are still sometimes objectified in our society. One of the things that makes this a difficult issue is that to a certain extent women sometimes like to be objectified. I mean, women like being told that they are pretty or things like that. I feel like to an extent that is never going to go away.
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