Consider how women handle wealth

Consider how women handle wealth

This is the prompt of this essay from my professor: “Consider how women handle wealth in 1-2 of the following: Sakuntala, The Merchant of Venice, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” The Tales of the Heike. How does it relate to their sexual power? What does it indicate about their position in marriage or society at large? Do they see money as an end in itself or a means to something else? if the latter, a means to what?” I picked the story Sakuntala, and the merchant of Venice to get my thesis statement. And I talked to my professor and she gave me more specific instructions and wrote me: “start with intro that establishes historical reasons women got married: social expectations, money, convenience. But in the merchant of Venice, Portia enters her marriage out of love for her husband. In the essay, I will consider whether Bassanio’s reasons for marrying her are equally romantic or more in line with actual historical practical reasons for getting married. Don’t just write a fact or history. Come up with the strong argument after close characters. Need a thesis first and add quotes from the text we read. The books we used in the class for the semester is “The Norton Anthology World Literature” with volume A,B, and C. For the story “Sakuntala”, the quotes must be used from this book, but the play “the merchant of Venice” isn’t in this book, so it can be used from Shakespeare’s book. The citation must be in MLA format and from which book I used. And lastly, the quotes must be cited in the following format: (act, scene #, line #). Do not use words such as “can’t” and “don’t”, instead, use “cannot” and “do not”. I would also like to see the first half of the paper in order to check and see if it meets the criteria.

Within the “Merchant of Venice” play, women had little to no freedom and were married from an early age because they were not allowed to exist on their own (Shakespeare & Cedric 12). The social expectations that women were expected to meet were ingrained into society, as women were expected to marry a well-established gentlemen and perform chores and other household duties to assist the man. Because women were not able to hold meaningful jobs, women would often marry financially successful men in order to sustain themselves financially. This was also a convenience issue, because a wealthier man would be able to provide for more opportunities for his wife if he was wealthy. However in the situation of Portia and Bassanio, Portia enters her marriage out of the love she has for him.

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