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A reflection of Bombal’s ‘The Shrouded Woman’

Before reading this novel, I couldn’t help but notice a handwritten note on the pdf version of the book provided to us by our Professor wherein on the title page, an anonymous individual wrote “Ana-Maria is a Femme Fatale.” Upon researching the unfamiliar term, I came to learn it refers to an attractive and seductive […]

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Bombal- The Shrouded Woman W4

Firstly, I must say I really enjoyed this read. It has probably been my favourite thus far. I found The Shrouded Woman to be very thought-provoking and interesting.  The overall feel of Bombal’s fictional world in The Shrouded Woman seems to me to be very gender-stereotypical and of course, patriarchal. The toll each of these […]

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Week Four: Maria Luisa Bombal, The Shrouded Woman

This book was a quick read. Overall,  it was concise and captivating. A few of the most prominent themes that stood out from this text are as follows: love, the value of women in terms of love, and the expectations that are placed on people based on the gender roles of society. 

Almost every single description or mention of any women in this text was somehow related to their physical appearance. It heavily focused on the idea that the value of a woman rests primarily on how beautiful they are according to the standards of society and in particular, the standards of the men in society. The men weighed their potential partners as candidates for becoming their wives and the mothers of their children based first and foremost on their attractiveness. There were a ton of details centered around skin, the colour and shape of their eyes, their hair, their grace and their bodies. I came away from this text with the feeling that while I didn’t learn enough about the profound, substantial characteristics of the women in the story, I came away with very clear, detailed images of how they look on the outside. 
However, there was one character, Fernando, who stood out as I believe the only man (from what I can recall) who saw more than Ana Maria’s appearance – he described her merits to be her intelligence, her sensitivity and her intuition. Even her husband Antonio, although he says that Ana Maria is the only woman he had ever truly loved, justifies his being crazy for many other women with the exclamation “Really, there are too many beautiful women running around in the world!” There was simply so much focus, importance and value pinned on beauty. 
Here is my final thought. All of this talk of love, heartbreak, relationships, betrayal – there has to be more to life than that, right? I think there has to be other things, hobbies and interests and more fascinating things to think about than the pain and complicated pleasures of navigating love. There wasn’t a single easy going relationship in this entire text and as realistic as that is, in my opinion, it shouldn’t be the main thing around which we force our thoughts and feelings to constantly revolve around. Aren’t there other ways for us to find value in ourselves other than the one that our relationship gives us?
Here is my question for everyone. Do you believe that in today’s society, there is just as much emphasis placed on the value of beauty? Are men and women today put through different standards than they were at the time this book was written?

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Week Four: Maria Luisa Bombal, The Shrouded Woman

This book was a quick read. Overall,  it was concise and captivating. A few of the most prominent themes that stood out from this text are as follows: love, the value of women in terms of love, and the expectations that are placed on people based on the gender roles of society. 

Almost every single description or mention of any women in this text was somehow related to their physical appearance. It heavily focused on the idea that the value of a woman rests primarily on how beautiful they are according to the standards of society and in particular, the standards of the men in society. The men weighed their potential partners as candidates for becoming their wives and the mothers of their children based first and foremost on their attractiveness. There were a ton of details centered around skin, the colour and shape of their eyes, their hair, their grace and their bodies. I came away from this text with the feeling that while I didn’t learn enough about the profound, substantial characteristics of the women in the story, I came away with very clear, detailed images of how they look on the outside. 
However, there was one character, Fernando, who stood out as I believe the only man (from what I can recall) who saw more than Ana Maria’s appearance – he described her merits to be her intelligence, her sensitivity and her intuition. Even her husband Antonio, although he says that Ana Maria is the only woman he had ever truly loved, justifies his being crazy for many other women with the exclamation “Really, there are too many beautiful women running around in the world!” There was simply so much focus, importance and value pinned on beauty. 
Here is my final thought. All of this talk of love, heartbreak, relationships, betrayal – there has to be more to life than that, right? I think there has to be other things, hobbies and interests and more fascinating things to think about than the pain and complicated pleasures of navigating love. There wasn’t a single easy going relationship in this entire text and as realistic as that is, in my opinion, it shouldn’t be the main thing around which we force our thoughts and feelings to constantly revolve around. Aren’t there other ways for us to find value in ourselves other than the one that our relationship gives us?
Here is my question for everyone. Do you believe that in today’s society, there is just as much emphasis placed on the value of beauty? Are men and women today put through different standards than they were at the time this book was written?

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Week 4 – Bombal

First of all, this was the kind of book I envisioned reading when I enrolled in Romance studies. To answer the question in this week’s lecture video, the characteristics of this fictitious world of Bombal stand out to me as being patriarchal and unfulfilling. Ana-Maria, our dead narrator, reflects on the people who impacted her […]

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Aragon “Paris Peasant”

I was initially surprised to find out that this book was incredibly difficult to understand when I started reading it. In the process of reading this book, I kept on getting lost. I believe this may be due to the language used in the book and the main sentiment it is trying to convey. The […]

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Hello world!

Welcome to UBC Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

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Hello! (Introduction)

Hi all! My name is Sophia and I’m one of your classmates in RMST 202. I just joined this class so my intro post is late, but I’m excited to meet you all (although it’s a bit delayed). I am a second year student, ad I am planning on (but haven’t yet declared) a major […]

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Hello world!

Welcome to UBC Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

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my thoughts on "Paris Peasant" by Louis Aragon

 While reading “Paris Peasant” by Louis Aragon I was confused a lot of the time. I found it difficult to follow along with the text of the novel, as it did not seem to have much structure or storyline in my opinion. I also noticed that the beginning of the text was not very something that seemed to portray similarity to introductions of other texts that I have read in the past. I noticed that the beginning to this text was abrupt and I was confused initially at the structure of the introduction. That being said, I was able to notice that introduction or beginning of the text was quite meaningful and deep. The beginning of this text seemed to focus on life and its deeper meaning or at least that was the way that I had portrayed it. The text was very descriptive and it was slightly hard for me to follow along, but I was able to understand and interpret what was going on and how descriptive this novel was based on life. When the novel came to talking about certain buildings or places, I was pretty confused. I felt like I was not able to grasp on to the reasoning and the meaning behind the description of these places. My question about the text is what do we think makes the beginning of the novel seem so random or abrupt? During this novel, I had a hard time reading it due to the names of places being in another language. I found that I had more trouble understanding the storyline or flow of the text. I noticed that throughout this novel the author points out things in a way of including the reader in the text. This was interesting to me and helped me have an even deeper interest in the text. I wonder why the information about certain buildings or places is descriptive to the point where it talks about most fo the details you would find or observe when visiting any place. This was interesting to me as it makes me wonder what the purpose was behind the descriptiveness and if it leads to a deeper meaner or way of perceiving this text. I think that it is very interesting how descriptive this text is and I think that it adds beauty to this novel. I believe that this text allows readers to have a deeper level of understanding and meaningfulness. 

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