Taming of the Shrew and Oleanna Women Supersede Essay

Throughout time there has always been the conventional rule that women must be submissive to their husbands and are expected to tend to the domestic responsibilities within the household (Bender 46). However in modern society, women are as outspoken and independent as men and the negative backlash of such behavior has lessened. Women work alongside their male counterparts and are now able to receive the benefits that were once kept from them by a dominating male society. Although gender roles have been challenged and refined over the course of the twentieth century, main characters, Katherina from â€Å"Taming of the Shrew†, and Carol in â€Å"Oleanna†, nonetheless portray the exceptions or even the extremes, of feminine independence and superiority†¦show more content†¦In Acts I and II, Katherina is a more masterly, dominant, and familiar character than the others. Katherina’s envy and suspicion of others is so great as well as her need for assurance, t hat it is believable to her that everyone is fallible and believable to the other characters that before Petruchio, no one could penetrate her defenses. So determined is Katherina to make herself invulnerable to others that she makes herself insufferable, and finds in insufferability, her one defense. It is no wonder that Katherina is a bad-tempered, headstrong, domestic tyrant and for these reasons, that Petruchio’s tactics of â€Å"curing† Katherina, are quite shocking, yet in the same notion predictable, because as the old saying goes, â€Å"fight fire with fire†. A great deal of the humor of the first meeting between Katherina and her suitor Petruchio depends on the determination of each to reduce the other to subhuman status. In â€Å"The Taming of the Shrew†, Katherina†²s pointed nose or rather her sharp tongue, is her bone of contention (Thompson 7). This essentially means that her foul and crude language is the problem which defines her as a shrew that must be tamed. Katherina’s language does not fit in the language patterns of her gender, as well as she herself does not fit into the typical patterns of society and the hierarchy within her family, reasons enough for the patriarchical society to believe she must be tamed. In the beginning of the play, Petruchio gets a