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Need help understanding this paragraph?

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My english is bad and its hard for me to understand what this paragraph is saying.

Women, no less than texts, have been subjected to a hermeneutic tradition which looks through the multiplicity of their actual beings to impose unitary meanings sealed with the authority of patriarchal knowledge and power to name. So women are "angels in the house," loving, self sacrificing, and chaste as wives, mothers and daughters, or they are she devils and Delilahs, dangerous, sexually enchanting, but always ultimately doomed. Read thus, solely in relation to male needs, the only approved images of self available to women reflect and sustain patriarchal ideology. In this way women, like texts, are imprisoned within an alienating interpretation, closed off from movement and exploration. Our models of reading for texts, for subjectivity, and for women are, then, interrelated. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's masterly short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," these issues meet in a powerful confrontation

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  1. The speaker is saying that women as well as all our literature are subject to the interpretations of the past.  Since the past has been recorded by men, women have been idealized as wives, mothers and daughters---yet they are  she-devils, seductresses, and fickle in all other roles.  Because this interpretive view of history continues, women continue to be imprisoned by the stereotype and are not able to move forward.


  2. Listen pal I speak perfect English. Its my mother tongue and I live where it was invented - England. I am English.

    If someone tried to say that out loud he'd be laughed at. Seriously!! We English have a word for that sort of verbose rubbish. Its called gobbledegook.

    Its a pity the person who wrote what you have just quoted didn't try to write it in English instead of just using English words (there is a subtle difference).

    What the paragraph is saying is that women have (allegedly) only been allowed to identify themselves as males see them.

    The writer is talking bollocks incidentally. Its simply not true.

    Hope this helps.

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