Breaking The Myth Of Woman: Reading Liz Lochhead's Dreaming Frankenstein & Collected Poems

Gender equality is an issue that never ceases to gain public attention.Numerous(mostly women)writers have plunged into the war to strive for it.Among them,the Scottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead(1947-)has published several fame winning works to utter her voice on the issue.This thesis focuses on her poetry for and about women in the fourth collection Dreaming Frankenstein&Collected Poetry.Basically,the thesis explores the poet's bold subversion of the patriarchal society.In the meantime,it presents and gives credit to Lochhead's efforts to break the myth of woman created by the male-dominated world.Then the paper goes on to pry into the new world shaped by Lochhead where the existent boundaries shall be eliminated.To clearly analyze these poems and clarify these ideas,the paper borrows ideas from feminist literary theories.Feminists recognize stereotyped notions about women as the "myth of woman" and they find the male-dominated world emphasizes them repetitively so as to naturalize the inferiority of women.Besides,with the central idea of gender equality unchanged,feminist theories develop over time.Early ones tended to emphasize the separation between sexes,but later Cultural Feminism refuses the separation and seeks other approaches.Both earlier and later ideas are helpful while analyzing Lochhead's poems.The paper tries to elaborate the central idea from three chapters.The first chapter examines Lochhead 's revisionary writing of some old texts.This part reveals the poet's condemnation of the old texts such as fairy tales the conspiracy of the male-dominated society to reinforce male hegemony.Then the second chapter sheds light on Lochhead's view on the beauty myth and her determination to escape its constraint.Besides the emphasis on the conflict between men and women,this paper also focuses on their reconciliation revealed in Lochhead's poetry,which is discussed in the third chapter.This part is a demonstration of a brand new world portrayed by Lochhead,where all kinds of boundaries are blurred.