Gender Roles and Marriage in The Proposal by Chekhov and Country Lovers

In the following essay I will compare and contrast gender roles and marriage between â€Å"The Proposal† by Anton Chekhov and â€Å"Country Lovers† by Nadine Gordimer to showing how women tried to survive in controlling their identity. This essay will compare and contrast each of the characters used by two very different writers. The early 1900’s era was not kind to people in their struggle for what they tried to accomplish with their lives. Nadine Gordimer was born 1923 in Africa. She was against the opposition that the black people of Africa had to face and stressed this issue in her writings. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991. Anton Chekhov was also famous for Russia’s Pushkin Prize in 1888 and like Gordimer, he also wrote many short stories but sometimes ventured out into theater with several plays. Both writers lived abroad sharing the use of conflict in their writings such as unrealistic expectations, endowment and social status. They used symbolism more as a contrast instead of a comparison, but compared lower class to higher class status for each of their characters in the two short stories that will be featured in this paper. In the article written by Gordimer that is titled â€Å"Twenty-one Years Later she states that â€Å"since 1980 other media have taken over from the printed word as the most powerful means of free expression. I remain as totally opposed to censorship as ever, but I am in a quandary when I touch the wrong button on television set and find I’m confronted with a couple making Shakespeare’s ‘beast with two backs’ in a truly beastly and violent sexual display that certainly could frighten any of the many children left to amuse themselves playing the channel keyboard of television. I’m more co... ...p107, 2 p. Contemporary Review Company, Ltd. Gordimer, N., 2001 Twenty-One Years Later, Biography, spring, Vol. 30 Issue 2, p. 277, 2 p. Kenyon, O., 1989 Women Writers Talk, Carroll & Graf Publishers, ISBN-10: 0881847054. Miller, R., 2008 Sweat. February 8, Collins Harper, Retrieved Website:http://www.zoranealehurston.com. Ritchi, D., 2003 Doing Oral History, New York: O U P. Seyhan, A., 2001 Writing Outside the Nation, U K: Princeton University Press. Singh, G., & Kumari, D., 2011 History Revisited in Oral History by Nadine Gordimer, Language in India, February, Vol. 11 Issue 2, p 296-303, 8 p. Trump, M., 1986 The Short Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, Research in African Literatures, Fall, Vol. 17, Issue 3, p 341-369, 2 p. Winkelmann, J., 2002 â€Å"Restless Legs† in â€Å"The Wedding Proposal†, Acta Neurologica Scandinavia, April, Vol. 105 (4), p. 349-350.