Stereotypical Gender Roles

Both the speaker of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and the speaker of Susan Minot’s “My Husband’s Back” fit perfectly into what I would consider stereotypically male and female roles, respectively. These roles coincide with typical stereotypes of male and female images and their ideal love. Love plays a key role in both poems as an ideal view of both speakers’ love is seen as the only thing that makes their bleak worlds worth all the troubles. The masculine aspects of “Dover Beach” fill the poem with diction like “Listen!” and words of manly anguish such as “grating roar” and “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” “edges drear,” “alarms of struggle and flight,” and crashing armies. He also uses the calm constants of the earth, tide, moon, land, and wind, to represent “the turbid ebb and flow/ Of human misery,” and the “eternal note of sadness.” These miseries are lined with the undertone of inevitable acceptance, another typically masculine quality to simply endure the pain he cannot change. Although this clearly makes him angry, noted by exclamation points and repeating the theme of sadness being as uncontrollable as forces of nature, he also sees the beauty, even if just as “light/Gleams and is gone.” He shows that beauty, light, and admiring femininity of something so miserable can be seen by those with love in their hearts when he compares it to the “Sea of Faith…round earth’s shore/Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.” He also does this by describing how love makes the world seem “To lie before us like a land of dreams,/So various, so beautiful, so new” after he had spent the whole poem portraying the world’s continuous misery. Using the word, “lie,” here could also have a second meaning that the dangerous world lies to the eyes of the happy, making them falsely believe there is good in the world. While Arnold uses worldly descriptions of general pain, Minot uses household descriptions to explain her sorrows. The poem begins with the speaker “Weeping into/a pot of burnt rice,” representing female emotional struggles when challenged by unfulfilling chores. She compares the sunset to a “light bulb gone out” to fit in with the problems of a fire to warm the air not catching, burnt dinner, and a sick baby. She then sits helpless on the couch and becomes not only grateful when her husband arrives to save the day, but she admires him as a supreme, ageless being. By focusing the poem on his back, something she can “crawl on” as he carries her to a better place, she also compares it to her own back: “my spine/collides with all its bones” using the spine and back as a symbol for strength. She finds the strength she needs in her husband’s muscular strength, another feminine quality, which she uses to demonstrate the adoration she has for her husband and how that love is worth having “traveled everywhere/to get to.” The speaker is stereotypically dependant on her husband, and his love, to be the pinnacle and savior of her hard life. As Minot uses examples of domestic troubles and Arnold uses larger problems, both constitute the failures of humans; the males need to save the world while the females need to make it warm, fed, and healthy. Both speakers, having failed in their assumed roles, turn to a greater, idealistic view of love to save their lives from complete misery.