Dora
... the context of Dora, the reader is able to analyze the bourgeois society at the turn of the century as it concerns the bourgeois attitudes toward women, marriage, and family. The bourgeois attitude towards women is andocentric. The society is male centered. Men are the controllers of everything and women are there for the support. Women are mostly found working in the home or holding a position that is considered women’s work. Men are generally found working outside the home as the main providers. Women were viewed as and treated as possessions. Men did not consider women as people worthy of their respect and love. As can be seen in Dora in respect to the bourgeois attitudes towards women, women were found in the home while the men were off working. They were expected to stay at home and raise the children and keep the home in order. Looking at Dora’s mother, she took looking after the home to extremes by constantly cleaning making the home almost inhabitable. The obsessive cleaning that Dora’s mother has may be her way of losing herself in an action so that she will not have to face the fact that her marriage has failed. Or the obsessive cleaning may be the mother’s way of keeping up the role of the woman in the house. However, looking at Frau K. she is at home but she is not the homemaker that Dora’s mother is. From the reading, she has not time for cleaning and looking after the children. What exactly she does in her home cannot be found in the reading. It is know that she spends most of her days with Dora’s father while her husband is away. Women are also viewed as sex objects by this bourgeois class. In Dora, Frau K. and Dora are the sex objects in question. Frau K. in Dora’s life is the mistress of her father. Frau though willing to be the mistress of Dora’s father, would play sick when her husband was home wanting to make love with her. Moreover, with his needs not being met by his wife, Herr K., Frau’s husband, turns is attentions to Dora. Although no actual sexual act took place between Dora and Herr, sexual tension underlined their relationship. Now concerning the subject of marriage, if the subjects of Dora represent the attitudes of the majority of the bourgeois class the marriage to them was joke. They did not find the ties of marriage to be binding at all. Dora’s father and mother by the time of this story most probably were no longer in love nor did they have any real relationship. The mother was so meticulous about being clean and that her environment was clean that it is possible that she view the act of sex as dirty and undesirable. Dora’s father was turned off by this and found comfort and sexual release with Frau, his friends wife. Now Frau found that her sexual duty to her husband was undesirable and would become “ill” when her husband returned home. Being denied by his wife, Herr turned his desires to Dora. Although Dora was secretly in love with Herr, she found his sexual propositions undesirable. Now the issue of family ties in with the issue of marriage. There did not appear to be any actual “family” within the story of Dora. Instead, it seemed as if there was a group of people forced into living with each other. The family did not seem to be cohesive. It appeared that the people who w...