The Effect of Gender Roles

Florence Kings’ “Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady” outlines how the old thoughts of how a lady should act and present herself affected more modern generations, like her mother’s generation and her own. In Kings’ essay a contrast between two moral styles is seen. The traditional “southern lady” is portrayed as Kings’ grandmother and the pressure she exerts on King and her mother to take the form of her ideal “lady.” King’s mother directly contrasts the views and the ideals of Kings’ grandmother, she represents the modern woman and has a “anything is possible” outlook on life whereas the grandmother feels that a “lady” should have a restricted and mild manner of life. Much like King, Tom Franklin also outlines the clash between antique gender roles and contemporary thought. In the first chapter of Franklin’s novel “Poachers,” he describes living in a community where hunting was thought to be an essential and needed quality of manhood. It was thought, and widely accepted, that all real men hunt and those who did not, or those who were not any good at it, were “p*****.” Even though, personally, Franklin did not enjoy hunting, he was well aware of the negative stigma that came along with not hunting, so he pushed himself to hunt for acceptance. We see an example of this in the dialogue between Franklin, his father, and his mother in KMART where Franklin states that he wanted to buy a new outfit for his GI Joe but instead he buys a new hunting knife to impress and satisfy his father. Franklin shows, through this essay, that it is very easy for one to be stripped of their true identity and succumb to traditional gender roles in society due to our innate need to belong and be accepted.