Gender roles and The egnima in Atonement (first 20 mins)

The main egnima
In the film I found the main question I was asking myself was why 'seemingly' 2 families were living together, why was this? It seemed it was a poor family had moved into a family of many riches. In the times of when the film was set Im sure there was a large seperation between Poor and Rich in those days where they would not come together. (bad wording there but I know what I mean) Maybe there family

Gender roles
As it was common in those days the men were the workers, the earners for the family. One excample of this is when the boy(Possibly from the poor family) was pushing the wheel barrow around while the woman of the household were inside practising acting from a script.

The woman also seemly seem to be more bossy, maybe this is just over the other family...

Another important point I noted was when the valuable item fell into the fountain, I would of thought as it was the mans fault that he would of gone in and be the gentle man but instead the woman was the one to go in herself, while the man seemed to laugh it off.

The woman didnt seem to like the fact the man had used her fathers money, to what looks to no avail, even though he assured her he was going to pay him back when he got a job, Seemingly to be show Hierachy.

Men were shown coming home from work, shouting hello to the household, woman respecting them as they come home, showing manners. Contractidicting the previous relationship with the other man from the other family, who was shown little respect.

Levi Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called the "father of modern anthropology".


Levi Strauss sees a way of structuring media texts through opposing concepts, e.g good/bad. He says these opposistions are value-laden.





Levi Strauss introduced the notion of binary oppositions as a useful way to consider the production of meaning within narratives. He argued that all construction of meaning was dependent, to some degree, on these oppositions.



Claude Levi-Strauss is a French anthropologist who is well-known for his development of structural anthropology. He was born on November 28, 1908 in Belgium as the son of an artist, and a member of an intellectual French Jewish family. Levi-Strauss studied at the University of Paris. From 1935-9 he was Professor at the University of Sao Paulo. Between 1942-1945 he was Professor at the New School for Social Research. In 1950 he became Director of Studies at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes. In 1959 Levi-Strauss assumed the Chair of Social Anthroplogy at the College de France. His books include The Raw and the Cooked, The Savage Mind, Structural Anthropology and Totemism
Some of the reasons for his popularity are in his rejection of history and humanism, in his refusal to see Western civilization as privileged and unique, in his emphasis on form over content and in his insistence that the savage mind is equal to the civilized mind.
Levi-Strauss did many things in his life including studying Law and Philosophy. He also did considerable reading among literary masterpieces, and was deeply immersed in classical and contemporary music.
His three "mistresses" in life were said to be Marxism, psychoanalysis and geology, but anthropology gave the scholar the opportunity to come into contact with the lives of men of different cultures, rather than just Western cultures. His belief that the characteristics of man are everywhere identical was found after countless travels to Brazil and visits to North and South American Indian tribes. In fact, Levi-Strauss spent more than half his 59 years studying the behavior of the North and South American Indian tribes. The method he used to study the social organization of these tribes is called structuralism. "Structuralism," says Levi-Strauss, "is the search for unsuspected harmonies.
Levi-Strauss derived structuralism from a school of linguistics whose focus was not on the meaning of the word, but the patterns that the words form. Levi-Strauss's contribution gave us a theory of how the human mind works. Man passes from a natural to a cultural state as he uses language, learns to cook, etc... Structuralism considers that in the passage from natural to cultural, man obeys laws he does not invent it's a mechanism of the human brain. Levi-Strauss views man not as a privileged inhabitant of the universe, but as a passing species which will leave only a few faint traces of its passage when it becomes extinct.
Levi-Strauss also came up with the theory of binary opposites which is: " a pair of opposiites, thought by the Structuralists to powerfully form and organize human thought and culture. Some are commonsense, such as raw vs cooked; however, many such oppositions imply or are used in such a way that privileges one of the terms of the opposition, creating a hierarchy. This can be seen in English with white and black, where black is used as a sign of darkness, danger, evil, etc., and white as purity, goodness, and so on. Another example of a contested binary opposition is rational vs emotional, in which the rational term is usually privileged and associated with men, while emotional is inferior and associated with women.

Linotype - Ms Parish

Linotype



First produced by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1886.the Linotype was 2.1 m tall.
Keystrokes retrieved letter molds from the magazines. The machine poured molten type metal, which is a lead alloy, into the molds, producing a complete line of type in reverse, so it would read properly when used to transfer ink onto paper. The molds were then assembled by hand onto a page.

The machines are so noisy that Linotype operators are known for their bad hearing. The "hot type" method of printing is virtually extinct today, replaced first by "cold type", in which lines of type were generated by computerized printers and pasted onto large paper "flats" by hand, and then by pagination and desktop publishing systems in which the entire page is created in the computer and produced in press-ready form. The Linotype may be best remembered for the layout of its keyboard, which had letters arranged in decreasing order of frequency in everyday English. The first two rows were usually ETAOIN SHRDLU, a phrase that occasionally appeared in print because Linotype operators who made mistakes would run their fingers down the keyboard to fill out the line with nonsense, and sometimes the slug of type would accidentally get used. This phrase is in the Oxford English Dictionary and has been used as a character name by a number of authors.