The Depiction of Women in English and Kurdish Poetry: Gender and Symbolism

Abstract

This study looks at how women are symbolically represented in modern British, American, and Kurdish poetry. It focuses on how images of the body, nature, and home are used to create and challenge gender identities. Using feminist literary criticism and semiotic analysis, the study looks at how male and female poets use symbolic language to reflect, reinforce, or oppose patriarchal ideas. The chosen poets—W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Browning, Sylvia Plath, Carol Ann Duffy, and Audre Lorde from English-language literature, and Abdulla Pashew, Sherko Bekas, Choman Hardi, and Kajal Ahmad from Kurdish literature each have a different but related view of what it means to be a woman. The major point of this study is that symbolic images of the female body, home life, and nature are important spaces where stories about women are either kept alive or changed. British and American poets commonly use psychological, mythological, and physiological imagery to question established gender roles. Kurdish poets, on the other hand, often connect feminine symbols to land, maternity, and survival because of their experiences with nationalism, conflict, and resistance. This comparison shows that both poetry traditions employ symbols to question and navigate entrenched gender roles, even though they use different languages and contexts. This study adds to the larger conversations about gender and representation by showing how modern poetry can be a site for both cultural continuity and feminist resistance by finding patterns in recurring symbols and their implied meanings in different cultures.