The fundamental notion of the female writer evolved within the nineteenth century when women were, and continued to be, considered as inferior beings when compared to their male counterparts. This is especially noticeable within the literary canon, where female writers are sparsely included in ‘reputable’ works of literature, let alone incorporated into any canon at all. Virginia Woolf, in her essay titled “In a Room of One’s Own” (1925), details the apparent trials and tribulations that female writers in the Victorian era experience when attempting to become recognized within a literary community. The female author is revisited during the second-wave feminist movement by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their psychoanalytic text, “Infection in the Sentence” (1979), which focuses on the “anxiety” associated with the act of writing as a woman. The approach to identifying the complex social constructs applied to women writers differ due to Woolf’s insistence on androgynous writing in order to unify perceived male and female characteristics, whereas Gilbert and Gubar celebrate distinctly feminine literature as a means to encourage an active literary community of women. Both texts acknowledge the socially challenging function of authorship when considering the role of women as writers in a male-dominated literary community. By analyzing these texts through a feminist lens, it is evident that the notion of the female author is, and will forever be, encapsulated within the concept of gender, itself. Female authorship is discussed through literary concepts of genius, androgyny, popular canon, and psychoanalysis. In order to analyze the ways in which women writers have traditionally been rejected from the Western literary sphere and the ...
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...ead the movement. It can be concluded, however, that female authorship will always focus on the authorial voice of women because women’s writing will, and always will be, a discourse about gender.
Works Cited
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. Infection in the Sentence. The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. Leitch, Vincent B, et all. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2010. 1926-1938.
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Gubar, Susan. “’The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity” Critical Inquiry 8.2
(1981): 243-263. Print.
Restuccia, Frances L. “’Untying the Mother Tongue: Female Difference in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 4.2
(1985): 253-264. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. The Norton Anthology of Theory
and Criticism. Leitch, Vincent B, et all. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2010.
896-905. Print.
In the predominantly male worlds of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh (Book I)”, the women’s voices are muted. Female characters are confined to the domestic spheres of their homes, and they are excluded from the elite literary world. They are expected to function as foils to the male figures in their lives. These women are “trained” to remain silent and passive not only by the males around them, but also by their parents, their relatives, and their peers. Willingly or grudgingly, the women in Woolf and Browning’s works are regulated to the domestic circle, discouraged from the literary world, and are expected to act as foils to their male counterparts.
Heberle, Mark. "Contemporary Literary Criticism." O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Vol. 74. New York, 2001. 312.
Throughout history, women have struggled with, and fought against oppression. They have been held back and weighed down by the sexist ideas of a male dominated society which has controlled cultural, economic and political ideas and structure. During the mid-1800’s to early 1900’s women became more vocal and rebuked sexism and the role that had been defined for them. Fighting with the powerful written word, women sought a voice, equality amongst men and an identity outside of their family. In many literary writings, especially by women, during the mid-1800’s to early 1900’s, we see symbols of oppression and the search for gender equality in society. Writing based on their own experiences, had it not been for the works of Susan Glaspell, Kate Chopin, and similar feminist authors of their time, we may not have seen a reform movement to improve gender roles in a culture in which women had been overshadowed by men.
Gendered strategies, in the criticism of early fiction, made feminine fiction incapable of excellence. By using conventional heterosexual relationships in their prefaces, authors only succeed in supporting the masculine control over fiction. The appraisals women gained only reinforced their inferior status. "Criticism placed female authors in a specific and confined critical sphere, while it located male authors in an other, more respected field" (375). By aligning their works with popular male literature, women inadvertently strengthened male authority. Women were only granted recognition in terms of their limited social stature. It is these gendered values and strategies that makes the history of the novel and feminine achievement difficult to assess.
Woolf, Virginia. "A Room of One's Own." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams et al. 7th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000. 2153-2214.
Though published seventy years ago, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own holds no less appeal today than it did then. Modern women writers look to Woolf as a prophet of inspiration. In November of 1929, Woolf wrote to her friend G. Lowes Dickinson that she penned the book because she "wanted to encourage the young women–they seem to get frightfully depressed" (xiv). The irony here, of course, is that Woolf herself eventually grew so depressed and discouraged that she killed herself. The suicide seems symptomatic of Woolf's own feelings of oppression within a patriarchal world where only the words of men, it seemed, were taken seriously. Nevertheless, women writers still look to Woolf as a liberating force and, in particular, at A Room of One's Own as an inspiring and empowering work. Woolf biographer Quentin Bell notes that the text argues:
Literature Criticism Online -. Web. The Web. The Web. 31 Mar. 2010. Kazin, Alfred. The.
There is no doubt that the literary written by men and women is different. One source of difference is the sex. A woman is born a woman in the same sense as a man is born a man. Certainly one source of difference is biological, by virtue of which we are male and female. “A woman´s writing is always femenine” says Virginia Woolf
“Girls wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it is okay to be a boy; for a girl it is like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading” (McEwan 55-56). Throughout the history of literature women have been viewed as inferior to men, but as time has progressed the idealistic views of how women perceive themselves has changed. In earlier literature women took the role of being the “housewife” or the household caretaker for the family while the men provided for the family. Women were hardly mentioned in the workforce and always held a spot under their husband’s wing. Women were viewed as a calm and caring character in many stories, poems, and novels in the early time period of literature. During the early time period of literature, women who opposed the common role were often times put to shame or viewed as rebels. As literature progresses through the decades and centuries, very little, but noticeable change begins to appear in perspective to the common role of women. Women were more often seen as a main character in a story setting as the literary period advanced. Around the nineteenth century women were beginning to break away from the social norms of society. Society had created a subservient role for women, which did not allow women to stand up for what they believe in. As the role of women in literature evolves, so does their views on the workforce environment and their own independence. Throughout the history of the world, British, and American literature, women have evolved to become more independent, self-reliant, and have learned to emphasize their self-worth.
Throughout American Literature, women have been depicted in many different ways. The portrayal of women in American Literature is often influenced by an author's personal experience or a frequent societal stereotype of women and their position. Often times, male authors interpret society’s views of women in a completely different nature than a female author would. While F. Scott Fitzgerald may represent his main female character as a victim in the 1920’s, Zora Neale Hurston portrays hers as a strong, free-spirited, and independent woman only a decade later in the 1930’s.
Women’s writing, particularly in The Golden Notebook is about the fact that women are assessed from a completely different point of v...
Fairclough (1992: 88) is of the view that “ideologies reside in texts” (p. 88). But it is noe necessary that the discourse would be interpreted in the same way as desired by the producers. Several interpretations can be made of a single piece of discourse. The ideological import may keep on changing with each new interpretation of discourse (Fairclough, 1992: 89).
Gilbert, Sarah M. and Gubar, Susan. "From the Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship." The Critical Condition: Classic Texts andContemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. 1361-74.
Woolf pioneered in incorporating feminism in her writings. “Virginia Woolf’s journalistic and polemical writings show that she made a significant contribution to the development of feminist thought” (Dalsimer). Despite her tumultuous childhood, she was an original thinker and a revolutionary writer, specifically the way she described depth of characters in her novels. Her novels are distinctively modern and express characters in a way no other writer has done before. One reason it is easy to acknowledge the importance of Virginia Woolf is because she writes prolifically.
Throughout literature’s history, female authors have been hardly recognized for their groundbreaking and eye-opening accounts of what it means to be a woman of society. In most cases of early literature, women are portrayed as weak and unintelligent characters who rely solely on their male counterparts. Also during this time period, it would be shocking to have women character in some stories, especially since their purpose is only secondary to that of the male protagonist. But, in the late 17th to early 18th century, a crop of courageous women began publishing their works, beginning the literary feminist movement. Together, Aphra Behn, Charlotte Smith, Fanny Burney, and Mary Wollstonecraft challenge the status quo of what it means to be a