Literary Theory

Series 1: Handout #20

“Give us some room!”

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): high priestess of literary modernism: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928); pioneer of stream-of-consciousness technique in novels; center of the Bloomsbury Group in London; early feminist critic (in tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft); daughter of Eminent Victorian, Leslie Stephen; published Freud with her husband Leonard Woolf (oh, the irony of listing these relationships with men!); drowned herself like Ophelia.

“A Room of One’s Own” (1929): considers the difference between women as objects of representation and women as authors of representation—i.e., finding a voice of their own:

“Shakespeare’s Sister”: explains the dearth of female literary figures in terms of social and educational prohibitions coupled with domestic responsibilities and low expectations. A classic, liberal-humanist interpretation.

Examples?

“Chloe Liked Olivia”: women in literature are generally defined by their relations to men rather than with each other. Moving on to a more complex feminism.

Examples?

“Androgyny”: Are there male and female parts of the brain that correspond to the sex of the person? Is genius the ability to balance the two? To be androgynous? Are there such things as masculine and feminine writers, and how does one get to be that way? And moving on to “gender studies.”

Examples?

“What have you become?”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986): pioneering feminist critic, married to Jean-Paul Sartre; famous aphorism: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” which, it is usually claimed, begins the social constructionist school of feminist criticism, which is foundational for subsequent critics such as Susan Bordo, Eve Sedgewick, and Judith Butler.

“The Second Sex” (1949): interdisciplinary essay that describes the objectification of women throughout history, the making of woman into “the Other,” denying them subjectivity; men are constructed as the state of normality; men transcend nature and are reasonable (a Godlike faculty), women reflect it—they are irrational. Culture reinforces a notion of the Eternal Feminine: an ahistorical view of women as having a common nature regardless of place and time. This is not simply imposed on women by men; patriarchy involves the complicity (perhaps unknowingly) in the system of their own exploitation (link to Marxist concept of “false consciousness”). As an existentialist, Beauvoir asks women to take responsibility for liberating themselves.

Q. Does Beauvoir insist that “women” must become “men” in order to be free?

Q. Where is the boundary between the essential and the socially constructed?