Sorry it's been so long guys! I just really haven't felt inspired lately. I did however, just finish A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf and can write about that. It will be short though, as I want to reread the book and think about it more.
Virginia Woolf says that in order to be a truly genius writer you must be sexless, that is your prose must not be too masculine, or too feminine. Of her male predecessors and contemporaries she feels that perhaps Shakespeare was androgynous, and Keats and Stern and Lamb and Cooper. Milton had too much male, as did Wordsworth and Tolstoi.
Woolf however, praises Emily Bronte and Jane Austen earlier in her essay, for their ability to "write as women write" not as men write. She states: "what genius, what integrity it must have required to face all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking"(74). Jane Austen was an amazing writer because she developed a writing style all her own, instead of imitating men writers.
One of the things Woolf finds particularly interesting is how men depict women in their works. Women in Shakespeare, in classical works, in contemporary literature are often pictured as being very strong, but very static. They are never as developed as the males; never in a male work do you hear the lines "Chloe liked Olivia" like in Mary Carmichael's novel. Woolf points out that Octavia never complimented Cleopatra on her hair (i found this funny).
All of this made me wonder, how exactly ARE woman portrayed in all my favorite books by men? This was actually quite a sad fault. Fitzgerald fails immediately, all of his women are the femme fatals of the males, they are over-emotional, they are needy or cold or even insane. It is always the male that saves the female. Dr. Diver dating his weak, crazed patient? Think of every female in This side of Paradise, all overemotional. The worst would be that girl in The Last Tycoon who does everything just for the purpose of have sex with some guy, when she slept she was resting for sex, when she ate it was fuel for sex. Thank You Virginia Woolf, you ruined my favorite author for me. haha, oh well.
tired now, more later
2 comments:
But if she says that truly great writing is sexless, but then praises Emily Bronte and Jane Austen for their ability to "write as women write".....I see a discrepancy. Or as Ms.Stedman would say, a conspiracy.
I know!
but she discusses the sexless thing later on, i think she felt that the first women writers had to establish a 'female voice' and than those of true genius (like emily bronte) could be androgynous.
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