The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
Sandra M. GilbertThe Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination Gönderileri
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination kitaplarını, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination sözleri ve alıntılarını, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination yazarlarını, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination yorumları ve incelemelerini 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.Shut Up in Prose: Gender and Genre in Austen's Juvenilia
Jane Austen has always been famous for fireside scenes in which several characters comfortably and quietly discuss options so seemingly trivial that it is astonishing when they are transformed into important ethical dilemmas.
Sayfa 113
Shut Up in Prose: Gender and Genre in Austen's Juvenilia
Although she has become a symbol of culture, it is shocking how persistently Austen demonstrates her discomfort with her cultural inheritance, specifically her dissatisfaction with the tight place assigned women in patriarchy and her analysis of the economics of sexual exploitation. At the same time, however, she knows from the beginning of her career that there is no other place for her but a tight one, and her parodic strategy is itself a testimony to her struggle with inadequate but inescapable structures.
Sayfa 112
Shut Up in Prose: Gender and Genre in Austen's Juvenilia
...But critics who patronize or castigate Austen for her acceptance of limits and boundaries are overlooking a subversive strain in even her earliest stories: Austen's courageous "grace under pressure" is not only a refuge from a dangerous reality, it is also a comment on it.
Sayfa 112
Shut Up in Prose: Gender and Genre in Austen's Juvenilia
For, as Gaston Bachelard explains, the miniature "allows us to be world conscious at slight risk." While the creators of satirically conceived diminutive landscapes seem to see everything as small because they are themselves so grand, Austen's analogy for her art — her "little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory" — suggests a fragility that reminds us of the risk and instability outside the fictional space.
Sayfa 108
Shut Up in Prose: Gender and Genre in Austen's Juvenilia
They shut me up in Prose
—As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet
—Because they liked me "still"—
Sayfa 107 - Emily Dickinson
The Parables of the Cave
"for out of my Womb thou shalt be brought forth after the manner of a Spirit, Conceived and Born again."
Sayfa 104
The Parables of the Cave
Detached from herself, silenced, subdued, this woman artist tried in the beginning, as we shall see, to write like an angel in the house of fiction: with Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, she concealed her own truth behind a decorous and ladylike facade, scattering her real wishes to the winds or translating them into incomprehensible hieroglyphics. But as time passed and her cave-prison became more constricted, more claustrophobic, she "fell" into the gothic/Satanic mode and, with the Brontes and Mary Shelley, she planned mad or monstrous escapes, then dizzily withdrew — with George Eliot and Emily Dickinson — from those open spaces where the scorching presence of the patriarchal sun, whom Dickinson called "the man of noon," emphasized her vulnerability. Since "Creation seemed a mighty Crack" to make her "visible," she took refuge again in the safety of the "dim hypaethric cavern" where she could be alone with herself, with a truth that was hers even in its fragmentation.
Sayfa 101
The Parables of the Cave
Emily Dickinson, a woman artist whose own carefully sewn together "packets" of poetry were — ironically enough — to be fragmented by male editors and female heirs, projected her yearning for this lost female home into the figure of a caged (and female) leopard. Her visionary nostalgia demonstrates that at times the memory of this Atlantis could be as painful for women writers as amnesia about it often was.
Sayfa 100
The Parables of the Cave
Reconstructing Isis and Eurydice, then, the woman artist redefines and recovers the lost Atlantis of her literary heritage, the sunken continent whose wholeness once encompassed and explained all those figures on the horizon who now seem "odd," fragmentary, incomplete — the novelists historians call "singular anomalies," the poets critics call "poetesses," the revolutionary artists patriarchal poets see as "unsexed," monstrous, grotesque.
Sayfa 99
The Parables of the Cave
Going "down to the woman" of Fate whom Helen Diner describes, the woman writer recovers herself as a woman of art. Thus, where the traditional male hero makes his "night sea journey" to the center of the earth, the bottom of the mere, the belly of the whale, to slay or be slain by the dragons of darkness, the female artist makes her journey into what Adrienne Rich has called "the cratered night of female memory" to revitalize the darkness, to retrieve what has been lost, to regenerate, reconceive and give birth.'
Sayfa 99
The Parables of the Cave
Where are the songs I used to know,
Where are the notes I used to sing?
I have forgotten everything
I used to know so long ago.
Sayfa 93 - Christina Rossetti
Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
Indistinct and yet rapid, barely perceptible but inexorable, the progress of that cloud shadow is not unlike the progress of nineteenth-century literary women out of the texts defined by patriarchal poetics into the open spaces of their own authority. That such an escape from the numb world behind the patterned walls of the text was a flight from dis-ease into health was quite clear to Gilman herself.
Sayfa 91
Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
...To become literally a house, after all, is to be denied the hope of that spiritual transcendence of the body which, as Simone de Beauvoir has argued, is what makes humanity distinctively human. Thus, to be confined in childbirth (and significantly "confinement" was the key nineteenth-century term for what we would now, just as significantly, call "delivery") is in a way just as problematical as to be confined in a house or prison.
Sayfa 88
Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
Similarly, when Byron's Prisoner of Chillon notes that "my very chains and I grew friends," the poet himself is making an epistemological point about the nature of the human mind, as well as a political point about the tyranny of the state. But when Rose Yorke in Shirley describes Caroline Helstone as living the life of a toad enclosed in a block of marble, Charlotte Bronte is speaking through her about her own deprived and constricted life, and its real conditions."
Sayfa 87
Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
The distinction between male and female images of imprisonment is — and always has been — a distinction between, on the one hand, that which is both metaphysical and metaphorical, and on the other hand, that which is social and actual. Sleeping in his coffin, the seventeenth-century poet John Donne was piously rehearsing the constraints of the grave in advance, but the nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson, in purdah in her white dress, was anxiously living those constraints in the present.
Sayfa 86