Sandra M. Gilbert Gönderileri
Sandra M. Gilbert kitaplarını, Sandra M. Gilbert sözleri ve alıntılarını, Sandra M. Gilbert yazarlarını, Sandra M. Gilbert yorumları ve incelemelerini 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
To consider the afflictions of George Eliot, however, is to bring to mind another strategy the insubordinate woman writer eventually developed for dealing with her socially prescribed subordination.
Where women like Finch and Bradstreet apologized for their supposed inadequacies while women like Behn and Cavendish flaunted their freakishness, the most rebellious of their nineteenth-century descendants attempted to solve the literary problem of being female by presenting themselves as male.
Sayfa 65
Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
What the lives and lines and choices of all these women tell us, in short, is that the literary woman has always faced equally degrading options when she had to define her public presence in the world. If she did not suppress her work entirely or publish it pseudonymously or anonymously, she could modestly confess her female "limitations" and concentrate on the "lesser" subjects reserved for ladies as becoming to their inferior powers. If the latter alternative seemed an admission of failure, she could rebel, accepting the ostracism that must have seemed inevitable. Thus, as Virginia Woolf observed, the woman writer seemed locked into a disconcerting double bind: she had to choose between admitting she was "only a woman" or protesting that she was "as good as a man."
Sayfa 64
Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
As Woolf 's comments imply, women who did not apologize for their literary efforts were defined as mad and monstrous: freakish because "unsexed" or freakish because sexually "fallen." If Cavendish's extraordinary intellectual ambitions made her seem like an aberration of nature, and Finch's writing caused her to be defined as a fool, an absolutely immodest, unapologetic rebel like Aphra Behn — the first really "professional" literary woman in England — was and is always considered a somewhat "shady lady," no doubt promiscuous, probably self-indulgent, and certainly "indecent.
Sayfa 63
Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits:
If what I do prove well, it won't advance, They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance.
Sayfa 62 - Anne Bradstreet
Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
As Elaine Showalter has shown, until the end of the nineteenth century the woman writer really was supposed to take second place to her literary brothers and fathers. If she refused to be modest, self-deprecating, subservient, refused to present her artistic productions as mere trifles designed to divert and distract readers in moments of idleness, she could expect to be ignored or (sometimes scurrilously) attacked.
Sayfa 61
Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
What all these characters and their authors really fear they have forgotten is precisely that aspect of their lives which has been kept from them by patriarchal poetics: their matrilineal heritage of literary strength, their "female power" which, as Annie Gottlieb wrote, is important to them because of (not in spite of) their mothers.
Sayfa 59
Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
"You could dance, or you could have the love of a good man. But you were afraid to dance, because you had this unnatural fear that if you danced they'd cut your feet off so you wouldn't be able to dance. . . ."
Sayfa 57
Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
And as Wendy Martin has noted in the nineteenth century, this fear of the intellectual woman became so intense that the phenomenon. . . was recorded in medical annals. A thinking woman was considered such a breach of nature that a Harvard doctor reported during his autopsy on a Radcliffe graduate he discovered that her uterus had shrivelled to the size of a pea.
Sayfa 56
Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
"...Constantly considering their nerves, urged to consider them by well-intentioned but short-sighted ad- visors, [women] pretty soon become nothing but a bundle of nerves."
Sayfa 55
Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
In other words, the "female diseases" from which Victorian women suffered were not always byproducts of their training in femininity; they were the goals of such training.
Sayfa 54