‘I am too
intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take
charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only
myself’
One of the
things that most called my attention from the authors we studied is that the
two women, namely Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, had feminist ideas and
expressed them in their books and their characters.
However,
and as a friend of mine says: ‘it is not easy to make revolution’ and both
authors had to fight against prejudices and the
predominant machista view of life, especially at that time.
It is said
that women around Jane Austen deem her
as an ‘unaccomplished’ woman (ironic, isn’t it?). The harsh judgement that people
of her own gender did talks louder and louder about the context, about the
beliefs and about who really are the ones feeding the man ruling, the exaggerated
praise to man even in society nowadays.
Also,
Virginia Woolf, as we all know, had her own battle against men around her
trying to convince this lady to stop thinking, stop trying to take the place
that she deserved because of her mind, her intelligence, but that was denied to
her because she was a woman (defined, as mentioned by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, by her genitals).
If we take
into consideration that even ‘normal’ women (the ones that followed the cannon)
were not allowed to express their ideas, can we imagine how much more it became
to the ones thinking outside the box? Difficult, uh? But, come on! We are
talking about smart women! They found a way: their books and the female
characters on them.
According
to Virginia Woolf, there were two kinds of characters in any story told by
anyone: the ‘lifelike’ or ‘realistic’ characters described externally,
physically and in their external context and the ‘“real” character, in
contrast, “has the power to make you think not merely of itself, but of all
sorts of things through its eyes – of religion, of love, of war, of peace, of
family life, of balls in country towns, of sunsets, moonrises, the immortality of
the soul’. Definitely both writers went for the second kind of character and
they make us readers to feel and to follow those female real characters in
their own travels and fights to be an empowered and intelligent women who have
more to do than gossiping and raising the many children her husband wanted to
have. Here we find a Mrs. Dalloway travelling and a Miss Elizabeth Bennet
already fighting; here we find us still travelling or still fighting. I admire
these two women because they were brave, I admire these two women because they
were able to convey their ideas and to make them eternal through their books,
essays and characters.
Sources:
- Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” in Collected Essays (London: Hogarth, 1966), 1:325.
- De
Beauvoir, Simone. "The Second Sex. 1949." Trans & Ed. HM
Parshley (London, Vintage, 1997) p 14 (1989).
- http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number12/lee.htm#4 (Last revision: November 5th, 2014)
Although I acknowledge that IT I NOT EASY TO MAKE A REVOLUTION, I think they did it! Maybe not in the time they lived but nowadays I see both revolutionary woman who had revolutionary ideas. Just to be woman and to write in those times I believe is a revolutionary act because woman were just confined to house issues. Also, the fact that they changed the way to see writing, in the sense that they paid more attention to the mind and to aspects that are actually worth reading and reflecting like time, war, identity, and a lot of criticism to the times in which they lived. As expressen in Virginia's essay Moden Fiction she did not want to be a "materialist" and focus just on actions, but what literature needed was life seen with the eyed of a woman, focusing on the inner world of characters.
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