Hello and welcome again to this lecture series
on Literary Theory. As you know we are in
the middle of the section discussing feminism
and its relation to literary studies. And
in our previous lecture we have tried to fix
a tentative definition of the term feminism,
and we have then discussed the life and works
of one of the major early modern feminist
Mary Wollstonecraft. In today’s lecture
we will discuss two more important theories
of the feminist tradition: Virginia Woolf
and Simone de Beauvoir, and we will start
with Virginia Woolf.
Her dates are 1882 to 1941, and Woolf was
born in London, in a family which had with
strong literary and artistic connections.
So, her father Leslie Stephen was a literary
critic, journalist, and well known editor
during his time. And Woolf’s mother’s
Aunt Julia Margaret Cameron was one of the
greatest portrait photographers of the 19th
century.
Woolf grew up in a family which included a
large number of siblings, not only the children
of her parents, but her half-brothers and
half-sisters, as well, who are children of
Leslie Stephen and his wife from their early
marriages. And it is now known that unfortunately
as a child, Woolf was sexually abused by some
of her half-brothers and a number of Woolf’s
biographers have connected this sexual abuse
in her early years with her later mental health
issues.
However, the dark shadow of sexual abuse aside,
Woolf’s childhood was spent in an intellectually
invigorating atmosphere. As a young woman,
Woolf was an integral part of what is referred
to as the Bloomsbury group or the Bloomsbury
set which was a circle of friends and associates,
and included people like the economist John
Maynard Keynes, the literary critic Desmond
MacCarthy, the novelist E. M. Forster, and
the biographer Lytton Strachey. Woolf’s
future husband the author and publisher Leonard Woolf
was also part of this bohemian circle, and
they together during a first half of the 20th
century represented the British intellectual
avant-garde.
Today Woolf is primarily remembered as a novelist
who works like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,
transformed the shape of modern British fiction.
But apart from these novels Woolf also wrote
a number of very important non-fictions which
are central to the feminist tradition of the
20th century; they are at the core of the
feminist movement that defined the 20th century.
In our lecture today, we are going to focus
on one of these non-fictions titled, A Room
of One’s Own, which was initially delivered
as two separate lectures in the University
of Cambridge and then well it a woman together
expanded and published in the year 1929.
But before moving on to explore this particular
work, I would like to briefly talk about Woolf’s
resistance to the term feminism.
In her book-length essay, "Three Guineas”
which is also another very important on fictional
work that Woolf wrote, she argues that feminism
is a disparaging term that was forced upon
individuals in the history who tried to speak
on the behalf of women’s rights.
And also it is very interesting to note that
in “Three Guineas”, Woolf considers feminism
to be a dated term which needs to be “destroyed”
because as she explains, it was “a vicious
and corrupt word that has done much harm in
its day.”
In any case, irrespective of Woolf’s resentment
towards the word feminism, her works can be
read and indeed has been read as among the
most impassioned pleas for women’s right,
which, as per the definition that we are using
in our lectures, makes her a feminist per-excellence.
So, now let us come to the text A Room of
One’s Own. We had ended our previous lecture,
you’ll remember, on Mary Wollstonecraft
by discussing how she envisaged the problems,
as well as, the possibilities of women emerging
on the socio-political stage as rational agents,
who were at par with men. In a Woolf’s text
the focus is much narrower and it deals with
the question “How can women write fiction?”
Yet this very specific question leads Woolf
to explore the norms and limitations of the
patriarchal society at large, which gives
her work a scope that is almost as broad as
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights
of Women.
Woolf’s thesis is that and I quote “[A]
woman must have money and a room of her own
if she is to write fiction.” This statement
which occurs at the very beginning of Woolf’s
text though simple in its phrasing actually
hides a rather revolutionary argument.
In our discussion of Wollstonecraft’s life,
we had seen how a very limited number of jobs
where open to respectable women in the 18th
century British society. And about the century
and half, when Virginia Woolf was writing
A Room of One’s Own not much had changed.
Women could still not be gainfully employed
which forced them forever to be at the mercy
of men as far as financial sustenance was
concerned. Woolf argues that having an income
of 500 pounds a year would completely change
this scenario for women. It would free them
from the humiliation of having to do those
inane jobs which allow them to earn but only
a pittance and this will result in a sea change
in the way women carry themselves within the
society.
So, where as now they have to work, “they
have to do things which one did not wish to
do, and to do it like a slave flattering and
fawning with an access to 500 pounds a year,
there will be a complete change in temper”:
To quote Woolf’s own words, “No force
in the world can take from me my five hundred
pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine
forever. Therefore not merely do effort and
labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness.
I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me.
I need not flatter any man; he has nothing
to give me. So, imperceptibly I found myself
adopting a new attitude towards the other
half of the human race.”
Having A Room of One’s Own, just like having
money of her own, brings for the women a sense
of freedom. This is because it helps her retire,
even if temporarily from the routine of domestic
chores. In other words A Room of One’s Own
helps a woman to create a world of her own,
and to escape the role of being merely an
angel of the house that is determined for
her by the patriarchy.
So, in this text the question that Woolf takes
up as to why there is so little great literature,
“great literature”, written by women compared
to that written by men is actually similar
to the question of why women or less rational
than men that was taken up by Wollstonecraft.
And like Wollstonecraft, Woolf too argues
that those, such differences might be true
on the surface, they are caused not by any
inherent shortcomings on the part of the women.
Rather they are the result of the lack of
equal treatment and the lack of opportunity
that a woman experiences within the patriarchal
society. And to exemplify this point Woolf
presence brilliant portrayal of a fictional
character named Judith, who she imagines to
be the sister of the most celebrated English
author of all times William Shakespeare.
Now, to make this imaginative portrayal of
Judith effective, Woolf first presents a brief
sketch of William Shakespeare’s life. Woolf
narrates how the famous playwright being born
as a male child in a well to do family was
given formal education, which meant that he
went to a school, he learnt Latin, he learnt
classical literature, he also learnt elements
of grammar and logic. And clearly such a formal
training contributed heavily towards his subsequent
development as a playwright.
As a young boy, William Shakespeare also had
the necessary liberty to develop wild habits
like poaching rabbits and shooting dear. And
he also had the gumption to marry a girl of
his own choice, and marry at a time which
suited him. Later, when William Shakespeare
ended up in London he wanted to join the theater,
and he was able to fulfill this wish by initially
holding horses at the stage door and then
getting admission inside the theatre where
he got a job. And since then there was no
looking back for him.
In Woolf’s words, “He became a successful
actor, and lived at the hub of the universe,
meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practicing
his art on the boards, exercising his wits
in the streets, and even getting access to
the palace of the queen.” This life of the
celebrated William Shakespeare is used by
Woolf to act as a foil to her depiction of
the imaginary history of Judith.
Judith is introduced as Shakespeare’s “wonderfully
gifted sister.” And this phrase wonderfully
gifted sister is important because the point
that Woolf is trying to drive home here is
that even if a woman is inherently as talented
as man within the patriarchal society she
cannot be as successful as a man.
Now, being a girl child, Judith would not
have been sent to any school which meant that
she would not have had any knowledge of grammar,
let alone any exposure to classical literature.
And even if she was adventurous as her brother,
she would have been asked to stay at home,
and per chance if out of curiosity she would
pick one of her brother’s books and start
reading it, Woolf says, and I quote, “her
parents [would come] in and t[ell] her to
mend the stalking or mind the store and not
moon about with books and peoples”.
Now, though when compared to the upbringing
of William Shakespeare this might look like
cruelty, Woolf is careful to point out that
her parents would treat Judith like this,
not because they felt any sense of hatred
towards her. On the contrary, Woolf argues
that they might even have been excessively
concerned, excessively loving towards their
daughter. The treatment that Judith receives
as a child would rather be determined by the
fact that she is a girl, who is destined to
be a woman and who like all respectable women
of her time would be expected to perform domestic
chores, rather than concern herself with books
and papers. So, the way her parents would
treat her was a reflection of the social norms
rather than any personal hatred that they
have towards their daughter.
Now, Woolf says that eventually Judith’s
parents decide to get her married and when
she protests she says that she does not want
to get married, her father first beats her
up and then begs her with tears that she should
not hurt him, not shame him, in this matter
of her marriage. Here again note that a within
the framework of patriarchal society such
an attitude towards Judith does not reflect
hatred on the father’s part, but rather
love and excessive concern for the daughter’s
future. Judith who loves her father as much
as he loves her is therefore, caught in a
dilemma. Yet she decides to allow her innate
talent to flourish and rather than marry and
settle down as a wife she decides to run away
to London.
So, in London just like her brother, Judith
also visits theatre and she also asks for
a job there, but being a women she is denied
entry, she is denied a job. And this is because
we will have to remember that in Shakespearean
England, all actors, including those who played
women’s parts were male. So, Judith is laughed
at and humiliated, and not only does she not
get a job, being a woman she is also unable
to do simple things like, for instance, go
to a tavern alone, and ask for dinner or to
roam around in the street in the middle of
the night.
Now, in this state of destitution, homeless,
without access to proper food, a theatre person
takes pity on Judith but he ends up sexually
exploiting her, and leaving her when she becomes
pregnant. Woolf says that this imaginary figure
of Judith kills herself on a winter night,
and her body is now buried at a crossroad
in London and buses now pass over it. Yet
nobody knows about Judith, who was this wonderfully
gifted sister of William Shakespeare.
Now, at one level this story is very disturbing
because it is a tale of how a woman might
literally be driven to kill herself by the
expectations and parochialism of a patriarchal
society. But at another level the story sets
the agenda for feminist literary theory, because
just like Woolf brings a focus on to the invisible
Judith that nobody knows of, nobody has heard
of, and a person who is as talented as her
brother William Shakespeare. So, the entire
point of the story is not that Judith is a
fictional character, the point of the story
is even if Judith was real you would most
probably not have known her as a playwright.
So, what Woolf does is she brings the focus
onto this invisible spaces of female writers,
and a large part of feminist literary criticism
would also concern itself with foregrounding
the unknown, half forgotten, or marginalized
women authors who have not been able to make
it to the great canons of literature, simply
because they are women. We will talk about
this later, in further details, when we discuss
gynocriticism in our next lecture. But today
let us move on to another major feminist theorist
of the 20th century Simone de Beauvoir.
de Beauvoir’s dates are 1908 to 1986, and
she is easily one of the most talented and
multifaceted personalities of the 20th century
Western intellectual history. She was a novelist,
she was a philosopher, a political activist,
the travel writer and of course, the key figure
who inaugurated what is known as a second
wave of feminism.
But for along a she had been known primarily
as the partner, simply as a partner of the
French intellectual Jean Paul Sartre. This
was of course, partly due to the fact that
Beauvoir was a woman and as we have seen in
course of these lectures, women are usually
placed second in importance to men within
patriarchal society. But this repetition of
being just a shadow of search was also partly
something of her own making because de Beauvoir
herself categorized her own works as little
more that elaboration of Sartre’s philosophy.
However, later generation of feminist have
tried to decouple de Beauvoir as an intellectual
from Sartre, and they have to a large extent
succeeded in establishing her reputation as
a major intellectual figure of the 20th century
by her own rights.
Now, de Beauvoir, unlike Woolf, did receive
a formal education and was in fact, the 9th
woman to receive a degree from Sorbonne and
the first woman to qualify the prestigious
competitive examination of “agrégation”
in philosophy. And Sartre incidentally stood
first in that examination, and Simone de Beauvoir
stood second, and this being second, the notion
of standing second to a men would play a major
role in how Beauvoir would theorize about
the condition of women we will see that. Between
1929 and 1943 de Beauvoir worked as a school
teacher after which she economically sustained
herself through her writings.
Though de Beauvoir is primarily known outside
France today as a philosopher, her first major
publication was a novel titled, She Came to
Stay, which was published in 1943 and in fact,
it was as a novelist that she would receive
one of the major awards of France, the literary
prize Prix Goncourt, which was given for her
1954 fiction The Mandarins.
But undoubtedly de Beauvoir’s most influential
work was Le Deuxième Sexe or The Second Sex
which was published in 1949 and which acted
as a trigger that unleashed the second wave
of feminist movement.
In the remaining time today our focus would,
therefore, be on this work and we will try
and understand some of the arguments that
de Beauvoir makes in The Second Sex.
Now, this book The Second Sex, is a text which
has multiple layers and therefore, it is difficult
to summarise or paraphrase it, but the main
argument in that book is that women within
the patriarchal society is looked upon as
an ‘other’ of the man. That is to say,
whereas, men are regarded as the norm, women
are regarded as some sort of a corrupt deviation
from that norm, making them as a title claims
– the second sex.
Now, this argument in itself is nothing new.
We have, in fact, already encountered this
argument as far back as the late 18th century
in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Women. What
is unique, however, is the comprehensive way
in which de Beauvoir elaborates this central
feminist argument which references philosophy,
references history, science, literature, as
well as, the concrete day to day lived experiences
of women.
de Beauvoir starts her thesis by looking at
the various explanations which are usually
provided to justify women’s position as
the deviant other to the normal men and she
first attacks the claim that women are “naturally”
different from men. Thus, as we know, it is
often argued that nature made man and woman
as distinct and separate entities, and this
is, this argument, is often used to justify
their sexual as well as their gender which
are supposedly inferior to that of men.
Now, de Beauvoir argues that there is nothing
inherently natural in the sexual and gender
distinction, because she says that there are
one-celled organisms in nature, there are
hermaphrodite species which procreate without
any need for this sexual distinction. So,
to label the othering of women as natural
and as based on their sexual distinction is
unsuitable, is as unsustainable rather, because
if it was natural then it would be a universally
occurring phenomenon. She then goes on to
attack the discourse of Freudian psychoanalysis
which too provides an apparently natural reason
for women’s inferiority.
So, as we know from our earlier discussion,
for Freud the male child was taken as the
norm and Freud’s theory of the normal psychosexual
development of the human being as articulated
through the idea of the oedipal complex was
predicated on the presence of the male penis.
And since a girl child does not have a penis,
Freud regarded the woman’s body as a site
of lack and he argued that their psychosexual
development preceded via a much more convoluted
and therefore, “unnatural” route. De Beauvoir
challenged this Freudian lens of looking at
women as simply damaged men and question the
psychoanalytic theory which defines identity
almost entirely in terms of unconscious drives
and impulses, and largely neglects the role
of individual choice, for instance, and even
more importantly the role of social values
and norms in shaping one’s gender identity,
and this is something that de Beauvoir is
going to focus on.
Now, de Beauvoir also attacks the Marxist,
or rather more specifically, the theory proposed
by Engels that women are treated as inferior
because of the division of labour, which identifies
men as breadwinners. Now, de Beauvoir would
be affiliated to the Marxist philosophy in
general, but here she picks up a difference
with Engels and she argues that this theory
does not explain how such a division of labour
at all came into place, and it is this that
she then sets on, sets out to explain in her
text.
So, de Beauvoir argues that women’s othering
happened in the primitive human society because
she was identified with the process of reproduction
and procreation. Now, since this is at the
core of de Beauvoir argument we will go over
it slowly.
According to de Beauvoir, sexual reproduction
though important is looked upon as a repetition
of the same, which is ubiquitous in the whole
of the animal world. All animals procreate
and they repeat their sameness through that
procreation. For de Beauvoir, human being
as race from the very beginning valued progress
over repetition.
So, in other words, humans valued productive
action which would help them surpass their
own conditions of existence over reproduction
which would merely help them sustain as race
through the repetition of the same. This resulted
in the original devaluation of women within
the society, because women were caught up
in the cycles of reproduction and child bearing,
and in contrast men could afford to be more
adventurous, more outgoing, and they became
inventors who in order to increase their tribe’s
resources to sustain life produced various
things.
So, in de Beauvoir’s own words, “[b]ecause
housework alone is compatible with the duties
of motherhood, [the woman] is condemned to
domestic labour, which locks her into repetition
and immanence; day after day it repeats itself
in identical form from century to century;
it produces nothing new. Man’s case is radically
different. […] to appropriate the world’s
treasures, he annexes the world itself. Through
such actions through such actions he tests
his own power; he posits ends and projects
paths to them: he realizes himself as existent.
To maintain himself, he creates; he spills
over the present and opens up the future.”
De Beauvoir argues that it is because man
is able to open up the future through his
invention, through his productive activities
that he establishes himself as the normative
human being. The woman on the other hand had
to keep away from this adventurous life but
by de Beauvoir calls “the absurd fertility”
and, therefore, she becomes the second sex.
And this subservient status which is established
in the primitive human tribe is then further
continued and even confirmed as human society
moves towards the concept of private property
and in that scenario women are reduced to
the status of being property owned by one
man or the other. De Beauvoir points out that
the status of women as the other is constantly
and consistently maintained within the society
through constant mythologizing.
Now, this means that either in the form of
religious course or in the form of literature,
we are constantly fed with images of women
either as goddesses or as dangerous sexual
temptresses. And in both the cases the images
of women are constructed as being images that
are beyond the normal human being and in both
the cases the images are actually projections
of men’s own fears and desires and wishes.
Which means that, even when she is being held
as a goddess a woman is being defined by men,
by their wishes, and their desires, their
fears.
And if you want to understand how frustrating
this situation can be for a woman, I would
suggest you watch Satyajit Ray’s 1950 film
Debi, literally the goddess which depicts
the horrific process of deification of a woman
by a patriarch.
Anyway coming back to de Beauvoir in The Second
Sex, she supplements these abstract theoretical
arguments about the status of the women as
the other by providing a narration about the
concrete life experiences of women within
the patriarchal society and by showing how
these life experiences are affected by the
consistent process of devaluation of women
within the society.
And de Beauvoir argues that this process actually
starts from the very childhood when the members
of the family in particular and the society
in general, they try to groom the girl child
as a woman, and teach her to be “feminine”.
This process of becoming feminine involves
training the girl in domestic chores which
fixes for her a particular kind of roll within
the society. It also involves alienating the
girls from their own growing bodies by associating
the notion of shame with female sexual desire
and with puberty. A dosage of literature like
Cinderella or The Sleeping Beauty teaches
the girl to be submissive in love, and to
believe that their redemption lies in the
arrival of some prince charming.
And when the promised man arrives to “redeem”
the women, through marriage it proves to be
an ambiguous affair for her. Because at one
level it does give the women financial stability,
but at another level it also traps her in
an unequal relation where she is expected
to be guided by her husband, to serve her
husband, and to connect with the wider world
through him.
De Beauvoir points out that this lack of personal
freedom within marriage has in turn dangerous
consequences for the women’s identity as
a mother, because she then projects her marital
frustrations onto her relations with her own
children. And also, de Beauvoir points out
that a women’s desire to gain agency which
is usually frustrated within the marital relationship,
within the relationship that she has with
her husband, manifests itself through an excessive
attempt to control her children, which again
in itself is rather unhealthy.
But then what does de Beauvoir suggest? How
should a woman escape this trap of inferiority,
this trap of being relegated to the second
sex? De Beauvoir points out, that women during
her time has definitely for more rights and
privileges than what they had earlier. But
she also argues that even if one takes all
of these rights together, they cannot really
emancipate a woman until and unless she also
has economic autonomy.
So, in other words though we see women gaining
a lot of civic liberties in today’s world,
the key factor to watch out for, according
to de Beauvoir, is women’s participation
in the productive workforce as fully paid
workers. And here we see that in most countries
the ratio of working men to working women
is abysmally low, and even when we see women
being incorporated within the workforce, we
know that their status as second sex is still
maintained there, they are for instance paid
less, often they are paid less to perform
the same work as their male colleagues.
De Beauvoir’s solution therefore, is that
women should escape from the trap of their
“absurd fertility” and move from merely
performing reproductive functions in the society
to performing more and more productive rules.
Yet de Beauvoir also acknowledges that this
is a difficult move, because it is regarded
in the patriarchal society as undermining
a woman’s “femininity” which usually
defines her within the society. However, de
Beauvoir stresses that this is a move that
is important and that must be accomplished
in order for the men and the women to meet
as equals for the reign of freedom to triumph
in society, these are her words. And for the
two sexes to meet not as battling counterparts,
but rather as peers who come together to “unequivocally
a form there brotherhood”.
So, with this we end our lecture today. We
will carry forward our discussion on feminism
and literary studies in the next lecture.
Thank you.
