Showing posts with label Feminism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Feminism. Show all posts

Thursday 4 September 2014

Worksheet: Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse

'To The Lighthouse' is one of the best poetic expressions in Virginia Woolf's literary oeuvre. The novel is deeply layered which opportunes us to explore various interpretations, We have discussed following points in the classroom during face-to-face interaction:


Here are some tasks to be completed by the students as a part of self-learning module: (Students have to give responses in the 'Comment' section below this blog post)

  1. How can you explain that 'what' Virginia Woolf wanted to say (for example, the complexity of human relationship, the everyday battles that people are at in their relationship with near and dear ones, the struggle of a female artist against the values of middle/upper class society etc) can only be said in the way she has said? (Key: The 'How' of the narrative technique is to be discussed along with features of Stream of Consciousness technique which helps Woolf to put in effective manner what she experienced in abstractions.)
  2. Do you agree: "The novel is both the tribute and critique of Mrs. Ramsay"? (Key: Take some clues from the painting of Mrs Ramsay drawn by Lily Briscoe and the article by Andre Viola and Glenn Pedersen. Can we read Mrs. R in context of the idea of Ideal Indian Woman - Karyeshu dasi, Karaneshu manthri; Bhojeshu mata, Shayaneshu rambha; Kshamayeshu dharithri, Roopeshu lakshmi; Satkarma yukta, Kuladharma pathni. )
  3. Considering symbolically, does the Lighthouse stand for Mrs. Ramsay or the narrator (Virginia Woolf herself who is categorically represented by Lily)? (Key: Take help from the presentation on Symbolism to connect Mrs. Caroline Ramsay with Lighthouse. Secondly, the narrator / author cannot fully disappear from the novel and thus the stoicism of Lily to paint and thus prove that she can paint, is symbolically presented in stoicism of Lighthouse. Read 'lighthouse' symbol from presentation slide with this insight to connect lighthouse with the narrator. Give your concluding remarks in the comment below in this blog )
  4. In the article by Joseph Blotner, two myths are patterned together. Name the myths? How they are zeroed down to the symbols of 'Window' and 'Lighthouse'? How does the male phallic symbol represent feminine Mrs. Ramsay? (Key: The strokes of light-beams. . . )
  5. What do you understand by the German term 'Künstlerroman'? How can you justify that 'To The Lighthouse' is 'Künstlerroman' novel? (Key: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/325047/Kunstlerroman)
  6. "... the wages of obedience is death, and the daughter that reproduces mothering to perfection, including child-bearing, already has on her cheeks the pallor of death. One reminded here of various texts by Lucy Irigaray, in which she attacks mothers for being, however unwillingly, accomplices in the patriarchal system of oppression." (Viola). In light of this remark, explain briefly Lily's dilemma in 'To The Lighthouse'. 
  7. Movie Screening: Worksheet (Click here to open)
  8. You have compared the 'beginning' and the 'ending' of the novel and the film adaptation of the novel directed by Colin Gregg (you can see it again in the embedded video below this). Do you think that the novel is more poignant than the movie? If yes, do you ascribe the fact that the power of words is much greater than that of the screen / visuals?
  9. How do you interpret the last line of the novel (It was done; it was finished.
    Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.) with reference to the ending of the film (After the final stroke on the canvass with finishing touch, Lily walks inside the house. As she goes ante-chamber, the light and dark shade makes his face play hide-and-seek. She climbs stairs, puts her brush aside, walks through the dark and light to enter her room. Gently closes the door - speaks: "Closed doors, open windows" - lies on the bed and with some sort of satisfaction utters: "Dearest Briscoe, you are a fool".) 
  10. What does the catalogue named as 'Army and Navy' signify? What does cutting of 'Refrigerator'  signify?
  11. Why did Virginia give such prominence to the tale of the “Fisherman’s Wife”? In particular, why did she weave such a misogynist tale into the fabric of a book which so eloquently challenges received patriarchal notions about the roles and capabilities of women? 
  12. How is India represented in 'To The Lighthouse'? (Read this blog for passing reference) 
  13. Write summaries of these articles:
_________________________________________________________________________________
Watch the film 'To The Lighthouse', directed by Clin Greg, written by Hugh Stoddart, Virginia Woolf (novel). 


Watch biographical videos in three parts: 

The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf, directed by Eric Neal Young, 2002.








Presentations on Symbolism and Stream of Consciousness in 'To The Lighthouse'.




Stream of Consciousness in Virginia Woolf's 'To The Lighthouse' from Dilip Barad

Articles for further reading:





  • Mythic Patterns in to the Lighthouse. Author(s): Joseph L. BlotnerSource: PMLA, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Sep., 1956), pp. 547-562Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/460631.



  • Fluidity versus Muscularity: Lily's Dilemma in Woolf's "To the Lighthouse". Author(s): André ViolaSource: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Winter, 2000-2001), pp. 271-289Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831911


  • Vision in to the Lighthouse. Author(s): Glenn PedersenSource: PMLA, Vol. 73, No. 5, Part 1 (Dec., 1958), pp. 585-600Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/460303



  • Color in To the Lighthouse. Author(s): Jack F. StewartSource: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), pp. 438-458Published by: Hofstra UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441465


  • Language, Subject, Self: Reading the Style of "To the Lighthouse". Author(s): Rebecca SaundersSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter, 1993), pp. 192-213Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345687


  • "These Emotions of the Body": Intercorporeal Narrative in To the Lighthouse. Author(s): Laura DoyleSource: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 42-71Published by: Hofstra UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441550
  • Friday 27 December 2013

    Elaine Showalter: Towards A Feminist Poetics: The Summary

    Elaine Showalter: Towards A Feminist Poetics


    Dilip Barad

    Department of English
    Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

    Citation: Cite this
    Abstract

    This content explores the work and ideas of Elaine Showalter, a prominent figure in feminist literary theory and criticism. Showalter's writings emphasize the importance of understanding the feminist tradition and its impact on literary analysis. She criticizes stereotypes of feminism and the tendency to neglect theory, arguing for a poetics of feminist criticism. Showalter divides feminist criticism into two sections: the woman as reader or feminist critique, which examines the representation of women in literature and critiques male-dominated perspectives, and the woman as writer or gynocritics, which focuses on constructing a female framework for analyzing women's literature. Showalter acknowledges the challenges of defining women's writing but sees gynocriticism as a means to understand women's relation to literary culture. She outlines three phases of women's literature: the feminine phase, the feminist phase, and the female phase, each characterized by different goals and approaches. Showalter calls for a cultural perspective in feminist criticism that recognizes the diversity of women's experiences. Overall, Showalter's views on feminist poetics are intelligent, balanced, and thought-provoking, reflecting her belief in the transformative power of feminist analysis.

    Keywords: Elaine Showalter, feminist literary theory, feminist critique, gynocritics, women's literature, cultural perspective.


    About the author: Elaine Showalter (born January 21, 1941) is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics.
    She is well known and respected in both academic and popular cultural fields. She has written and edited numerous books and articles focused on a variety of subjects, from feminist literary criticism to fashion, sometimes sparking widespread controversy, especially with her work on illnesses. Showalter has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television.

    Showalter is a specialist in Victorian literature and the Fin-de-Siecle (turn of the 19th century). Her most innovative work in this field is in madness and hysteria in literature, specifically in women’s writing and in the portrayal of female characters.

    Showalter's best known works are Toward a Feminist Poetics (1979), The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (1830–1980) (1985), Sexual Anarchy: Gender at Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990), Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997), and Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001). In 2007 Showalter was chair of the judges for the prestigious British literary award, the Man Booker International Prize.

    Showalter's book Inventing Herself (2001), a survey of feminist icons, seems to be the culmination of a long-time interest in communicating the importance of understanding feminist tradition. Showalter’s early essays and editorial work in the late 1970s and the 1980s survey the history of the feminist tradition within the “wilderness” of literary theory and criticism. Working in the field of feminist literary theory and criticism, which was just emerging as a serious scholarly pursuit in universities in the 1970s, Showalter's writing reflects a conscious effort to convey the importance of mapping her discipline’s past in order to both ground it in substantive theory, and amass a knowledge base that will be able to inform a path for future feminist academic pursuit.


    Showalter is concerned by stereotypes of feminism that see feminist critics as being ‘obsessed with the phallus’ and ‘obsessed with destroying male artists’. Showalter wonders if such stereotypes emerge from the fact that feminism lacks a fully articulated theory.
    Another problem for Showalter is the way in which feminists turn away from theory as a result of the attitudes of some male academics: theory is their property. Showalter writes: ‘From this perspective, the academic demand for theory can only be heard as a threat to the feminist need for authenticity, and the visitor looking for a formula that he or she can take away without personal encounter is not welcome’. In response, Showalter wants to outline a poetics of feminist criticism.
    In Toward a Feminist Poetics Showalter divides feminist criticism into two sections:
    The Woman as Reader or Feminist Critique : ‘the way in which a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening it to the significance of its sexual codes’; historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena’; ‘subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male–constructed literary history’; ‘concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film, and with the analysis of woman–as–sign in semiotic systems’; ‘political and polemical’; like the Old Testament looking for the errors of the past.
    One of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male–orientated. If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the limited roles women play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and experienced, but only what men thought women should be. […] The critique also has a tendency to naturalize women’s victimization by making it the inevitable and obsessive topic of discussion.
    The Woman as Writer or Gynocritics (la gynocritique) :
    Showalter coined the term 'gynocritics' to describe literary criticism based in a feminine perspective. Probably the best description Showalter gives of gynocritics is in Towards a Feminist Poetics:
    In contrast to [an] angry or loving fixation on male literature, the program of gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories. Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture.
    This does not mean that the goal of gynocritics is to erase the differences between male and female writing; gynocritics is not “on a pilgrimage to the promised land in which gender would lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and equal, like angels”. Rather gynocritics aims to understand the specificity of women’s writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental aspect of female reality. Its prime concern is to see ‘woman as producer of textual meaning, with the history themes, genres, and structures of literature by women’. Its ‘subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity. It studies linguistics and the problem of a female language in literary text. It reviews the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career. It proposes ‘to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on women’s experience’. Its study  ‘focuses on the newly visible world of female culture’; ‘hypotheses of a female sub–culture’; ‘the occupations, interactions, and consciousness of women’. It projects how ‘feminine values penetrate and undermine the masculine systems that contain them’. And at its extreme, it is ‘engaged in the myth of the Amazons, and the fantasies of a separate female society’.
    Showalter acknowledges the difficulty of “[d]efining the unique difference of women’s writing” which she says is “a slippery and demanding task” in “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”. She says that gynocritics may never succeed in understanding the special differences of women’s writing, or realize a distinct female literary tradition. But, with grounding in theory and historical research, Showalter sees gynocriticism as a way to “learn something solid, enduring, and real about the relation of women to literary culture”.
    Showalter then provides an exemplary feminist critique of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge to demonstrate that “one of the problems of the feminist critique is that  it is male-oriented,” meaning that, in some sense, every feminist critique, even when criticizing patriarchy, is focused toward the male. As an alternative, Showalter presents gynocritics as a way “to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather that to adapt to male models and theories.”
    To begin to trace out this radically female-centered theory, Showalter notes excerpts from feminist historians and sociologists. She then moves on to an engaging discussion of the experiences of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and other female authors to show the need for “completeness” in discussing women authors’ work way in which “it is necessary to leave oneself room to deal with other things besides [women writers'] work, so much has that work been influenced by conditions that have nothing whatever to do with art.”
    Beauvoir, Cixous and Showalter: The Trio of Feminist Literary Thought

    Three Phases:
    From these experiences, Showalter then begins a rough sketch of some of the elements that have characterized women’s writing: awakening, suffering, unhappiness, and matrophobia, among others. She concludes with her classification of women’s writing into three phases that “establish[es] the continuity of the female tradition from decade to decade, rather than from Great Woman to Great Woman.”
    Thus, Showalter traces the history of women's literature, suggesting that it can be divided into three phases:
    1. The Feminine phase (1840–1880): Showalter sees the first phases taking place from roughly 1840 to 1880; she calls this “the Feminine phase” and declares that it is characterized by “women [writing] in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture… The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym… [which] exerts an irregular pressure on the narrative, affecting tone, diction, structure, and characterization.”
    2. The Feminist phase (1880–1920): The second, Feminist phase follows from 1880 to 1920, wherein “women are historically enabled to reject the accommodating postures of femininity and to use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wronged womanhood.” This phase is characterized by “Amazon Utopias,” visions of perfect, female-led societies of the future. This phase was characterized by women’s writing that protested against male standards and values, and advocated women’s rights and values, including a demand for autonomy.
    3. The Female phase (1920— ) is one of self-discovery. Showalter says, “women reject both imitation and protest—two forms of dependency—and turn instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature”. Significantly, Showalter does not offer a characteristic sign or figure for the Female phase, suggesting a welcome diversity of experience that is too broad to be encompassed in a single image.
    Rejecting both imitation and protest, Showalter advocates approaching feminist criticism from a cultural perspective in the current Female phase, rather than from perspectives that traditionally come from an androcentric perspective like psychoanalytic and biological theories, for example. Feminists in the past have worked within these traditions by revising and criticizing female representations, or lack thereof, in the male traditions (that is, in the Feminine and Feminist phases). In her essay Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness (1981), Showalter says, "A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important differences between women as writers: class, race nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant as gender. Nonetheless, women’s culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space".
    Conclusion: On the whole, we may conclude that her views on feminist poetics are intelligent, largely devoid of rhetorical extremities, and confidently provocative. Showalter speaks with calmly convincing authority, as one who firmly believes in the verity of what she’s saying. She is both earnest, in that she sees change needing to occur immediately, and patient, in that she expects that, given time enough, the wisdom and truth of her cause will prevail.

    Additional Resources:

    An extraordinary criticism of the dangers of trying to talk for those who have no voice in society. Why? Because it is extremely hard to truly understand what you have only heard about, and not experienced. Watch Macat’s short video for a great introduction to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—one of the most important essays in the field of postcolonial studies ever written.




    References:


    • Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
    • Eagleton, Mary, editor. Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader.
    • Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
    • Leitch, Vincent B., editor. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
    • Showalter, Elaine. ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago, 1986. 125- 143
    • Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing.
    • Showalter, Elaine. “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” was originally published in Mary Jacobus's anthology Women Writing and Writing about Women (1979)
    •  Thompson, Zoë Brigley. The Midnight Heart. 'Toward a Feminist Poetics' by Elaine Showalter. << http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/towards_a_feminist/>
    • Tolan, Fiona. Feminisms. An Oxford Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Patricia Waugh. OUP. 2006.
    • Wikipedia contributors. "Elaine Showalter." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 Oct. 2013. Web. 27 Dec. 2022.
    • Witalec, Janet. Ed. Introduction" Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 169. Gale Cengage 2003 eNotes.com 27 Dec, 2022 http://www.enotes.com/topics/elaine-showalter#critical-essays-showalter-elaine-introduction