Feminism in literature

In my thesis, I examine the function and treatment of goddesses in six modern
feminist mythopoeic fantasy novels by Y olen, Shinn, and Harris. In these novels, the
goddesses and their worshippers serve as the agents of socio-political change within the
secondary world, inducing changes that end with the ultimate transformation of
oppressive social structures. Acknowledging these goddesses and incorporating them into
the fabric of communal life, the protagonists, and ultimately entire societies, are able
transcend issues of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and religion, in order to create a
peaceful and prosperous society. These novels work through many of the issues troubling
modern day feminist theorists and make important contributions to the discourse of
feminist spirituality and feminist theory as a whole. Extrapolating both a theory and
praxis from the texture of these fantasy narratives, I suggest that these stories offer a way
to transcend dichotomous thinking and escape the current stagnation of spirituality based
approaches to feminism.

In their comparative study of Medieval and Renaissance European women
writers, Pamela Benson and Victoria Kirkham, exploring the relationship between Italian
women writers and their English and French counterparts, assumed a "dynamic
interaction" existed.
Despite the absence of Spanish women writers in that collection when observing
the themes and writing strategies ofModerata Fonte and Maria de Zayas Sotomayor, one
can observe a number of similarities that points toward a dynamic interaction and
moreover, to the transmission of proto-feminist ideas along "memory chains".

In 1767, Mme Benoist published an epistolary libertine novel entitled Lettres du
Colonel Talbert. Although she has received little critical attention to date, she was a
prolific author who appeared with great regularity at minor literary salons. Her presence
at these salons is well-established in personal memoirs and correspondences, and actively
remarked upon by other authors—men and women—of the period, including Mme
Roland and Choderlos de Laclos. Mme Benoist’s preferred genre was the novel with its
explicit blend of high and low literary cultures, its melding of the philosophical and the
sentimental, its pursuit of formal innovation, and its deliberate marketing in multiple
formats and for multiple audiences, including publication through the mainstream book
market, and serial publication in revues and journals with a large female readership, such
as the Journal des Dames. This study focuses on Lettres du Colonel Talbert (1767) as
both a paradigmatic and privileged text inside Mme Benoist’s larger corpus, and one
which explicitly engages many of the most pressing moral and philosophical debates of the period, including the legal status of women. To do so, Mme Benoist appropriates the
libertine novel as specific novelistic subtype. In Les Lettres du Colonel Talbert, Mme
Benoist parodies the libertine novel and in doing so, converts the libertine textual
economy to one in which well-established narrative codes of femininity and masculinity
are inverted. Although her depiction of the heroine, Hélène—an exceptional and
courageous young woman who resists the predatory advances of a man through sheer
strength of moral character—is not in itself unusual, Mme Benoist’s choice to frame her
heroine’s moral struggle in a narrative epistolary exchange between two diametrically
opposed male “types” in enlightenment thought—the libertine and the honnête homme—
Mme Benoist effectively subverts masculine textual dynamics at the level of plot and
character. More importantly, she also subverts the libertine novel’s traditional
identification with masculine authorship.

Despite the designation of Olive Schreiner's Lyndall in The Story of an African Farm as the first "New Woman" in literature, the nineteenth-century New Woman, with her high ideals and belief in an androgynous compromise of sex roles, is exemplified by Fanny Fern's heroine Ruth in the novel Ruth Hall. While Lyndall speaks of social injustice done to women, the limitations of her provincial setting preclude her protests from achieving the level of social activism; however, Ruth's protests, in the form of newspaper articles, do reach the level of social activism. Schreiner's androgynous ideal becomes lost in a role reversal rather than role dissolution, while Fern's Ruth achieves the metamorphosis from voiceless stereotype to empowered woman, breaking established gender conventions. Ruth, revealed to the literary world before Schreiner's Lyndall, is not only an earlier New Woman but also a stronger and more successful New Woman.

Traditional fairy tales represent some of the oldest and most archetypal forms of literature. However, as humanity rapidly evolves, the genre and content of traditional fairy tales still operates as a prevalent socializing agent that fails to promote pluralism. Instead, traditional fairy tales illustrate and uphold limited gender roles and expectations. This paper examines Hermann Hesse's role as a pioneer in a now burgeoning movement of fairy tale revisions that blur boundaries between fantasy and reality by introducing specific, everyday locations, countries, and individuals coupled with a copious use of the double. This formula draws the reader into the tale via the uncanny and prompts a reevaluation of especially violent historical moments and issues that affect all within a society. Hesse's work within this new tradition of revisions of beloved fairy tales, as well as his creation of literary fairy tales, has significantly influenced the work of key postmodern feminist fairy tale revisionists like Jeanette Winterson.

Geoffrey Chaucer's narrator persona in The Legend of Good Women (LGW) goes through a transformation, starting off in the Prologue to the LGW as a naèive compilator who is subordinate to his literary sources, or auctores, and eventually becoming an auctor himself by the end of the Legends. To gain an authoritative voice, Chaucer's narrator criticizes auctoritee as it pertains to the antifeminist tradition and its misrepresentation of women as inherently wicked, in the process using certain rhetorical devices and other literary strategies to assert control over his sources for the Legends, as well as over the text as a whole. Of particular importance in this process is the narrator's line "[a]nd trusteth, as in love, no man but me" (2561) occurring near the end of "The Legend of Phyllis," the penultimate legend in the LGW. At this point in the text, the narrator persona steps completely outside of the role of compilator and presents himself as auctor who can be trusted by his female readers to tell their stories fairly and sympathetically, in ways that subtly confront antifeminist texts and perceptions.

Edith Wharton uses characterization in the primary three characters in The Age of Innocence to explore the aspects of her life. Early adulthood is represented by May Welland Archer, who was born into New York 400, where society suppressed an individual's emotions, aspirations, and freedoms. The intermediate phase of her life is depicted in Newland Archer, who tests the confining limits of the society to which he belongs and strives to understand the role of emotions in achieving personal satisfaction. Wharton rejected and craved the ties of the New York 400 in the final phase of her life as portrayed in Ellen Olenska who left the 400, lived in Europe, and returned to New York. By developing these characters, Wharton attempts to retrospectively reconcile the transformations she experienced. Indeed, it will be clear that Wharton's work serves as a personal assessment of her self-actualization.

This thesis represents a study of The Years by Virginia Woolf and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Both novels attempt to redefine the role of women in patriarchal society during the 1930s. The domestic role women had to fill within a masculine household constrained their ability to form an independent "self," apart from fathers and husbands. I argue that these novels articulate the possibility for women to access an independent self by examining the meaning behind domestic objects in and of the house. Lucy Irigaray asserts that women were, and still are, associated with being valued as a desirable "commodity". Since women have no choice but to work within the symbolic order and are already labeled as "object," women writers have manipulated the system by examining the subject/object dichotomy. The relationship women have with inanimate, and particularly domestic, objects shows how time (the past and the future) manipulates freedom in the present moment. Woolf's reflection on how "moments of being" function as gateways to a heightened sense of awareness is prevalent in her last published novel, The Years. I invoke Friedrich Nietzsche to consider notions of how an antiquated past hinders identity in du Maurier's Rebecca. In the literary texts of Woolf and du Maurier, women have a unique relationship with material objects in relationship to subjectivity. By examining the spatial constructs of the home, women are able to construct themselves as free "subjects" in a male dominated world.

Olive Schreine'rs novel, The Story of an African Farm, and nonfiction work, Woman and Labor, have compelled critics to apply the term New Woman to her main character, Lyndall, who speaks out for change against the established gender roles. The thesis proposes that by placing Lyndall in a colonial context, Schreiner creates a plot where place and language embody the possibilities for change. Considering that Schreiner's life consisted of a life in the colonies, first as a governess, later as a wife, one sees Schreiner's personal interest in change. Analyzing Schreiner's style of representing Lyndall's relationship with nature and other characters, one discovers the way Schreiner balances a feminist (and hence radical) shadow discourse of masochism with the discourses of nature and evolution. Schreiner registers an interest in change in her language by turning the linguistic-mental neighborhoods of Jane Austen inside out in favor of a more extrinsic language, the dialect of real South African neighborhoods. In her personal details, furthermore, Schreiner brings to life the language and landscape of her beloved country, creating the conceptual groundwork for political change. Read in this way, Olive Schreiner's work can be seen as creating space for more literature about social change like the award-winning work of the South African writer, Nadine Gordimer.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is, admittedly, a text with many racist, imperialist and sexist subtexts. A feminist literary analysis, however, can extract women's empowerment and agency. This thesis takes a closer look at the Mistress (also known as the African woman) and the Intended, two women with vastly different racial and class backgrounds who, in their own ways, demonstrate resistance. This thesis analyzes Mr. Kurtz's often ignored sketch in oils, arguing that the sketch itself demonstrates the colonial mentality of difference and the disruption of that difference. It then explores both the Mistress and the Intended in detail, positing that while the Mistress uses the colonizers' fear of the wilderness and its silence to her advantage, the Intended takes control over her own domestic circumstance. Overall, this author asserts that the Mistress and the Intended, while often dismissed, are noteworthy, important, and influential characters in Heart of Darkness.