Victorian Literature: Anglo-American Feminism, French Feminism

ssignment Title comparing and Assess at least 2 of the following approaches in womens liberationist theory, with illustration from two of the puritanical texts you shit studied Anglo-Ameri posterior feminist movement french Feminism Socialist or bolshy Feminism feminist approaches influenced by Foucault. I decl ar that this is my get hold up and that I arrest followed the code of academic good conduct and wee-wee sought, where necessary, advice and guidance in the proper presentation of my work. Sig record Date Compare and Assess at least two of the following approaches in feminist theory, with illustration from two of the puritanical texts you constitute studied Anglo-American Feminism French Feminism Socialist or Marxist Feminism Feminist Approaches influenced by Foucault. Feminist theory like psychoanalytic theory is relatively neo in its creation. The immergence of feminist literary theories can be linked to the bring out banish of fe mannish political upri infe rnog in the early ordinal snow.The French Revolution marked the beginning of a fight for the obtaining of womens rights to index finger and equality in society. Elaine Showalter comments that the ideological socially acceptable suck in of niminy-piminy women as a whole can be seen as prescribe a woman who would be a Perfect Lady, an Angel in the Ho employ, contently submissive to men, but strong in inner purity and religiosity, milksop in her own realm of the Home. (Victorian Womens Poets, rogue 13)Feminist theory is segregated into recognise imagine points of feminism as a whole French Feminism analyses literature from a perspective of a psychoanalytic view, drawing upon the work of Lacan to highlight view points. It helps to analyse the ways in which women are positioned in society in the text and how they can be perceive to be cut downed. Marxist Feminism takes its inspiration from how the women can be perceived to be oppressed in literature. American feminism anal yses literature from a textual expressive view point. altogether feminist out looks throw away their issues which provide flaws into their argument. To be sure, most feminist thinkers today assume that nurture, at the very least, qualifies nature. Recently, however, a number of postgeomorphologicist theorists deploying both male and womanish signatures put up claimed that there is no sexual urgeed reality, that the concepts of man and woman are, as some would cast it, always already fictive since human identity is itself a tenuous, textually produced epiphenomenon. (No Mans Land. rapscallionxv).Wuthering high by Emily Bronti provided feminist critics with a canvas of a examples of marginally autobiographical Victorian gynocentrism. The production of text from a woman, looking at the fierceness placed on the egg-producing(prenominal) place in the history of the text, the structural placing of women and the thematic view of women in the text. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that women sources such as Emily Bronti had been gobped into the billets that society has manipulated, as they were trapped against the patriarchal view of the angel of the house.However even thought there is a desire for this view to be usurped, Bronte still curtails herself to societys expectations by debilitating and eventually killing away of the strong rebellious charcter of Catherine, emphasising her own fear of what the female form in which she was writing. Gilbert and Gubars reading of Wuthering Heights classes it as a A rule book of Hell. (Gilbert, S & Gubar, S. Mad woman in the attic) The classification of Wuthering heights as a living brilliance is created in type by the Byronic sub of Heathcliff.Although Gilbert and Gubar look into the curtailment of women be confined to the house, trapped into fortitude by domesticity, Wuthering Heights provides Catherine with her own sense of control where she can break social confinements. Yet Catherine chooses to be confined by domesticity and social patriarchate by marrying Edgar Linton. Bronte does however portray the confusion Catherine feels in making her pick between what she desires and what is socially expected You love Mr Edgar because he is handsome, and young, and cheerful, and rich and loves you. The last, however, goes for vigor You would love him without that, probably, and with it, you wouldnt, unless he possessed the four former attr exertions. (Wuthering Heights, scallywag 119)Through the use of the mo generation Cathy, Bronte allows the correction from cultural to natural choice to be make via the successful relationship between Cathy and Hareton.Kristeva comments on the text presses the linguistic sign to its limits, the semiotic is fluid, plural, a kind of pleasurable creative extravagance over precise meaning and it takes sadistic delight in destroying or negating such signs. (Literary Theory an introduction). The dual nature of narration in the raw serves thematic purposes, in that both provide commentary on the role of women in society. The feminist nature of the novel can be seen done Lockwoods comments on the success of Nellys fib story telling.Bronte manipulates the Victorian view that women have innate frailty and makes a parody out if the view by portraying Catherines illness as a strength in which she is manipulating those nigh her through Nellys perception I wasted no condolences on miss, nor whatever expostulations on my mistress, not did I pay attention to the sighs of my master, who yearned to hear his ladys name, since he might not hear her voice. (Wuthering Heights, page 158) Catherines subsequent illness shows itself in the form of a disillusioned madness.Brontes use of this madness is to offer uncloudedness to the social structure that the very cultural expectations of Catherine are the things that cause the feared roughshod nature to develop This feather was picked up from the heath, the bird was shot we see its nes t in the winter, full of little skeletons. Heathcliff set a trap over it, and the old ones dare not come. I made him bargain hed never shoot a lapwing, after that, and he didnt. Yes, here are more Did he shoot my lapwings, Nelly? Are they red, any of them? Let me look. (Wuthering Heights, Page 160) Gilbert and Gubar view Catherines imprisonment in Thrushcross Grange as the reason for her being trapped into a feminine madness Imprisonment leads to madness, solipsism, paralysis starvation both in the modern sense of malnutrition and the old Miltonic sense of freeze (to starve in ice) leads to weakness, immobility and death. (Rylance, Page 253) Catherines embracing of Victorian societal views that kept her from being with Heathcliff. Included in these views are the expectations of women.It is important to job because the awareness of social standing and gender in this example prevent true love prevailing. Bronte also argues that Catherines inability to resist social emulation is reflective of the oppressive power of the social structure of the Victorian society. Bronte feminises Lockwood by giving him the typically female characteristic of frailty, according to Beth Newman Lockwoods supine passivity (he is bed ridden during most of her narrative) suggests that he is in the feminine position with rate to Nellys controlling gaze. (Gender, Narration and Gaze in Wuthering Heights, Page 1034). Emily Bronte portrays Hareton as a model man who does not fear women but does not repress them either, this is marked through his not hiding away from Cathys advancesHelene Cixous has written that the medusa who has terrorized the male subject, looked at straight on, is actually beautiful and Laughing Bronte has uncannily anticipated Cixouss analysis of the masculine fear of the womans gaze in suggesting that Hareton, solely among the male characters in the novel, is able to laugh back. (Gender, Narration and Gaze in Wuthering Heights, Page 1037). The splitting and f ragmentation of Catherines feminine desire through the deprivation of a stable identity, she is Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff and Catherine Linton at the same time. The theme of heaven and hell is prevalent most through Heath cliffs representation as a satanic wild figure that should be feared. Bronte links Heathcliff to the wildness of nature through his name he becomes one with the heath surrounding the heights.Catherine expresses her own desire to be associated with Heathcliff through If I were in Heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable. Because you are not fit to go there, I answered. all(a) sinners would be miserable in heaven. I was only going to utter that heaven did not seem to be my home and it broke my kindling with weeping to come back to earth and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the place of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy. (Wuthering Heights, Page 121) Bronte uses the binary program program opposition to emphasise Catherines ideal of Heaven being Heathcliff.Yet cod to the confinement of social expectation Catherine turns her back on Heaven and places herself in the Hell that is Thrushcross Grange causing a fragmented version of herself to become her existence. Kristeva comments on Wuthering Heights lack of ability to have a simplistic narrative form, there is a use of multiple genres to create the complex binary oppositions. The use of the re-emergence of the choice between patriarchy and desire through Cathy has the heading of articulating the mother-child relation as a site for both affirm the archaic force of the pre-oedipal, which although repressed is thus also preserved.Both affirm the fluid, polymorphic perverse status of libidinal drives and both evoke a series of sites of bodily pleasure capable of resisting the demands of the symbolic order. (Jacques Lacan A feminist Introduction, Page 149) Thus, although Wuthering Heights ends in cosy domesticit y, the gaps in its enunciation express a feminist resistance to the patriarchal order in which its story partly acquiesces for the narrative undercuts the condition of its own telling even while implicating them in specular economy that fetishizes and appropriates women. (Gender, Narration and Gaze in Wuthering Heights, Page 1039)Christina Rossettis imp market place expresses the frustrations from enforced female passivity, articulating bitterness about being the second sex, and the limitations on female potential this is evident through out the poem, culminating as two women become what Victorian patriarchy predetermines, wives and mothers. hob Market shows women in social relations, in grocery economies in literary history and women in sexual economics. Elizabeth Helsinger explains that Goblin Market is A feminist utopia based on sisterhood against male domination and the male market or a legitimating of separate spheres? Victorian studies, 1991). Goblin Market allows Rossett i the opportunity to escape the archaic patriarchy and create a fantasy realm.Rossetti allows Lizzie and Laura an insight into the male commodities of male utopia that is the market place, and how to success to the full regain equal control. This is a morally nonsense poem, which puts apparitional myth and sexual temptation into a market economy which is interminably unstable. (Victorian Womens Poets, Page 138). Rossettis creation of sisterly solidarity gives a feminine outlook tweet me, kiss me, suck my juices Squeezed from hob fruits for you,Goblin pulp and Goblin Dew. ingest me, drink me, love me For your sake I have braved the glen And had to do with goblin merchant men. (A Choice of Christina Rossettis verse, Page 16). The sexual suggestiveness of Goblin Market has undoubtedly made it a compelling work for feminist readers concerned with what constitutes a clearly female imagination. (A harmony of Thine own. Victorian Womens Poets, Page 50). Goblin Market, the agnomen poem of Christina Rossettis first volume, is the questioning feminine discourse it masks. (A Music of Thine own Womens Poetry. Victorian Womens Poets, Page 49)Rossettis representation of sexuality is not in the name calling or images she finds but in the structure of the whole poem with its reiterate tasting. (A Music of Thine own Womens Poetry. Victorian Womens Poets, Page 49) In many consider Goblin Market is directly contradictory to many nineteenth century views about the role of the woman poet. Mary Ann Stoddart, 1842, defines the sphere of the poetess as All that is beautiful in form, delicate in sentiment, graceful in action will form the peculiar province of the gentle powers of women. Goblin Market can be said to have none of these qualities.This metrical indulgence, gives Goblin Market a sensual art for arts sake, which is usually reserved for male poets, making this offering to the public by a poetess incompatible with Victorian notions of female poetic beauty Laura performs a familiar role in literary history that of the fallen Eve. She relinquishes herself to the sexual temptation offered by the perversive goblin men. Her sin is compounded by prostitution in sell a lock of her hair in return for the fruits. This can be viewed as an act of rape the goblins cut her hair for payment, when, at the time, a womans hair was a somewhat sacred thing.The fallen woman is a common figure in literature, however, because she comes from the creative mind of a female poet the representation comes to have a few problems in its interpretation. Yet still, Laura receives her salvation, from her sin of eating the fruit, through the self-sacrificing actions of her sister. Lizzie plays the male role of redemption. While Rossetti can be viewed in opposition to the Victorian ideals of female creativity, there is an inhering conservatism in her work that creates problems with the idea of her being a sincerely radical or feminist writer.Unlike the other Pre-Raphae lite poets, Rossetti does not embrace atheism, but rather adheres to a strict Anglo-Catholic credence Goblin Market is Christina Rossettis most remarkable long poem. She was also a writer of consummate lyrics. What can be called the feminine discourse which respondes to the aesthetics of face and repression overflow and barrier, in Goblin Market, is also at work in her short poems. (A music of thine ownWomens Poetry, Victorian Womens Poets, Page 54).Through both of the texts analyzed it is important to notice that as Showalter states that it is in fact, female imagination cannot be treated by literary historians as a romantic or Freudian abstraction. It is the product of a delicate network of influences operating in a time, and it must be analyzed as it expresses itself, in talking to and in a fixed arrangement of words on a page, a form that itself is subject to a network of influences and conventions, including the operations of the marketplace. (Victorian Womens Poets, Page 12) Both Emily Bronte and Christina Rossetti were classed as typically romantic Victorian womens writers.However this view is highly problematic as both women try to break the curtailments of Victorian archaic patriarchy in their work, constantly testing and pushing the boundaries of female authorship Romance fiction deals above all with the doubts and delights of heterosexuality, an institution which feminism has seen as problematic from the start. In thinking about this problem I myself have found the psychoanalytic framework most useful since it suggests that the acquisition of gendered subjectivity is a process, a movement towards the social self , fraught with conflicts and never fully achieved.Moreover, psychoanalysis takes the question of pleasure seriously, both in its relation to gender and in its understanding of fictions as fantasies, as the explorations and productions of desires which may be oversupply of the socially possible or acceptable. It gives us ways into the discussion of familiar culture which can avoid the traps of moralism or dictatorship. (Romance Fiction, Female sexuality and class. Page 142)