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The role of the women in Shakespeare
Role of women in shakespeare play
The role of women in Shakespeare's plays
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In 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman intentionally overdosed on chloroform. In 1941, Virginia Woolf filled the pockets of her overcoat with stones and walked into a river near her home. Thirty-three years later, in 1974, Anne Sexton put on her mother’s old fur coat, poured herself a glass of vodka and started the engine of her car in her locked garage. Within a span of less than fifty years, at least three prominent women writers were dead by their own hand. As time goes on, others will undoubtedly follow suit. As with any suicide, the question of “why” remains. The answer can be found in the works of Gilman, Woolf, and Sexton, which explore the consequences of “the heat and violence of a poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body”. (Woolf 416)
In her lengthy essay, A Room of One’s Own, Woolf invents a fictional sister for William Shakespeare, named Judith. Woolf describes Judith’s life, the life of a talented writer in a time where women were scarcely allowed to be literate. Judith, trapped by the expectations of women and compelled by creative genius she cannot express, eventually commits suicide. While Judith’s case, ending in suicide, may be a bit extreme, Woolf acknowledges that little good will come to a talented writer, especially if they are a woman, even more so in the sixteenth century:
“This may be true or it may be false – who can say? – but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.” (Woolf 417)
Anne Sexton echoes a sim...
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...talented female writers have died by their own hand, victims of their own contrary instincts. They have fallen prey to a madness that also plagued their literary sisters, a madness caused by a stifled passion, a passion that eventually finds its outlet through the means of a tragic and untimely death. By examining the lives and works attributed to Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, it is easy to see the price a woman must pay from possessing a poet’s heart.
Works Cited
Woolf, Virginia. "Shakespeare's Sister." 1929. Criticism: Major Statements. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000. 411-21. Print.
Sexton, Anne. "Her Kind." 1958. The Seagull Reader: Poems. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2008. 273-74. Print.
Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. "The Yellow Wallpaper." 1892. The Seagull Reader: Stories. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. 172-89. Print
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper. The Forerunner Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s Magazine. Charlton Co., New York, Volume 1, No. 1 November 1909.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” 1892. Ed. Dale M. Bauer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998.
Jane presents one aspect of woman in The Waking collection (1953): Ross-Bryant views Jane as a young girl who is dead. The poem expresses concern with the coming of death. This poignant elegy is presen...
Gilman, Charlotte “The Yellow Wallpaper” ”. The Seagull Reader: Stories. Ed. Joseph Kelly. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2001. 111-128.
Both Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard are extremely gifted writers. Virginia Woolf in 1942 wrote an essay called The Death of the Moth. Annie Dillard later on in 1976 wrote an essay that was similar in the name called The Death of a Moth and even had similar context. The two authors wrote powerful texts expressing their perspectives on the topic of life and death. They both had similar techniques but used them to develop completely different views. Each of the two authors incorporate in their text a unique way of adding their personal experience in their essay as they describe a specific occasion, time, and memory of their lives. Woolf’s personal experience begins with “it was a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months” (Woolf, 1). Annie Dillard personal experience begins with “two summers ago, I was camping alone in the blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia” (Dillard, 1). Including personal experience allowed Virginia Woolf to give her own enjoyable, fulfilling and understandable perception of life and death. Likewise, Annie Dillard used the personal narrative to focus on life but specifically on the life of death. To explore the power of life and death Virginia Woolf uses literary tools such as metaphors and imagery, along with a specific style and structure of writing in a conversational way to create an emotional tone and connect with her reader the value of life, but ultimately accepting death through the relationship of a moth and a human. While Annie Dillard on the other hand uses the same exact literary tools along with a specific style and similar structure to create a completely different perspective on just death, expressing that death is how it comes. ...
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." 1892. The New England Magazine. Reprinted in "Lives & Moments - An Introduction to Short Fiction" by Hans Ostrom. Hold,
Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. "The Yellow Wallpaper"." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Concise Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. 1597-1609. Print.
I have chosen to write about Virginia Woolf, a British novelist who wrote A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, to name a few of her pieces of work. Virginia Woolf was my first introduction to feminist type books. I chose Woolf because she is a fantastic writer and one of my favorites as well. Her unique style of writing, which came to be known as stream-of-consciousness, was influenced by the symptoms she experienced through her bipolar disorder. Many people have heard the word "bipolar," but do not realize its full implications. People who know someone with this disorder might understand their irregular behavior as a character flaw, not realizing that people with bipolar mental illness do not have control over their moods. Virginia Woolf’s illness was not understood in her lifetime. She committed suicide in 1941.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" Ed. Catherine Lavender; The College of Staten Island of the City University of New York, Fall Semester, Oct. 1997. (25 Jan 1999) http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The Story and Its Writer. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 462-473. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte P. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The story and its writer: An introduction to short fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 340-351.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories. Mineola: Dover, 1997. Print.
In the novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf successfully creates a unique form of writing through her experimentation with language that allowed her to break from the conventional writing style of her era to land into a radical modern style of literature. Her experimentation with writing came at a time where no women had a feminine voice in literature. Although, her new form of writing veered into a dimension unknown to the conventional style of writing, the novel was still able to capture the character’s fleeting internal thoughts, reactions, and struggles. Thus, Woolf’s use of techniques such as symbolism, structure organization, narrative voice and the unusual time treatment allowed her novel to express precisely the women condition and to plead the feminist enigma.
Virginia Woolfe was truly talented author, who wrote in the 1920's. She was considered a gifted woman and a pioneer for feminist authors yet she was plagued by mental illness from her youth until her suicide. She suffered from manic depression that was said to have been aggravated by her troubled youth. She experienced many traumas, including the death of her mother at age 13 and sexual abuse by her stepbrother at the age of 12. However Woolf was able to find temporary escape from her illness by using the characters in her novels to express her unusual and often disturbing thoughts and feelings about herself and the world around her. She was known for using several characters in each of her novels to express the different aspects of herself. In her novel To the Lighthouse she used the character Lily to express the anxiety she faced in trying to impress her father, however in her novel Mrs. Dalloway she used the character Clarissa to express her views on suicide where as in the same novel she used Septimus to express the pain she has had to endure from being mentally ill.
Many female writers see themselves as advocates for other creative females to help find their voice as a woman. Although this may be true, writer Virginia Woolf made her life mission to help women find their voice as a writer, no gender attached. She believed women had the creativity and power to write, not better than men, but as equals. Yet throughout history, women have been neglected in a sense, and Woolf attempted to find them. In her essay, A Room of One’s Own, she focuses on what is meant by connecting the terms, women and fiction. Woolf divided this thought into three categories: what women are like throughout history, women and the fiction they write, and women and the fiction written about them. When one thinks of women and fiction, what they think of; Woolf tried to answer this question through the discovery of the female within literature in her writing.