Through an exploration of gender thinkers considering femininity as a lived experience of endemic repression in the first-wave concerns of Woolf to the struggle for objective representation without repercussion as delineated by Gilbert and Gubar, this essay will analyze the effects of a historically patriarchal literary landscape in reproducing a damaging hegemonic subjectivity. Adopting an Althusserian lens which recognizes ideal subject creation through dominant institutions realizes the difficulty of attaining an individual agency and producing against anon as a supposedly monstrous female creative, and subsequently heralds the bravery of the dynamic precursor in bearing the physical and psychological scars of social transgression. Considering the work of Cixous, we can observe how much content shapes the ideas of ever-changing feminism as seminal texts are consumed and reworked with an affectionate yet pragmatic approach as literary studies work to a universal sense of inclusion and representation.
When considering gender in light of literary studies, Virginia Woolf's early twentieth-century text, A Room of One's Own provides a foundational basis for recognizing the engrained marginalization of what one considers the figure of the woman. Indeed, her imagined tale of Shakespeare's Sister explores the potential possibilities of a sister as gifted as Shakespeare in what culminates as a tale of tragedy. That a woman excluded from educational facilities could hold the epithet of genius may appear a dubious claim, yet Woolf posits ‘genius of a sort must have existed amongst women’ of the era. Unlike the nurturing her male counterparts receive, the microcosmic woman is rather tortured in the erasure of her ‘own sense of her self’. Woolf's text can aptly lend itself to an Althusserian understanding of the created subject, the so-called ‘ideological state apparatus’ existing as a means of the subconscious and non-violent hegemony. Through institutions such as education, the family, and the church, the government state can convey dominant opinions to create obedient citizens of subjectivity through processes of reproduction. One can acknowledge within Woolf's work how the role of the family can be complicit in reproducing domestic ideologies, ‘the conditions of life for a woman’ constituting effectual grooming towards marriage as observed in ‘her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers’. Certainly, one can acknowledge the denoted effects of spatial constraint in molding pacified women, it indeed seeming ‘inevitable that women reared for privacy, reticence, domesticity might develop pathological fears of public places and unconfined spaces’.
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That Woolf imagines Shakespeare's sister as ‘took pity on (and) subsequently found herself with child’ when she effectually enters society can suggest that through the aforementioned processes of patriarchal reproduction, exteriorized existence is imagined as masculinized, unsanitized and dangerous. That the home is ultimately the only true realm of protection and safety instills a restrictive fear. Acknowledging the relationship between her socialization and physical body can support the notion that women ideally ‘become nothing but a bundle of nerves, in which control and restriction are naturalized and fragility emphasized. Indeed, if women are reduced to ‘nothing but’, they must lack the agency to create material that escapes subjectivity. Where Butler notes a conceptual ‘scene of constraint’, Woolf traces a historical struggle for ‘woman’ in a society that fails to consider and subsequently nurture her individual autonomy. Examining in detail the notion of ‘constraint’, Woolf's theorem aligns with Butler's practice of improvisation that underpins the concept of gender. Embodying the angelic, as explored in the later studies of Gilbert and Gubar, perpetuates a religiously influenced image of pity requiring a means of salvation. Where this allows a means of survival, albeit temporary in Woolf's narrative, that women must embody an angelic submissiveness to ensure their livelihood profligates a damaging and indeed constraining paradox of limitation. Normalizing and circulating a gender definition of ‘women’ which rejects the autonomy that can be held in ‘woman’ evidently restricts the prospective potential of the physical and intellectual feminine and addressing the topic of literature itself, reproduces a body of largely patriarchal literary work which perpetuates the aforementioned stereotypes and renders woman ‘anon’.
Yet when considering the concepts of gender from a twenty-first-century standpoint, whilst it is easy to critique in hindsight, it is nonetheless crucial to note that the work of considered forerunners such as Woolf herself is not wholly representative of collective women in so much as a confined sense of a woman. Examining both Shakespeare's sister and A Room of One's Own holistically, whilst they outline a gender limitation that will be an assumed basis for later literary theorists, the central claim that women require a ‘room to herself (and) - five hundred a year of her own’ to effectively thrive is a loaded one. Both middle and working-class women are indeed restricted to a particular sphere of expectation, yet one can posit that regarding Woolf's premise, ‘for some women to thrive, gain intellectual freedom, time and private space required to develop and be creative, another group of women (must) stand back’. Indeed, in imagining this denoted room one is inclined to consider the role of working-class women in its domestic upkeep, Woolf demonstrating a bias of her upbringing in failing to consider the financial unfeasibility of her premise for the very women that make it possible.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare's Sister engages with the overarching struggle of the female creative, and it is productive to note that Woolf outlines evidenced consequences for women when attempting to write and produce amongst a sea of male precursors. Where it may be easy to condemn a distant past of gendered inequality in light of improved educational inclusion and proto-feminist reference, Woolf's analysis finds some corroboration in Gilbert and Gubar's examination of Victorian literary culture, The Madwoman in the Attic. The pair note that within the literature of the nineteenth century, ‘incarnate patriarchal authorities - attempt to enclose (women) in definitions of person and potential, reducing her to extreme stereotypes (angel, monster)’ that subsequently affect both her creative process and indeed ‘her own self-her autonomy’. Furthermore, the notion of the female self and autonomy is taken further in Fetterley's supporting notion that this mass of masculinized literature ‘forces women readers to identify against themselves in reading it women have to think as men, identify with male viewpoints, accept male values and interests’. Exploring the impact surrounding the imagery of ‘angel’ and ‘monster’ for literary studies, that women are reduced to religiously underpinned binary opposition is a poignant process of debilitation by a society whose patriarchal values seep into prominent pedagogical institutions. In an argument that reaffirms the Althusserian notion of the 'ISA' within the church, women are forced into a debilitating scene of improvisation through fear of greater consequence which permits a pandering to engrained masculine desire. As asserted by Gilbert and Gubar ‘if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters’. Yet one can note how authors such as Bronte effectively employ the bildungsroman form to attempt to defy such patriarchal impositions, her titular Jane Eyre tells her own retrospective narrative in which she literally and metaphorically refuses to pacify herself; - am not an angel will be me - you must neither expect' asserting individual agency in the face of patriarchal idealism.
Elaborating on a presupposed narrative of consequence for women, the female creative examined in The Madwoman is said to be plagued with what the duo coin as the ‘anxiety of authorship', which takes a spin on Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence in which the poet wishes to equal or overpower their precursor's influence in a process of writing which relishes competition and rivalry. The anxiety of authorship rather takes into consideration the foundational work of theorists such as Woolf in suggesting that the act of writing for the female artist will be a physically and intellectually destructive struggle against ‘isolation - alienation - (and) obscurity'. In light of extensively patriarchal precursory work, the female artist is rather forced, albeit painfully, to attempt a legitimation of ’her own rebellious endeavors'. In an anxiety that stems from a self-defined ’inappropriateness to her sex', she looks to her foremothers whom history has obscured, attempting to assert and validate her individual agency as a ‘genius of a sort must have existed among women’ before her. That Gilbert and Gubar emphasize the ‘lost fore-mothers is an important note for gender-literary studies. To defy the obscurity of these forgotten sisters and effectively facilitate her sororal successors, one must proactively enact a sacrificial martyrdom in negotiating an alienation that manifests upon the body and mind as a disease. Where patriarchal culture assumes ‘mental exercises would have dire consequences', that a woman is prepared to battle with restrictive identifications at a cost to both health and honor can reason the noted ’fear of the intellectual woman'.
In an essay that can attempt to answer the denoted criticisms of its theoretical predecessors, Helene Cixous's The Laugh of the Medusa, published in 1975 within the second-wave feminist movement, can be acknowledged to work towards an intersectional feminist modernity. Cixous understands that women must take proactive action in regaining autonomy of their socio-literary construction by ‘writing her self’, constituting both class and race diversity through authentic narratives of a previously mystified experience as ‘almost everything is yet to be written about femininity’. Where Cixous' premise can be said to problematically rely on the effort of women in effectually cleaning up the representative failures of masculinized literature, she nonetheless attempts to reunite women with their bodied self in recognizing a lack of autonomy when one's form has been transubstantiated into a site of politicization and oppressively problematized. Writing as a woman of color, Cixous can be acknowledged to respond to the narrow perspective that infects Woolf's work. In writing ‘woman’, she creates through an undefinable but 'inevitable struggle' a tragic image where patriarchal oppression is endemic of a collective feminine experience exclusive of race and class. In positing that a 'universal woman subject - must bring women to their senses', it is only through coming to know and loving the Old in the efforts and realities of our literary and theoretical foremothers that we can speak of the privilege of a universal approach as theories of gender are approached and revised amongst developing social climates.
In conclusion, literary studies understand the difficulty of production for the prospective feminine creative when constraining expectations of her force a performative improvisation. Where Gilbert and Gubar view femininity as subjected to a restrictive binary opposition in women having to accept the piteous figure of male interest, Woolf's work connects the domestic existence with a superficially protective binding as the sense of a world outside the symbolic door is purposely unprepared for and subsequently unnavigable. Through the anxiety of authorship, literary studies acknowledge the great obstacles that must be overcome for the historically marginalized to feel they can legitimize their creative endeavors and recognizes the power of a patriarchal landscape in obscuring the potential capabilities of a historical multitude. Whilst Cixous effectively pushes for revisionary female authorship that privileges an autonomous experience, a perspective of such privilege can only emerge through the recognizing analysis of gender theory in denoting the physical and psychological effects that accompany the act of writing in a society that aims to reproduce spatial and intellectual constraints to its women.
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