Myth of the Angry Black Woman

Well, Heilbrun hits the ground running in the first chapter of Reinventing Womanhood. She begins with the supposition that “To be a feminist one had to have had an experience of being an outsider more extreme than merely being a woman.” According to Heilbrun, the isolating effect of feminism (often dividing women from their own gender)  causes women to capitulate to conventional society.

Heilbrun believes this is less likely if one already suffers from social isolation due to sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious affiliation, ect. There is less to lose by adopting feminist beliefs, expressing a feminist voice, or taking feminist action. Being a woman and a member of one of these groups places a double burden on one’s identity.

She uses the African American woman as an example:

Black women are thus peculiarly vulnerable: they are objects both of racism and sexism. What has not perhaps been equally emphasized is the possibility that that very condition has enable them to succeed where black men have failed. The strength of women throughout the black experience has too often been distorted in order to illuminate the perils of black manhood rather the strengths of black womanhood.

I, myself, have often heard the Matriarchal strength of the African American woman attributed to the lack of a masculine presence. In other words, many claim African American woman became strong because they had to be. They lacked the luxury of a protective male pressence. So yet again, woman is defined by her relationship to man.

Heilbrun is arguing that since African American women are faced with the burden of racism they are less afraid to deal with the burden of sexism. They are not afraid to assert their own autonomy.

Heilbrun’s arguement challenges the idea that women become strong when left on their own and insists that quite often women find themselves alone because they are strong.

Pagan Bridehead: Imagery of Feminine Oppression and Independence in Jude the Obscure

If I had been born in Victorian England, I probably would have been Sue Bridehead. Always moved by my conscious, opposed to convention, and unable to hold my tongue, I surely would have met with the same tragic fate as Thomas Hardy’s unfortunate heroine.In Jude the Obscure, Hardy creates the ultimate anti-Victorian woman who embodies the classical ideas of reason and speculative thought believed to be beyond the powers of her sex. Sadly for Sue, she maintains her independence only as long as she can adhere to her unconventional ideas–vacillating throughout the story between oppression and independence.

When Hardy first turns the narrative to Sue’s perspective, she is enamored with a pair of Greek statuettes. In a nostalgic era when “the Gothic was understood as a style that expressed spiritual goodness, truth, and the properly reverent relationship between humanity and God” (Wilkins 426), Sue’s appreciation for classical art, architecture, and literature is intended to emphasize her rejection of such sensibilities. Sue’s purchase of the statuettes, Apollo and Venus, symbolically represent her personal guiding principles of reason and love. These two values diametrically oppose the prescribed guiding principles of Victorian convention, faith and duty. We can see an example of this in a popular hand book of the period. Sara Stickney Ellis admonishes the women of England: “You have deep responsibilities, you have urgent claims; a nation’s moral wealth is in your keeping” (Ellis 13).

By aligning Sue’s individual nature with “pagan” ideology, Hardy creates a catalyst that allows her to deviate from Victorian conformity and assert her own independence. In 1893, Emile Durkeim originally published The Division of Labor in Society, in which he discusses the idea of internal and external influences on human behavior:

There are in each of us . . . two consciences: one which is common to our group in its entirety, which, consequently, is not ourself, but society living and acting within us; the other, on the contrary, represents that in us which is personal and distinct, that which makes us an individual.
(http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Durkheim/DIVLABOR.HTML)

As Durkeim points out, Sue’s nature has not developed in a social vacuum. She is aware of Victorian codes of conduct, and the consequences of not adhering to them. If her “personal and distinct” nature mirrored or complimented the aspects of “society living and acting within” her, there would be no internal conflict pushing her to seek independence. Instead, Sue is faced with the constant tension of acting as one should act or as one wants to act–the decision to conform and play the role of a submissive dependent or to deviate and act as a self-defining independent woman.

The extent to which an individual identifies with the self or with the group determines the extent to which he/she will conform. When the reader first encounters Sue, she is estranged from her father and living alone in Christminster. Like many Victorian writer’s, Hardy has created a heroine devoid of family ties in order to facilitate her unorthodox independence. As noted by Rodney Stark in his 6^th Edition of Sociology, “the causes of conformity are the social bonds between an individual and the group. When bonds are strong, the individual conforms; when these bonds are weak, the individual deviates” (200).

Throughout the novel, Hardy uses imagery as well rhetoric to illustrate Sue’s level of conformity. When Jude first encounters Sue, she is illuminating manuscripts in a shop that “seemed to be kept almost entirely by women” (Hardy 91). The presence of Sue and the other women in a successful shop that sells Christian paraphernalia is an indication of how well they have conformed to social expectations. Unfortunately for Sue, this position is revoked when her true values are discovered, establishing the relationship between oppression and social acceptance.

While attending a training school in Melchester, Sue develops “the air of a woman clipped and pruned by severe discipline” (Hardy 136) metaphorically expressing the severe oppression of her individuality. Later, during an excursion with Jude, Sue is temporarily relieved of the school’s oppressive atmosphere and Hardy likens her to “a shepherdess” (142). By mirroring the pagan symbolism of pastoral poetry, Hardy invokes tension between innocence and seduction. We see here that Sue longs to be free, but is still afraid to act, secretly longing for external circumstances that will liberate her from her captivity.

Later, when she escapes from an imposed imprisonment at the training school, Sue arrives at Jude’s door “clammy as a marine deity . . . her clothes clung to her like the robes upon the figures in the Parthenon freezes” (Hardy 149). It is in this ultimate act of defiance that Sue’s external appearance best reflects her internal beliefs. Represented as a classical Goddess, Sue is the antithesis of a demure Christian woman. Her behavior has severe social consequences, however, and she is forced into a marriage with a much older man in order to save her reputation.

Marriage to a man almost two decades her senior was an undesirable arrangement even by Victorian standards:

A considerable disproportion between the ages of the husband and the wife is to be avoided . . . there should not be between three to five years in difference. (Ruddock 112)

The disparity between partners compounds Sue’s marital oppression culminating in the image of the “little nest” of rugs created in the cramped quarters of a closet. This small personal space carved out of a larger living space mirrors the repression of Sue’s personal ideology within the larger influence of social ideology.

When Sue voluntarily returns to Phillotson’s sickbed after he has released her, she uses a swinging mirror to “catch the sunshine, moving the glass till the beams were reflected on Phillotson’s face” (Hardy 257). This image visual repeats the shift in the marital relationship. Just as Sue reflects light into the oppressive atmosphere of the antiquated house, Sue uses the light of reason to obtain her release from an oppressive marriage.

After losing her children in a tragic murder suicide, Sue falls into a deep depression. Believing she is responsible for the death of their children, Sue’s grief alienates her from Jude, the only individual who supports her ideology. Without this bond, Sue reverts to her former habit of conformity. As she admits earlier in the novel, on her own she does not have the “strength of her convictions”. However, this final submission to the oppression of social convention will be a fatal blow to her individuality and therefore her independence.

Hardy illustrates this symbolically when Jude finds her sobbing at the church:

High overhead, above the chancel steps, Jude could discern a huge, solidly constructed Latin cross—as large, probably, as the original it was meant to commemorate. It seemed to be suspended in the air by invisible wires; it was set with large jewels, which faintly glimmered in some weak ray caught from outside, as the cross swayed to and fro in a silent and scarcely perceptible motion. Underneath, upon the floor, lay what appeared to be a heap of black clothes . . . something white disclosed itself; she had turned up her face (Hardy 358).

Finding Sue prostrate beneath a life size cross obviously evokes a sentiment of self sacrifice. The jewels of the cross only faintly reflect the light of reason that Sue once worshipped. Instead, it sways back and forth hypnotically emphasizing the irrationality of faith. Sue’s black garb and white face merge her image with that of death itself.

With the publication The Division of Labor in Society just one year before the serialized version of Jude the Obscure, it appears Hardy was familiar with Durkheim’s theories of social control. By incorporating these ideas into the theme of the novel, Hardy was able to examine and symbolically depict the nature of feminine oppression and independence in Victorian England.

Works Cited

 

Durkheim, Emile. Trans. By George Simpson. Division of Labor in Society.

New York: Free Press. 1947. 2 September 1999.  <http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Durkheim/DIVLABOR.HTML>

Ellis, Sara Stickney. The Women of
England, Their social Duties and   

domestic Habits.
London: Fisher, Son & Co. 1839. Indiana University Libraries,
Bloomington, IN. 3 March 2006[PT] <http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/ellis/womeneng.html>.

Ruddock M.D., E. H. The Lady’s Manual of Homeopathic Treatment. Ninth

Edition.
London: Homeopathic Publishing Company. 1886.

Stark, Rodney. Sociology.  Sixth Ed. New York:
Wadsworth Publishing

Company. 1996

Wilkins, David G, Bernard Schultz and Katheryn M Linduff. Art Past Art

Present. Second Ed.
New York: Harry N Abrams, Inc. 1994.

Who is Carolyn G. Heilbrun?

Lest the Modern Matriarch readers think this is a website devoted to Virginia Woolf, here’s a little biographical information about the next author I will be reading/disscussing. Carolyn G. Heilbrun was a Humanities professor at Columbia University who specialized in feminist theory. 

Heilbrun also wrote detective novels under the pen name Amanda Cross. She explains her choice to use a pseudonym in her book Writing a Woman’s Life:

I had very good reason for secrecy, but as I now perceive, the secrecy itself was wonderfully attractive. Secrecy is power. True, one gives up recognition and publicity and fame, should any be coming one’s way, but for me that was not difficult . . . I think that the secrecy gave me a sense of control over my destiny that nothing else in my life, in those pre-tenure, pre-woman’s movement days, afforded.

Heilbrun is passionate about the cultural narratives of women’s lives and has had an unmistakable impact on women’s memoirs. I highly recommend Writing a Woman’s Life to aspiring writers. Although I do not always agree with everything Heilburn has to say, her dedication to the feminine narrative is unsurpassed, making her one of the most influential voices of the 20th century.

With chapters like “Woman as Outsider” and “Women Writers and Female Characters: The failure of Imagination,” Reinventing Womanhood should prove to be just as challenging.

Woolf’s Advice for Women Writers

In the fourth chapter of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf finally begins to address women’s writing. Her observations and advice are still relevant today. She discusses the difference between books that are destined for longevity and those destined for obscurity.

A great novel contains what Woolf calls “integrity”:

What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one the truth . . . when one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims with rapture, But this is what I have always known and desired! (72)

It is this quality that has elevated books from mere novels to classics. Many other books are written then quickly forgotten:

If, on the other hand, these poor sentences that one takes and tests rouse first a quick and eager response with their bright colouring and their dashing gestures but there they stop: something seems to check them in their development: or if they bring to light only a faint scribble in that corner and a blot over there, and nothing appears whole and entire, then one heaves a sigh of disappointment and says, Another failure. (72-73)

Another fascinating aspect of chapter four, is Woolf’s admonishment against misplaced rhetoric in literature. She begins the chapter acknowledging the unique struggle of the female writer, and the social pressures under which she is subject, but also cautions women from allowing these issues to spill over into their writting unchecked:

Now, in the passages I have quoted from Jane Eyre, it is clear that anger was tampering with the integrity of Charlotte Bronte the novelist. She left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance . . . Her imagination swerved from indignation and we feel it swerve. (73)

Although Jane Eyre is one of my favorite classic novels, I understand the comparison that Woolf makes between Bronte’s novel and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:

[Bronte] was admitting that she was “only a woman,” or protesting that she was “as good as a man.” She met criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. (74)

Jane Austen on the other hand was one of those that “did not budge to the right or to the left”:

What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the one thing as they saw it without shrinking. (74)

What Woolf found most remarkable was that “they wrote as women write, not as men write” (74). Woolf acknowledged that in a patriarchal society, masculine values prevailed:

Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial.” And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room. (74)

The same can still be said today. Not only of books, but films as well. Unfortunately, women of the 21st century are not only subject to “patriarchal” bias but “feminist” bias as well. This is a slippery slop for many of us. When is a woman enabling stereo-types and when is she manifesting her true values.

Woolf indicates that these issues should not be a concern when writing good fiction. Allow characters to be who they are and to act true to their nature, instead of using them as a mouth piece to vent your own frustrations.

Film vs. Literature: Perspective on ‘The Holiday’

Yesterday, my husband and I watched the Nancy Meyers film, The Holiday (starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Jack Black, and Eli Wallach) which revealed an interesting dichotomy. 

In the film, Cameron Diaz plays an LA editor who runs her own company that specializes in movie trailers. Her home is filled with walls of DVD’s and audio/video equipment. Kate Winslet plays an English writer who lives in a “quaint” rural cottage stuffed with books and no noticeable indication of even a TV! Wearing layers of clothes and heating the apparently ancient edifice with two fireplaces, she does not appear to have the same economic power as her LA counterpart or the same level of influence within her industry. Hmmm.

Winslet’s love interest, Jack Black appears to be a self-sustained film composer while Jude Law, who plays Diaz’s love interest (as well as Winslet’s brother) appears to be a very successful English editor. Hmmm.

Now my husband is not originally from the United States, and often views things from an interesting perspective. Taking this brief overview of the film into consideration, my husband’s question may not surprise you, “Do the English read books more than Americans?” At first, I denied the assumption. I began a structural explanation of how location and profession where being utilized to emphasize the opposing nature of both character’s, but then I stopped and thought about the summer I studied in England.

The school I attended was in Surry-Rheohampton, just outside of London. I often took public transportaion into and around the city. I remember riding in the Tube (the London subway system) and being amazed by how many people where actually reading during their commute. Could my husband be on to something? The English definitely have the advantage in literary legacy. And America is, after all, the home of Hollywood.

You may at this point expect me to lament the lack of literary appreciation or ambition in this country; to chastise consumer obsession with film and television, but I will not. In fact, I believe I have done this forum a serious diservice by excluding film from discussion. As an undergraduate, I took a very fascinating “English course” about film.

In his book Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain hypothesizes that “when a critical mass of people within a society acquire literacy, especially alphabet literacy, left hemispheric modes of thought are reinforced at the expense of right hemispheric ones, which manifests as a decline in the status of images, women’s rights, and goddess worship” (viii). (Shlain relates the left brain with what I call rational ways of being and the right brain with what I call intuitive ways of being–see “Replacing the Terms ‘Masculine’ and ‘Feminine’”) Therefore, I will be updating the purpose of this blog to include the representation of women in both film and art.

Earn up to $50,000 a Year to Complete that Writing Project

Virginia Woolf predicted in in 1929:

in a hundred years women will cease to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them. The nursemaid will heave coal. The shop-woman will drive an engine.

As women have surged forward into the work force, Corporate America kept pace. Maybe not with wages, but certainly with expenses. Most financial experts agree that it takes two incomes to survive in our contemporary culture. This creates unique obstacles for female authors of the 21st century. 

If you’re married, you’re probably juggling multiple roles: wife, mother, housekeeper, cook, working professional. If you’re single, you’re probably trying to get by on a salary that is entirely too small for today’s outrageous living expenses.  

If you are truly dedicated to your craft, there maybe hope. A Room of Her Own is a Foundation for Women Artists and Writersand they may be able to help. With their annual Gift of Freedom, the foundation attempts to further “the vision of writer Virginia Woolf by bridging the often fatal gap between a woman’s economic reality and her artistic creation”.

Like most grants, competition is stiff and will require a lot of follow up work  (quarterly reports and mentor-ship) but as former winner Meredith Hall says:

This grant offers exactly what it promises: the gift of time, of freedom from our obligations to others, to wage-earning, to home and its constant needs.

Click here for more information on A Room of Her Own Foundation.

Also see Poets & Writers for other Grant opportunities.

Manifesting the Internal: Circumventing the Imposed Editor

As  writers, our greatest nemesis is the internal editor. Entire workshops are dedicated to mapping, free-writing, and other techniques to circumvent this suppressor of our creativity. 

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf implies that this internal censor is rooted in scholastic tradition which emphasizes structure and categorization. Using the research scene in the British Museum, Woolf satirically compares the academic approach to the narrators approach:

The student who has been trained at Oxbridge has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs into its answer as a sheep runs into its pen. The student by my side, for instance, who was copying assiduously from a scientific manual was, I felt sure , extracting pure nuggets of the essential ore every ten minutes or so. His little grunts of satisfaction indicated so much (28). . .glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. (30)

Although, on the surface this appears to be self-deprivation, Woolf is actually emphasizing the need for a less linear approach in women’s writing. Throughout, her treaty on economic and creative freedom, Woolf’s narrator continually contradicts her own internal editor. An obvious example lies in the first chapter:

As I have said already that it was an October day, I dare not forfeit your respect and imperil the air name of fiction by changing the season and describing lilacs hanging over garden walls, crocuses, tulips and other flowers of spring. Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction–so we are told.

After quoting a verse by Christina Rossetti which invokes images of spring, the narrator defies this rule:

the lilac was shaking its flowers over the garden walls, and the brimstone butterflies were scudding hither and thither, and the dust of the pollen was in the air. A wind blew, from what quarter I know not, but it lifted the half-grown leaves so that there was a flash of silver grey in the air.

Woolf prefaces the shift with the phrase: “it was nothing of course but a fancy” but it is a fancy that she indulges. Woolf does not shepherd her narratives past distractions, but follows them, exhausting all of the tributaries before returning to the main river of thought, inventing what would become known as the stream of conciousness.

Through the use of stream of conciousness, Woolf believed women could break free of imposed patriarchal ideologies and externally manifest the unique aspects of the internal world of women.

Virginia Woolf Audio

In this BBC audio clip, Virginia Woolf helps us better understand her obsession with language and how the words we choose influence what we think on multiple levels. She explains why words are more than just phonic assemblies with finite definitions. Words evolve and contain connotative as well as denotative meanings.

“a eulogy to words” Virginia Woolf: April 29th, 1937

Famous Feminist Suffered from Penis Envy?

Sigmund Freud first introduced the theory of penis envy in his 1908 article “On the Sexual Theories of Children,” and expanded on the idea in his 1914 On Narcissism.

In Freud’s theory, women suffered from castration anxiety due to the realization that they did not have a penis.

In a Room of One’s Own,Virgina Woolf appears to reference this Victorian anxiety metaphorically in the guise of a tailless cat:

the manx cat, who did look a little absurd, poor beast, without a tail, in the middle of the lawn. Was he really born so, or had he lost his tail in an accident? The tailless cat, though some are said to exist in the Isle of Man, is rarer than one thinks. It is a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is strange what a difference a tail makes–

This mundane description of a cat is elevated to the metaphoric by its juxtaposition within a narrative about the academic exclusion of woman.  The lawn, cat, and tail serve as euphemisms for body parts.

But did Virginia Woolf really suffer from penis envy? There is one more important clue. The reference to the Isle of Man. This tiny municipality was the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote. In essence, the first to recognize the equality of women. The true manx represents the holistic view of women–naturally complete–not the subject of some tragic misfortune. For Victorians like Woolf, such women were rare indeed.

It appears that Woolf did not necessarily envy the penis, but the power and freedom the penis represented in Victorian England.

Undermining the Masculine Canon

As I mention on the Editor Page, I am a graduate student working on my thesis in “Modern Matriarchal Literature” (to be defined in a later post).  This movement begins with Virginia Woolf, who challenges women writers to develop distinctly feminine voices. 

For centuries, Men had dominated the literary scene. These male writers, editors and critics defined what was good literature. In the fictionalized account of the days preceding her lecture on “Women and Fiction,” Woolf utilizes narrative to point this out:

Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, Tell me then how you wrote your essays? For his essays are far superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought . . . Certainly he wrote an essay–the name escapes me–about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here . . . it is in this famous library that the manuscript of Thackeray’s Esmond is also preserved.

In a page and a half, Woolf (almost coquettishly) points out that men have shaped literary history and it is their great works that are coveted, preserved, and emulated. Therefore, Woolf subtly implies, if women only have male literary models, wouldn’t feminine works be a mere replication of masculine works.

Woolf argues that the absence of women in literature is do to political and economic tradition:

a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction

This statement became a landmark in literary history. If you have read (or would like to read this work with me) please feel free to use the comment section as a book discussion forum.