Women in Literature

At Issue

Issues of women's identity in Western literature concern the fictional identity (characterization) of women in literary works versus the "real" identity (literal role) assigned women in the actual historical period of the plot. "Western literature" refers to the works of writers in Europe, Canada, and the United States; these works trace their literary heritage to classical Greek and Roman myths. Western fiction was predominantly written by men from Greek and Roman mythmaking until the nineteenth century, and societal gender inequality continued to be reflected in literature into the twenty-first century. Feminist scholarship seeks understanding of the gaps between men's depiction of women in fiction and the place assigned to women in society.

One may mark the beginning of the scholarship of gender and identity with Virginia Woolf's feminist work A Room of One's Own (1929). Consideration of gender and identity in Western literature requires a review of Woolf's work, an analysis of Western gender issues as rooted in the myth of Eden, and a focus on the Western man's depiction of woman in literature versus the role he assigns to her in society.

A Room of One's Own consists of two lectures presented to young women who wanted to write fiction. For those women, Woolf delineates the place man assigned to woman in society: the home, the nursery, the sickroom, and the conjugal bed. She references the places man forbade woman to go: men's schools, about the countryside alone, to a room of her own, to solitude. Early in the work, she focuses on professors and beadles as the brute guards of academe and of church. Woolf cites examples of how libraries were determined to deny women access. She illustrates by focusing on gender and identity in academic literature. Citing entries in a history of England, she makes a convincing argument that women were ignored, beaten, starved, and generally treated like chattel throughout history. Woolf then points out that had women existed only in fiction written by men, readers would think they were persons of utmost importance, "heroic and mean; splendid and sordid . . . as great as a man." Woolf adds: "This is woman in fiction." In fact, she points out, if a girl refused to marry the man her parents chose for her, she was "locked up, beaten, and flung about the room."

Woolf marvels that, although woman permeates pages of fiction and poetry, she is "all but absent from history." Scholarly concentration on this paradox came to be called "gender studies" after the 1976 publication of French critic Michel Foucault's first volume in his three-volume history of sexuality. This work distinguishes between sex and gender, the latter of which Foucault identifies as the process of socialization and experience through which people learn to play the role of male or female. Foucault was a pioneer in the investigation of the assignment of gender roles. Sex is biology; gender is culture.

Jacques Derrida, the French deconstructionist critic, argued that every work of Western literature has roots in Edenic myth. Indeed, in Western society the biblical view of Eden can be seen as underpinning the longstanding social inequality between men and women. In the biblical account, Adam was in God's image, and was, in a sense, partner with God in creation, for whereas God created, Adam named. The act of naming was comparable to creating. Then came Eve. Since Eve ate first the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and then tempted Adam to eat it, Eve caused Adam to sin. Thus, Adam lost his partner status with God because of woman. Furthermore, God's punishment of Eve was to make her an object forever under the authority of a man, always unequal to his position as the one created in God's likeness. The interpretation that Eve caused Adam to sin gained woman the label of temptress, one who needs masculine control.

As men have long dominated power in church and state, the male-dominated interpretation of Edenic myth has determined societal roles, which in turn inform and are bolstered by literary representations. Through scholarship, women seek to retrieve their past and to establish themselves as having been contributing members of Western culture, not as appendages of man, but as persons in their own right.

Archetypal Women in Western Literature

Woman as temptress is one stereotypical view that fills literature. In John Milton's rewriting of Edenic myth in his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), Eve is a narcissistic being (devoted to self-pleasure). Milton places blame for Adam's fall on Adam, who should not, the poem says, have allowed the woman out of his sight. Such a view demeans women, labeling them as incapable of making moral choices without a man to control their decisions. American feminist critic Sandra M. Gilbert argues that Milton's view of Eden so permeates Western thought that it affected even Woolf, making her guilt-ridden for being woman.

A second stereotypical view of woman that fills literature also comes from the Bible. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a virgin: pure, innocent, angelic. In literature, male authors tend to place the well-behaved virgin on a pedestal. Angelic women are looked to for encouragement, for applause, for comfort, and for redemption. Such a figure appears, for example, in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (1859). These heroines exist mainly to enable men to become heroes; often the heroine's most overt action as a character is fainting in the face of even minimal discomfort.

Another version of the pure, innocent, angelic female character—though a considerably more complex one—is found in Henrik Ibsen's Nora Helmer. She appears in Et dukkehjem (1879; A Doll's House, 1880). In this play, Nora is like a doll in size; her father called her his doll; her husband, Torwald, wishes her to be a doll and treats her as if she were one, as if she had no mind or will of her own. Yet Nora is not a doll; she is a woman with a secret debt made to fund a trip which, unknown to Torwald, was necessary to save his life. Although she behaved as his doll, she was, in fact, sacrificing herself to his image of her, as she had sacrificed herself in girlhood to her father's image of her. All the while she knew exactly what she was doing, but it made her happy to be what they wished of her. In the end, however, Nora leaves Torwald and her children to discover herself. Still, this does not impinge on Nora's purity, since Torwald has convinced her that liars should never come near children, and so her leaving is presented as a further act of self-sacrifice.

The third major stereotypical identity given women in Western literature is that of mother. A mother may be either the good mother or the wicked stepmother. As with Edenic myth, individual and societal views of what mother should be like are primordial. The mother image is, as a gender role, a social fabrication, an archetype, and an unconscious expectation people hold of what a mother should be. Expectation controls a person's perception of adequate or inadequate mothering.

In Western culture, in history and in literary representation, proper motherhood traditionally required marriage. Yet while held up as a social ideal, marriage often presented considerable difficulties for women. Until the mid-twentieth century, for example, divorce was shunned, and, if successful, fathers typically received custody of children. Physical punishment of wives was often seen as acceptable, or even encouraged. Women were expected to obey the husband and often to produce and care for many children. Historical records reveal how often women died in childbirth. Meanwhile, the importance placed on motherhood also reinforced arguments that kept courts of law, the vote, and the door to the church or university closed to women.

Despite this reality, wifedom and motherhood was long idealized in mainstream Western literature written by men. If a wife falls short of the ideal, dire consequences befall her; in society, women who conform to societal views of mothering are depicted as blessed, while those who do not are depicted as evil and worthy of any dire punishments they receive. Only as women began to protest and cast off restrictive social mores did literature begin to regularly reflect more realistic experiences of women, whether as mothers or otherwise.

Yet even as women began organizing and improving their standing both in society and in literature, they were often marginalized in other ways. For example, critic Shirley Foster notes in Victorian Women's Fiction: Marriage, Freedom, and the Individual (1985) that when women in the Victorian period could finally publish under their own names, society said they should write only of maternal emotions, capturing sensations unknown to man. Such writing, critics contended, would be part of woman's specialness as an artist. Critics also said that women should not write of professional or intellectual life, since abstract reasoning was difficult, if not impossible, for them.

Foster points out that women novelists were not deceived by such false praise of their ability. Women realized that the seeming tribute to their literary skills was really man's way of limiting the themes that women might treat in fiction. Publishers did not publish women's novels unless the content conformed to what male critics said women were capable of writing. To publish, it became the practice of many women novelists, Foster notes, to escape their own entrapment in marriage by writing fiction about a relationship of which they only dreamed, thus falsifying their own identity in literature.

Women in American Literature By Men

Much has been written about colonial America as the new Eden, and about American women as the new Eve. The history of gender and identity in American literature takes a different twist than in that of Europe. The European stereotype of temptress applied to women characters in American fiction, as did the great mother. The virgin, however, became the American princess. Bright, young, full of promise, desirable and with money, the princess is a staple of American fiction.

The earliest writings of colonial America are not, however, fiction but political documents, letters, journals, diaries, and some poetry. Julia Kristeva, a French feminist critic, argues that America in the twentieth century still had no national literature of its own, but only copies of that of Europe. In gender identity, however, fiction in the United States, from its post-Revolutionary War beginning onward, reveals a curious difference from European fiction.

From girlhood onward, beginning in colonial days, American women were given freedoms unheard of in Europe. They farmed, fenced, milked, scrubbed, churned, and built barns. Abigail Adams, for example, ran the family farm while her husband was away on government business, and she did it so well that Adams received numerous letters from friends praising her work. Women also gave birth, reared children, made soap, became wartime spies, quilted by candlelight, went to parties, planned picnics, and wrote letters on serious subjects to mates, government leaders, and women friends. American women wrote journals, diaries, and poems, but few of these works were published in their lifetimes.

The openness and freedom of American women's lifestyle caused European visitors to comment on them as a new creation, constantly exposed to the world, yet sweet, guileless, and energetic. These visitors found it odd that such freedom in national manners resulted in such purity in national morals. They marveled that American girls were taught to think for themselves and that parents, rather than trying to keep them from confronting the world, taught them to survey it firmly and calmly. To this end, girls went to school with the boys and learned to read and write. Accordingly, Ernest Earnest notes, European visitors commented that American women were interesting to talk with.

Yet in American literature, too, the women of history are not the women of much canonical fiction. Sentimental novelists depicted women as delicate flowers, as emotional rather than intellectual, as moralizing, as preachy, and as meek. American women in fiction were put in the sick room, in poverty. Their purpose was to redeem men through Christian example and submissive behavior. Even Nathaniel Hawthorne has his generally strong protagonist Hester Prynne doing needlework in The Scarlet Letter (1850) instead of chopping wood, which, in life, a woman like her was more likely to have done.

Modern historians have shown that women were often actively, aggressively, and effectively involved in public and private life. Yet in America, as in Europe, they continued to be denied legal rights accorded to men: the right to vote, to serve on juries, to enter a case in a court of law, to borrow or sell real property without a husband's or a father's consent, to gain custody of children in the event of a divorce. During the period in which the roots of American literature were formed, men typically had unquestioned authority over women.

As society shifted, however, literary representation of women began to become more realistic and diverse. Along with the growing women's rights movement and subsequent increase in women authors, this was in part due to changing trends in literature in general. The rise of realism, especially, meant that male writers, too, joined in rendering more accurate depictions of women. At times this stark countering of long-established archetypes proved controversial. For example, it may be argued that William Faulkner depicts women in the South quite accurately; it is not a pretty picture he paints, however, and as a result he has been declared a misogynist by some critics. Others suggest that he merely mirrors the societal conditions of the day, including stark misogyny and the challenges faced by many women across social classes and racial lines.

Gentler pictures of American women were also accurately drawn by male authors in the twentieth century. Langston Hughes, in his poem "Mother to Son," for example, couples the hard with the soft, includes historical subjugation through hints and through what he leaves unsaid, but ends on a note of triumph and promise. Hughes presents woman as mother, but gives readers the implication that this mother has never been an American princess. Hughes's portrait of a mother recalls the American woman's pioneer drive, having always done whatever had to be done to keep herself and her family alive. The mother demands courage to step into the darkness, where faith is needed. She challenges her son to keep moving when he is too tired to stand or has been knocked down. The hardness of the poem lies in the sense that, even if the son stops, the mother will not. The poem captures a woman's validation of herself as a person in her own right.

Women in Literature by Women

An important literary trend across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first was the increasing attention paid to women writers. While important female writers had existed throughout history, it was only by the late twentieth century that the literary establishment truly began to consider them to the same degree as male authors. At first this typically took the form of separate analysis of works and subgenres as "women's writing," as in women's studies programs. This scholarship helped draw attention to the rich body of earlier works by women that were largely ignored by the mainstream literary community. Eventually some feminist thinkers criticized this outlook, however, suggesting that literary criticism should not be segregated by the sex or gender of the author.

As with men's writing that long favored male protagonists, many prominent female authors have focused on women characters. Through tropes of the mother, the pure innocent, and the temptress remained influential, a much wider range of female identities and perspectives emerged. This included depictions of women of color and LGBTQ women. Along with Woolf, some of the most prominent women writers who explore women's experiences in their works include Alice Walker, Louisa May Alcott, Zora Neale Hurston, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, and Toni Morrison. The novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood earned much attention for its feminist themes, as did its eventual sequel, The Testaments (2019).

Bibliography

Cheek, Pamela. Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century. U of Pennsylvania P, 2019.

Earle, Monalesia. Writing Queer Women of Color: Representation and Misdirection in Contemporary Fiction and Graphic Narratives. McFarland, 2019.

Earnest, Ernest. The American Eve in Fact and Fiction, 1775-1914. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1974. A well-documented look at American women in society and in fiction.

Foster, Shirley. Victorian Women's Fiction: Marriage, Freedom, and the Individual. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1985. Examines women's expression of marriage in their fiction.

Fryer, Judith. The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. This classic treats the identity of woman in American fiction by men, and in the last chapter, by women writers.

Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986. An excellent review of woman as treated by these chief male writers of American fiction.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G., and Margaret R. Higonnet, eds. The Representation of Women in Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. The introduction presents a brief, clear statement of the purpose and direction of feminist criticism relative to the representation of woman in literature.

Reische, Diana, ed. Women and Society. New York: Wilson, 1972. Excellent source for starting research in gender identity.

Robertson, Jamie Cox. An Uncommon Heroine: Scarlett, Edna, Sula and More than 20 Other of the Most Remarkable Women in Literature. Adams Media, 2010.

Solly, Meilan. "The Women Who Shaped the Past 100 Years of American Literature." Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Sept. 2020, www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/women-writers-who-shaped-20th-century-american-literature-180975872/. Accessed 26 Apr. 2023.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. 1929. Reprint. New York: Harcourt, 1981. The book that initiated the gender and identity issue.