Rereading Women: Thirty Years of Exploring Our Literary Traditions
Sandra M. Gilbert
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 0393067645
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A collection of essays that reexamine literature through a feminist gaze from "one of our most versatile and gifted writers" (Joyce Carol Oates).
"We think back through our mothers if we are women," wrote Virginia Woolf. In this groundbreaking series of essays, Sandra M. Gilbert explores how our literary mothers have influenced us in our writing and in life. She considers the effects of these literary mothers by examining her own history and the work of such luminaries as Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath. In the course of the book, she charts her own development as a feminist, demonstrates ways of understanding the dynamics of gender and genre, and traces the redefinitions of maternity reflected in texts by authors such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot.
Throughout, Gilbert asks major questions about feminism in the twentieth century: Why and how did its ideas become so necessary to women in the sixties and seventies? What have those feminist concepts come to mean in the new century? And above all, how have our intellectual mothers shaped our thoughts today?
But “this illusion [is] faint and transitory” because it implies a deceptive liberty of desire. As Wharton reluctantly observed, the daughter’s summer of erotic content blooms only to prepare her for what Dickinson called “a Doom of Fruit without the Bloom”—an autumn and winter of civilized discontent in which, like her precursor, the first Mrs. Royall, she will be “sad and timid and weak.” As in Wharton’s pornographic “Beatrice Palmato” fragment—a more melodramatic tale of father-daughter incest
“Toward a Feminist Poetics” see also Ortner. 5. Hopkins, p. 133. 6. Dickinson, J. 1677. 7. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 64. 8. See Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 45–92. 9. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 94. 10. See Winchilsea, “The Introduction,” pp. 4–5. 11. Heilbrun, “Feminist Criticism,” p. 35. 12. Robinson, p. 19. 13. Miller, “The Function of Rhetorical Study at the Present Time,” p. 12. 14. Greg, Why Are Women Redundant? 15. Dickinson, J. 175 and J. 601. 16.
split-level, reading Little Women, Jane Eyre, and The Bell Jar, and raiding the refrigerator now and then for diet sodas. On the whole she learned most then.” For Hen, as she discovered when she took a Women’s Studies course in the second half of her freshman year, had become what Judith Fetterley calls a “resisting reader” indeed, though she had always tried hard to “submit” herself to the “established truths” of the texts she studied in school, she had already begun half consciously “reading
Mystique and a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. We lived in an old house in Kew Gardens few of our Manhattan-based friends wanted to visit, but we went to the opera, museums, even on summer vacations, thanks to kindly parents, grandparents, and in-laws, who also provided babysitters and housekeepers. Why did I weep in the pantry? I didn’t suffer from what Betty Friedan grimly called “the problem that has no name.” My husband shared child care. I had serious literary aspirations and
fierce as a mouse: your riches are all my purpose, your currants and death’s eye raisins wrinkling and thickening blackness, and the single almond of light she buried somewhere under layers of shadow…. One day I too will be Uncle Sandra: iambic and terse. I’ll hobble the tough sidewalks, the alleys that moan go on, go on. O when I reach those late-night streets, when acorns and twigs litter my path like sentences the oaks no longer choose to say, I want that cake in my wallet. I want