"All these relationships between women ... are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. ...But almost without exception they are shown [only] in their relation to men. ... And how small a part of a woman's life is that."~Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One's Own"
I had never thought of literature in such terms. Sure, I've been introduced to the Feminist theorists, but I can't recall ever internalizing the fact that most all literature, up until Jane Austen's time, only portrays women in relation to men, if they portray women at all.
Go back to Petrarch, where the lover pines for his beloved. She does not acquiesce to his proposals, and he is left without the lover he so desires. But we know nothing about the woman, except that she is the woman who does not return the man's love. End of story. And then there's Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," with again the focus on Juliet in relation to Romeo, and also her father... but still in relation to men all the same. In "MacBeth" we may see a little more of the actual character of Lady MacBeth, but she is still seen in relation to King Duncan and her own husband. And she even asks to be "unsexed" so she can be more like a man.
So what does this say about women, and about how this literary canon informs us as women today? Obviously, this literature shows women only in one type of role, that in their relations to men. And I thought back to my childhood, how Disney movies and fairytales all placed the woman in relation to the man. How I grew up believing that I had to have a man to be whole (I have now realized my error in this train of thought), and I attribute that greatly to books and movies. Those books and movies that showed true love and women searching for their prince charming, or even women being "bold" enough to refuse the man. And that's how I thought life had to be... thinking of women (and myself) in relation to men. I know you are getting biographical information that you didn't ask for... but I was an avid reader of romance novels (and I give the term "romance" novel to those like the Anne of Green Gables series and the Little House on the Prairie books. And I read the love story parts over and over. I could have cared less about the rest). And these romance novels, although they often painted a bigger portrait of women than those of long ago, still gave women in relation to men... entire books on the search for a woman's completeness through a man, in fact. And that is what I internalized, for better or for worse.
And then I think about the Christian books out there, the ones that say you are whole because of who you are, not in relation to other men. That you don't need a man to be pretty or whole or anything else. But do we have to say this because women automatically think - from the day they are born - that they need a man to be beautiful or whole or worth something, or is this view learned from society and from the literature that surrounds us each day? I would venture to say is it the latter. Yes, I believe women and men "complete" each other... but it doesn't necessarily have to be in a romantic sense all the time. And we certainly don't have to spend our entire lives as women searching for the man that will make us feel whole... for a man can never do that, and nor can a woman do that for a man. And yes, we were created man and female, to live side by side, together working through this life and towards God. But each one of us separately has different gifts and talents that work for a wholeness in the world... but we have to know both sides, not just one in relation to the other.
But I digress... Yes, women have been portrayed only in relation to men, and until recently, they still were. In the beginning of the semester, I read "Mama Day" and "Beloved" for a class.... and both books gave me thorough pictures of women, not only in relation to men, but in relation to each other and themselves. And just as men need men in literature, so women need women - and themselves - in literature. Through reading these books, I am now discovering what it is to be a woman... to be that one, whole, beautiful part of the twofold human race. And yes, women do have to be seen in their relation to men... but that is not all they are. We were created man and female, each one with our own gifts and talents. It's time to let both women and males shine through literature...
1 comment:
Great post, and I love the photo. So many paintings out there of women reading, and how is that reading figured differently than men reading. Regarding christianity and this dynamic. There's kind of a conflicted history. On the one hand, the notion that women are only an extension of men have in Western History come out of narratives surrounding Adam and Eve. Woman as helpmeet rather than complete and independent in herself. On the other hand, the discourses of the chuch have also worked against that notion in imagining distinctive vocations for women. Many feminists, for instance, are highly interested in the conflicted tradition of nuns. On the one hand, this seems to replicate notions that women should hate their own bodies and submit their wills to a patriarchal entity, the church. But on the other hand nunnery's established zones of female freedom and power that operated relatively independently of the church. So it's a really complicated story.
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