Date of Award
4-8-2010
Document Type
Thesis
Abstract
Virginia Woolf explored, through various essays, what it means to be a female writer: the history, challenges, and societal implications. Recently, many of Woolf's ideas have been attacked by current literary figures such as Adrienne Rich. In particular, Woolf's assertions about passion and the female writer stir debate and controversy. In Virginia Woolf's essays on women and writing, she explores female passion and specifically contrasts Austen with the Brontës. Woolf suggests that Austen's restrained expression of passion is more meaningful than the overstated passion in the Brontë novels. However, while Woolf focuses on the novels' passion, closer analysis reveals that Woolf's perspective on passion is actually more related to her attitudes in regard to gender and socio-economic class. From Woolf's perspective, depending on a character's gender and social class, the level of passion the character may overtly express varies. Analyzing the fictional space in novels reveals the connection between passion and gender/socio-economics. Space is a mode through which Austen and the Brontës could express the gender and social hierarchies, which Woolf uses to determine her opinion of the novelists. How space is portrayed also reflects the novelists' lives and the genre in which the novelists wrote. Both Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Emma reveal the complexity of gender and social class relations through the novel's descriptions of interior and exterior spaces. In this analysis, Austen's two novels are compared to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Bronte's Villette in order to examine how different portrayals of space affect passion. Ultimately, these comparisons reveal that Woolf's critique of the Brontës was not merely about gender-conscious passion, but more about her prejudices involving social class. For Woolf, the level of emotion characters exude must be appropriate to their gender and class. Analyzing Woolf's critique of passion in terms of socio-economic situations of the characters and even the authors, makes Woolf's prejudice with social class more plausible.
Recommended Citation
Howard, Mary '10, "Woolf, Narrative Space and Female Writers: The Different Implications on Female Passion Described Between the Brontes' and Jane Austen's Use of Gendered and Class-Divided Narrative Spaces" (2010). Honor Scholar Theses. 243, Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University.
https://scholarship.depauw.edu/studentresearch/243