PERSPECTIVA DE

GÉNERO
Curso 22/23

Andrea Espina Peñalver

Perspectiva de género fernandezmmarta@uniovi.es

Perspectiva de género

Introduction
In the course we will see 5 units:

1. INTRODUCTION TO GENDER STUDIES AND FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

2. BODY MATTERS : compulsory text → In the next room.

3. INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM → Speaking in tongues.

4. PATRIARCHAL VIOLENCE → Milk and Honey.

5. FEMINIST FUTURES → The handmaid tale.

3 assignments in class – a five so that they will be taken into account.

In the calendar will be all the updates and the things we have to read LOOK AT IT!!!!!!

UNIT 1 – INTRODUCTION TO GENDER STUDIES ANS FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

1.1 SOME NOTES IN THE HISTORY OF FEMINISM

Feminism: social movement that aims at equal rights and opportunities between men and women.

ANGLO-AMERICAN FEMINISM(S), THE “WAVES”

SOCIAL FEMINISM(S)

• 1st wave: 1890s-1920s

• 2nd wave: 1960s-1980s
• 3rd wave: late 1980s-2000s
• 4th wave: today.

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• Post feminism: ???? Complex concept. It is the idea that, since there is so much awareness, particularly in
western society we should not be talking about feminism anymore.

ACADEMIC FEMINISM(S) → 1960s+, Women’s Studies and more

“PROTOFEMINISM”

• Writers and thinkers of the past:

o La Querelle des Femmes: Christine de Pizan (15th century- The City of Ladies)
o Judith Drake 1969, “An Essay in Defense of the Female sex”. Mary Astell.
• Mary Wollstonecraft (The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792).
• Jane Austen? Mary Shelley? Maria Edgeworth, (“An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification” (1795).
• Victorian writers (The Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell)

MARIA EDGEWORTH, (“AN ESSAY ON THE NOBLE SCIENCE OF SELF-JUSTIFICATION)

For the advantage of my subject, I address myself chiefly to married ladies; but those who have no as yet the good
fortune to have that common enemy, a husband to combat, may in the meantime practice my precepts upon their
fathers, brothers, and female friends; with caution, however, lest by discovering their arms too soon, they preclude
themselves from the power of using them to the fullest advantage hereafter. I, therefore, recommend it to them
to prefer, with philosophical moderation, the future to the present.

Timid brides, you have, probably, hitherto been addressed as angels. Prepare for the FALTA

THE FIRST WAVE IN THE ANGLOPHONE WORLD

• Antecedents: 1848, Seneca Falls conference (NY state). Meeting was organized by men and women who
realized that despite the involvement of women in the abolitionist movement, they really did not have a
voice. In this meeting was written the Declaration of Sentiments, inspired by the Declaration of
Independence, in which they wrote about the lack of rights and equality that women faced. This is the
antecedent of the first wave.
o Elizabeth Cad Stanton and Lucretia Mott.
o Sojourner Truth → talked about being a black woman.
• New women’s movement: Sarah Grand “The new aspects of the woman’s question” (1894), Mona Caird.
S. Grand was the one who coined the term “new women”.
• Famous New women and their contributions (Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Blackwell, Amelia Bloomer, Millicent
Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst).
• 1910s-1920s Suffragism:
o Names: Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst (UK), Susan B. Anthony & Elizabeth Cad Stanton (USA).
o Issues: the vote (!!!!), education, reproductive rights, employment.
o Strategies: demonstrations, hunger strikes, pamphlets (never violent against people/animals). For
these things, they would be sometimes put in jail.

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o Developments during and after WWI. Women began to do more things, since men were at war.
Thus, women alone did more work at home but also some women helped with the war (nurses…).
o Result: female suffrage in the USA in 1920, in the UK in 1928.

PIONEERING FEMINIST THINKERS

Virginia Woolf

• A Room of One’s Own, 1929

• Three Guineas, 1938
• “Professions for Women”, 1921

Simone de Beauvoir

• The Second Sex, 1949: She talks about how women had been “other”. Man is the default identity,
everything that is human is a man. The male experience is considered the central experience, so the woman
is the “other” idea of humanity.

THE SECOND WAVE

• Antecedents: Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1949)

• Precedent: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), she interviewed ex-university women who,
Kate Millett names `patriarchy’ in Sexual Politics (1970), she is the first one to name patriarchy in her thesis.
• 1960s (68+), Women’s Liberation Movement.
• Links with Civil Rights movement and other social reform activism of the time.
• Adrienne Rich defines the concept of “compulsory heterosexuality”.
• Main branches:
o Liberal: changing the system from within, getting into the system and modifying it.
o Radical: dismantling the system, the system does not work so we need to rebuild it.
o Materialist: stronger in the USA, understands women as a class, they function together as a class.
• Issues: family rates, abortion, violence (rape!!), body, sexuality -) “The personal is political” → concern
about and working for how family roles affected women, abortion, violence the second wave started to talk
about rape and domestic violence, women’s bodies, and their sexuality. The personal is political (Carole
Hanisch quotes).
• Strategies: Demonstrations, lobbying, c-r (consciousness-raising, going from the I to the we, waking people
up and making them realize their situation) and academy, the second wave started to produce theories and
dialogues that evolve into gender studies.

THE THIRD WAVE

• When: Late 1980s (postfeminism: movement that defends that women have already achieved equality and
that feminism is no longer necessary).

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• Institutionalization of feminism (1975+, conferences, institutions like UNIFEM ET AL., grassroots affected
by Reaganism in the USA.) The 80s was a period of backlash for the equalitarian movements (race, sex,
gender...) Reagan in the USA, Thatcher in the UK.
• 1980s backlash brings on the Third Wave: multiculturalism and sexual identities come into play; gender and
sex are questioned (Judith Butler), and feminism becomes more plural and intersectional.
• First world: civil rights taken for granted, individualistic, postmodern empowerment, femininity ok,
derogatory terms are rewritten, ICT.
• Developing countries/minorities: still collective, postcolonial.
• Rebecca Walker (quotes), “Becoming the third wave” (1992).
• Intersectionality: feminism with class, color.

THE FOURTH WAVE

• *MeToo Movement: Tarana Burke 2006; Hollywood 2017 (grassroots activism > hashtag activism). One of
the initiatives that is linked to the fourth wave. Tarana Burke is an African American activist and social
worker that works with women that suffered from abuse. It is an addiction to current activism, involving
social networks → creating community and a way of sharing experiences. Most visible movement in the
Anglophone world.
• 21st January: Women’s March after Trump’s inauguration.
• 8th March 2018 and 2019: international women’s strike → the biggest movement was in Spain.
• New causes, or the same one with different names? (not new things but new concepts or the same
concepts treated differently)
o Reproductive rights (abortion, surrogacy) → big issue with some new currents.
o Sexual violence (rape, harassment, “honor” crimes → implicitly accepted crimes towards women
they seem to be justified because the woman has done something that damages the honor of the
family, prostitution)
o Stereotypes (education, socialization)
• Intersectional, intergenerational, transnational initiatives, a global movement with environmental
awareness (Adichie quotes)
• Plural panorama: Role of the youth, celebrities, pop culture and social media >> marketplace feminism,
femlit “craze”.

1.2 EIGHT IMPORTANT WORDS WE NEED TO CONSIDER FROM THE GLOSSARY

Binary opposition: “The Yellow Wallpaper”. In the Western world we tend to think in binaries, for a very long-time
the dichotomy between men and women has given more power to men.

Canon: “The Angel in the House” (the concept).

Essentialism: The meaning of Kingdom.

Ideology: i.e. George Orwell 1984

Intertextuality: the interactive meeting of two or more texts. One of the forms of intertextuality is rewriting text,
it is a conversation between texts.

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Patriarchy: “The Handmaid’s Tale”. The male order.

Phallocentric: The Bible.

Symbolic order: if there is no word to something that is happening to me how can we explain it?

*LAS DEFINICIONES TENEMOS QUE SABER LAS DEL GLOSARIO DE MORRIS.

1.3 BEYOND THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT

Gender does not only equal “women”

Masculinity, femininity, and everything in between studied as constructs.

The feminist movement as the sparkle for women’s, but also men’s reflections.

FROM THE MEN’S MOVEMENT TO MEN’S STUDIES

• Men’s movement: focus on gender, self-help, redefining masculinity (1970’s on)

• Men’s liberation from traditional “macho” impositions: men for equality, fathers’ rights (MRAs)… different
approaches.

• From consciousness-raising to academic theorization.

• Evolution in the concept of “masculinity” (stages):

“One was based on the clinical knowledge acquired by therapists, and its leading ideas came from Freudian
theory. The second was based on social psychology and centered on the enormously popular idea of “sex
role”. The third involves recent developments in anthropology, history and sociology” (R.Connell.
Masculinities, 2005, p.7)

• Peter Filene (Him/Her/Self, 1974) and Joseph Pleck (American Man 1980) as foundational authors of Men’s
Studies.

• 1990s crisis of masculinity (they wanted to create something new, a new concept of masculinity) S. Faludi
(1991): impulse; 2010’s new crisis <> backlash.

• Importance of minority men, pro-feminist men // allies.

FROM STONEWALL TO QUEER STUDIES

• Traditional gender roles → heteronormative (compulsory heterosexuality is the norm).

• Gay movement <> Civil Rights movements (late 1960s +).

• 28 of June 1969: Stonewall Riots (NYC) (movie) → people at the bar were being treated violently. The
symbolic beginning of the movement.

• 28 June 1970: first Gay Pride marches (NYC, LA, Chicago).

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• 1977: Harvey Milk (movie) was elected to SF Board of Supervisors. The first person who openly said that
he was gay.

• Late 1970s, linked to Women’s St.: first Queer Studies publications ( a.k.a Sexual Diversity Studies: focused
on LGTB+).

• Queer theory: term coined by Teresa de Lauretis in 1988; Judith Butler as key name. Linked to
poststructuralism beyond sex as a given; gender identity/trans rights.

1.4 ACADEMIC FEMINISM(S)

Feminism tends to look back to its antecedents:

• Antecedents: Mary Wollstonecraft 18th c. she wrote vindication of the right of woman, one of the texts
that is fundamental to the feminist theory. Margaret Fuller 19th c. transcendentalism, she was one of the
first proto feminist philosopher of the States.
• (In)equality enters the Academia when the Civil Rights Movement is happening: first courses in 1966.
• 1st official Women’s Studies program appears in San Diego State Uni., in 1970.
• 1960s/70s: Women’s studies (where they exclusive, only for women), “Feminist Studies” (Political, not
scientific?), for some academic authorities this title sounded too political). Regardless of the names, every
study of this field combines compensatory research (compensation, visibility, making them relevant) and
interdisciplinary research (there are different disciplines, a constant conversation among disciplines).
• “Gender”, making gender an academic category, as a useful analytic category, this happened with the
publication of Gayle Rubi’s article, “The traffic in Women”, 1975.
• 1980S+: poststructuralist (they look at how concepts are constructed, the context in which a cultural
product is created, to analyze a text, you need to analyze the context) approach and research (politics of
location, term used in gender studies to specify the situated quality of a text, be transparent in the location
and politic movement).
• Today: integrating, transnational research (Women’s/ Feminist/ Gender Studies, dialogue & debates with
Men’s Studies and Queer Studies)

Feminist Literary Studies: Evolution

• Associated to Women’s Lib & 1st phase of academic fem. (1968+)
• Cultural analysis applied to texts: how are women represented? Where are the female writers? Who
defines literature and canon?
• E. Showalter, American scholar, coined the term gynocriticism: female framework for the analysis of
women’s literature. She wrote A Literature of their Own (1977). 3 phases in women’s lit.:
o Feminine (passive heroines created following the patriarchal canon).
o The feminist phase (Independent protagonist, autonomous, created knowing about feminism).
o Female phase (gender does not condition them, the female characters could do the exact same
thing that male characters and no one would care).
• 1980s, minority authors: African Americans: Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Chicanas: Gloria Anzaldúa and
Cherríe Moraga. Minority writers start to make themselves heard.
• 1990s, postcolonial authors: Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty (Indians).
• 21st century: interdisciplinary, diverse literary studies.

Feminist Literary Studies (II): Some Classics to Bear in Mind

• Ellen Moers, Literary Women. The Great Writers (1976), she revises the contribution of women in England,
France, and the US from the 18th century to her time.

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• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), coined the term anxiety of
authorship.

PLA 1 30-01 – PROFESSIONS FOR WOMEN→ V.WOOLF

Some key words relating to Virginia Woolf:

• Modernism
• Stream of consciousness: free flow of thought.
• A room of One’s Own
• She’s protofeminist: the beginning of feminism (getting there but not quite) → first wave of the feminist
movement.

“The hours” is a novel/movie about Virginia Woolf (she is one of the characters).

It is a speech → essay that was published after she died in 1942.

The Women’s Service League is a group of activists that fight it for suffrage (complete information).

The content of the text is the struggle of the woman writer at the time (20th century).

Some important concepts in the text:

• The Angel of the House: ideal woman in the Victorian Age.

• She talks about her life.

STUDY QUESTIONS
• How does Woolf present herself in the opening paragraph? Can you connect her introduction to any of
the problems/issues for women writers studied in previous units?

She presents herself first as a woman and then as a writer. First-wave issues regarding employment. She references
women writers that have smoothed the path for her to write. The idea of genealogy is important she recognizes
how there have been other women that have come before her. Representation and references are important, we
all need models and referents.

• What is the purpose of the personal anecdote about the cat in the second paragraph? What effect do
you think it may have had on her audience?

She talks about money and needing money to buy paper. Woolf doesn’t seem to be having economic problems
with money as with the money she has she buys a cat, not a priority. She specifies the money that you need (500
pounds). She writes from a privileged position; she has money to buy a cat and not food with the money she makes
by writing. She doesn’t take for granted her privilege. There is class awareness.

She talks about personal anecdotes (identification). She is talking to women that had time to be there and hear her
for hours therefore they may have been also privileged.

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• In the third paragraph, Woolf changes the pace by introducing a succession of very short sentences with
an anaphoric structure (“She was… She was… She was…”). Why? What is the result of this creative
choice?

To catch people's attention, to emphasize that it is a key topic. It is the beginning of a change of tone, introducing
the idea that the angel is not good, we have to kill this concept. She guides the audience towards killing the Victorian
concept of the Angel of the House. Anaphoric repetitions.

• To what extent does Woolf’s description of the ‘Angel in the House’ match Coventry Patmore’s in his
19th-century poem about his wife? (Excerpt below)

[…] Her disposition is devout,

Wrong dares not in her presence speak,
Her countenance angelical; Nor spotted thought its taint disclose
The best things that the best believe Under the protest of a cheek
Are in her face so kindly writ Outbragging Nature's boast the rose.
The faithless, seeing her, conceive
In mind and manners how discreet;
Not only heaven, but hope of it; How artless in her very art;
No idle thought her instinct shrouds, How candid in discourse; how sweet
But fancy chequers settled sense, The concord of her lips and heart;
Like alteration of the clouds
How simple and how circumspect;
On noonday's azure permanence; How subtle and how fancy-free;
Pure dignity, composure, ease
Though sacred to her love, how deck'd
Declare affections nobly fix'd, With unexclusive courtesy […]
And impulse sprung from due degrees
Of sense and spirit sweetly mix'd.
Her modesty, her chiefest grace,
The cestus clasping Venus' side,
How potent to deject the face
Of him who would affront its pride!

This poem is written to his wife, who is the original Angel of the House. The origin of the concept. They kind of
describes the same concepts with the same terms and adjectives but with another intention. Coventry idealizes and
romanticizes the concept of the Angel, while Virginia has a negative perspective towards this description, it is a
burden for the woman. The same but Coventry + Woolf -

• Discuss Woolf’s explanation of how she killed the ‘Angel in the House’ (“I turned upon her […] the
occupation of the woman writer”): tone, language, message…

If she doesn't kill Angel, the Angel would have killed her. There an urgency, and aggressiveness in language and
tone, stating that it is necessary to kill it In order to write and progress.

• Analyze Woolf’s use of the analogy between the female writer and the fisherman (paragraph #5):
construction of the image, effects…

The writer is trying to catch ideas and inspiration for their mind from their unconscious. A metaphor for the creative
process. It is kind of representing that you have to be patient and it is not immediate or easy to create. You have to
go deep; be patient it is difficult. She uses a profession that includes the word men in the name.

• What is Woolf’s pending mission as a writer after killing the ‘Angel in the House’, according to the text?
Why has she been unable to fulfill it?

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Once the Angel of the House was dead after she had killed it, the pending mission was to get rid of falsehood and
be herself without worrying about external judgment and canons. Free herself from the concept of the ideal woman
at that time completely. For example, writing about their passions or the body was unfitting for her as a woman to
say or write about, to write the truth that roused her from her artistic unconsciousness. She hasn’t been able to
fulfill it because there will always be ghosts and prejudices to overcome, she thinks it will be a long time until the
woman can sit and write a book without finding a phantom to be slain a rock to be dashed. Internalized obstacles
stopped her from writing.

• How does Woolf recover the reference to the room of one’s own here? With what purpose?

She explains how women have won rooms of their own, meaning that they have gained to a certain extent a degree
of freedom but how the room is still unfurnished, and not decorated meaning that there is still a very long path to
achieve complete freedom and equality without obstacles. However, is an advance as it is the first time that women
can ask themselves questions like how they want to decorate it, to furnish them, and with whom they want to share
it. Using one of her writings as an extended metaphor and makes rhetorical questions to make the audience think,
to encourage women to continue fighting.

• What is the tone of the text? Do you see any change/variation/evolution in it?

Sad and pessimistic towards an encouraging and motivating tone. She kind of shows the whole tough process. We
have perceived that at the beginning of the essay she starts undervaluing her profession as a writer, stating how
privileged she is and how she may not encounter as many obstacles as women in other professions however then
she goes on talking about her profession and how women writers encounter phantoms, and obstacles in their
professions. She finishes with an optimistic tone encouraging women to keep fighting, she motivates them to keep
going. At the end, she explains for the first time how they can answer the questions and change the future kind of.

Light tome, grown to be tense, and ends with an encouraging tone.

Discuss the following quotation:

Even when the path is nominally open –when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a
lawyer, a civil servant– there are many phantoms and obstacles, I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and
define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be
solved.

There is still a lot of things to do in society and Virginia passes the baton to young ladies and the younger generation
to continue changing reality and inequalities.

PLA 02 (06-02) – BLOOM 1975 AND KOLODNY 1980 (SELECTED EXCERPTS) ARCHIVO

HAROLD BLOOM
He was one representative of the tendency of New Criticism → the only aspect that we had to consider of a text
was its artistic value.

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He wrote books and article conceptualizing the idea of literary strength → the capacity of a good work to influence
other works → if a work is influential for two generations it becomes part of the canon.

For him Shakespeare was the most important part of the canon.

Relevant texts

- The anxiety of influence (1973) → discussion about the relationship between authors, authors always
respond to other authors.

- A map of misreading (1975) → he defines the idea of strength.

- The western canon (1994) → he explains what the canon was for him, there is a list of books that form that
canon. The problem was that it was complete form by white men. Some people started to respond to that
saying that a revision and reconsideration of the canon was necessary

ANNETE KOLODNY
Revisionism (ecocriticism)

She responded directly to Bloom

She was a professor at the university of Arizona, and she mostly wrote about feminist ecocriticism

Works:

- The lay of the land (1975)

- Dancing through the minefield (1980) → she puts into practice feminist criticism

- A map for rereading (1980) → related directly to A Map of Misreading by Bloom. She was mainly concerned
with the question of gender, and hjuaahow women were not included in the canon.

KEY IDEAS IN THE QUOTES

*If there is no common symbolic order there is no possibility to understand something in the same way, to establish
canonical*

HAROLD BLOOM
- Relationships between texts → authors always respond to other authors and text always respond to other
text.

- Strength → poets survive because of inherent strength, the artistic quality of what matter to him.

- Misinterpretation → the idea of revising and interpreting other text when producing other texts.
Misreading and misinterpreting are active actions between texts. It is part of the creative process.

- Loss of the canon → revisionism challenged the canon.

- Father → reference when misinterpreting text. Masculine line, masculine figure.

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Key ideas about Harold Bloom

Text always responds to other text → intertextuality is at the base of the canon

For a text to be canonical It has to be strong → influential through two generations.

ANNETTE KOLODNY
- Influence → anxiety of authorship of (Gilbert Gubal) The Madwoman of the Attic – there are no influences
for women to interpret. There is no representation to follow.

- Gender-inflected interpretation → the interpretive strategies. How we interpret and read the world
depends on gender (among other things) but at that time mainly focused on gender .

- Literary tradition → questioning the idea of tradition.

- Precursor → anxiety of authorship no line. Women writers could not interpret their mothers, didn’t have
any model to follow, unlike men who were able to question their precursors such as Bloom explained.

- Isolation → women don’t have a line to question whether there is a mother figure and when there is they
are isolated when reading and writing.

- Shared symbolic representations → we need to have common experiences as writers and readers to
understand and interpret the text in the same way and establish canons.

- Apprehension → men have to be trained to learn and read the female canons as women had done.

- Authority → as feminists and women we have to challenge the male authority when establishing the canon
by reading and writing from our perspective.

- Role of muse → women as more than a muse, they can also write, read, and interpret.

Key ideas about Annette Kolodny

Interpretive strategies are learned, historically determined, and thereby necessary for gender inflected.

The concept of tradition that Bloom considers does not apply to women because there is no line, women have been
isolated as writers and readers.

PLA 3 (13-02) – IN THE NEXT ROOM (2010) → Sarah Ruhl

Say the publication and the date of the premiere

Sara Ruhl (b.1974)

• Education: Brown (Paula Vogel’s influence) and Oxford.

• Playwright, essayist, professor.

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• Adaptations: Woolf’s Orlando, Chekhov’s The three sisters. → she started with this kind of plays, she started
learning that way before she starts writing original plays.

• Original pays: Melancholy Play (2022), The Clean House (2004 – turning point in her reputation and
recognition), Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2007), For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday (2017).

• In the Next Room . staged in 2009 and published in 2010.

• Other genres: 100 Essays I don’t have time to write (105), Smile The Story of a Face (2021) (about her
problem with Bell paralysis), Love Poems in Quarantine (2022).

When talking about the author situated the play in her whole career.

IN THE NEXT ROOM, OR THE VIBRATOR PLAY

• Berkeley Repertory Theatre (2009); Leyceum Theatre (Brodway debut), 2009.

• Finalist for the 2019 Pulistzer Prize, nominated three Tony Awards (Best Play, best Featured, best Costume)

• Setting (time and place): Victorian Era (values, introduction of electricity); Dr. Giving’s’ house (living
room/operating room, with permeable boundaries as the play progresses. They are radically separated at
the beginning, and they start to become less rigid as the plot progresses). Before electricity the treatment
was manual as the vibrator is powered with electricity. Light is also another important symbol: progress,
new things, power.

• Binarism and binary though → the principle that organized society was the principal idea of the two
spheres: men/women, productive/reproductive. She presents the possibility of breaking that binarism
down.

• Main topic: mental health (especially female > hysteria (from the Greek word for uterus). Men and women.
The believe was the mental health issues were caused by physical body problems. There was a deep
connection: the uterus caused hysteria in women. The treatment for hysteria was rest, electrocuted, liches
in the reproductive area.

*Fin de siècle → end of the 19th century and 20th century.

• Charcot was the creator of the first treatments of hysteria: he had a hospital for hysteric women. He opened
the hospital for people once a week, there is kind of a theatrical performance. He trained them to perform
hysteria for people to see. He wanted to show off his science using women as publicity for his experiment.

*El baile de las locas – leer aparte.

• Other themes: marriage, motherhood, sexuality and pleasure, professionalization (masculinization) of

medicine, transgressive live (gender/race barriers broken), male complicity/friendship. Leo and Elisabeth
// Annie and Givings.

*Very primal sexuality and sex, orgasm etc because in the 19th century there was no model to follow no movies, no
porn.

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IN THE NEXT ROOM (II)

• Dr. Givins: husband + doctor → double authority (remember John in The Yellow Wallpaper)

• Catherine Givings: form passive acceptance to agency, with the help of patient Daldry. She is passive and
the Angel of the House at the begging and with Daldry there an evolution in her character. They experience
things together and Giving’s changes. She is the roundest character.

Key symbols: light (knowledge, progress, technology), vibrator (male power (doctor) appropriated then by women).

Important dramaturgical strategies: use of space (partition, Catherine’s transgression in space entering in the
Operating room), humor (19th c. ussies seen from the 21st perspective – clash), magic realism → introduction
impossible effects in a realistic context (ending > A(lienation)-effect → in the last scene they go from the living to
the garden → space disappears. B. Brecht created epic theater → he wanted to make people think, he would shock
them into thinking, and he would show them familiar things in an alienated context. When we are surprised and
take distance, we start questioning things, we start to reflect on having taken a step back.

Sarah Ruhl’s theater is funny but most important political.

• It’s a play – Dramaturgical terminology!!:

o Stage directions: intratextual (implicit in the text) and extratextual (between brackets=.

o Kinetics: stage direction in terms of movement in the stage. Ex. she faints, she runs…

o Proxemics: the position of people and things on stage and its effect on the importance of different
characters in the play.

o Props: elements that the actors use, the objects manipulated in the stage.

Nervous women of the fin-de-siècle: ravenous for a fuller life that their society offered them, famished for the
freedom to act and make real choices. Their nervous disorders expressed the insoluble conflicts between their
desires to act as individuals and the internalized obligation to submit to the needs of the family and to conform to
the model of the self-sacrificing “womanly” behavior. (Elaine Showalter)

One physician quoted in The Technology of the Orgasm argued that at least three-fourths of women has ailments
that could be cured by the vibrator. Which is kind of stunning. The economy for vibrators, even then, was vast: I
mean, it was a million dollar enterprise. (Sarah Ruhl).

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UNIT 2 BODY MATTERS

THE 19TH CENTURY

• 1790’S- 1840 → Industrial revolution ( rural → urban economy technology).

• Late 18th c. – mid 19th c. → Romanticism.

• 1837-1901: Victorian Period.

• 1848: Seneca Falls Conference → Declaration of Sentiments

• 1850s: First campaigns for female suffrage.

• 1869: Publication of john Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of WOMEN

• Key female authors in Anglo-American literature:

o Poetry: Elisabeth Barret Browning, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickenson

o Novels: Emily, Charlotte and Anne Bronte, Mary Shelley, George Elliot, Jane Austen, Elisabeth
Gaskell, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin.

o Theater: Elisabeth Inchbald, Anna Caora, Ogden Mowat

o Non-fiction: Harriet Taylor Mill, Margaret Fuller.

THE MADWOMAN IN THE ATTIC – SANDRA M. GILBERT, SUSAN GUBAR

• Pub. 1979, latest revised edition 2020.

• Turning point in feminist of 19th c. literature.

• Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, George Elliot, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Elisabeth
Barret Browning.

• Key concepts:

o Angel/ monster dichotomy

o Anxiety of authorship

o Double-voiced (subject, palimpsest: texts and subtexts)

o Madwoman (protagonist’s/ author’s doppelgänger)

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THE 19TH C.: REAL VS IDEAL GENDER ROLES

• New industrialized society → nuclear family as economic unit.

• Separate spheres (public/domestic; productive/reproductive; male/female)

o Men = breadwinners, heads of the household.

o Women at the center of the domestic → guardians of tradition

• Cult of true womanhood → purity, obedience, restraint, dependence.

• Idealization of middle and upper-class women: the “Angel in the House”

• Real conditions of working-class women: factory labor, prostitution, alcohol, lack of hygiene in the
tenements, birth giving and childcare… single women worked, governesses at best.

*Julia Margaret Cameron 1871 – The Angel of the house. Hacer referencia al poema de la PLA de Virginia Woolf.

BODIES, HEALTH, AND MORALS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE

• 19th c. theories of mental disorder: biology/environment.

• Male neurasthenia <> overload businessmen. Outside the bodies, the environment, and their role as bread
winners.

• Hysteria (uterus) <> female system. The inside their bodies.

o Treatment: institutionalization (Dr. Charcot), cauterization, electroshock, leeches, rest cure (Dr.
Mitchell), vibrator (Sarah Ruhl)

• Other disorders: agoraphobia, claustrophobia, anorexia → link to female socialization, extreme

expressions of traditional femininity → cult invalidism became iconic, and the representation of women
was connected to being invalid (typical word of the 19th c.)

• The “New Woman” = dangerous figure, deviant body.

WHAT IS THE “NEW WOMEN”?

• Term coined by Irish writer Sarah Grand in The New Aspect of The Woman Question! (1894).

• Transitional generation “who made the effort to live by their beliefs” (Elaine Showalter). Victorian →
modern values; “Angel in the House” →emancipated woman.

The transition woman of this age has a difficult position, and I’ve met my share of difficulties. A few
generations more and il will be easier” (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

• Intellectual representatives:

o Eleanor Marx (The Woman Questions, 1886→ working class women, she introduced the socialist
perspective into the woman question of the period)

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o Mona Caird (Marriage, 1888 – equality in marriage – Daily Telegraph controversy with thousands
of letters of readers, the beginning of a public conversation)

o Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland 1915; essays)

MAIN FEATURES OF THE “NEW WOMAN”

• Rejects marriage and motherhood in favor of independence.

• She is educated and demands higher education.

• Has a liberal approach to sex or is seen as having it.

• Wants a career and opportunities (turning point: WWI, “od women” → not enough men to be married)

• Demands equal rights (e.g., to vote and be elected)

• Tends to gather in class and associations (e.g., suffragist movement)

• Expects a “New Man”, the movement is not only about women, but men also progress along with women.

*Olive Schreiner explains that the change was for both not only women

MAINSTREAM ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE NEW WOMEN

• Unfeminine, selfish, even unnatural (monster): scientific arguments (sterility, racial degeneration, hysterias
anorexia…)

• Rejection of marriage = attack on the institution and women’s sacred mission.

• Sexual predator (wild women)

• Simultaneously masculine and anti-man: “blind alike to maiden modestly and maternal dignity FALTA PEDIR
A PAULA

• Overeducated, ugly and humorless.

• FALTA PEDIR A PAULA.

THE NEW WOMAN IN LITERATURE

• Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House (Norway, 1879)

• Anglophone canonical writers:

o Henry James: Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886) – He popularized the term.

o Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure (1895)

o Francis Scott Fitzgerald: Flappers and Philosophers (1920)

• Anglophone

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o Sarah Grand: The Heavenly Twins (1893)

o George Egerton: Keynote (1893)

o Kate Chopin: The Awakening (1899)

o Susan Glaspell:The verge (1921).

WOMEN, CAPITALISM, AND THE BODY GUEST LECTURE

INTRODUCTION
• Modernity (1900s)

• Industrialism, administrative and military power.

• Increased movement of goods, ideas, people.

• Increased fear, anxiety, uncertainty.

• Capitalism: social an economic system.

o Private ownership

o Needs competition and individualism.

o Leads to pollution and inequality.

GENDER ROLES AND BODY POLITICS

Since the scientific revolution, women have been associated with nature, feelings, and with the body, whereas men
have been associated with knowledge and reason. Because of this division, those who do not fit into this dichotomy
are left aside, in-betweenness.

URBAN CONSUMER CULTURE

The male gaze in cultural items and practices of everyday life. The capitalist city needs genre distinctions. Women
now enjoyed a greater degree of freedom (after both world wars, especially the first one), especially, sexual
freedom. But restraints frequently come disguised as liberties.

SURVEILLED BODIES
Increase of social pressure on women’s body image. Extremes of consumption and individual narratives as coping
mechanisms. Crossbreeding of the body and the machine.

IN LITERATURE
• Good morning, Midnight.

• Jean Rhys (author of Wide Sargasso Sea).

• Published in 1939

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• Set in Paris

• A novel “in-between”, narratives eras (Gardiner 1983). Narrative styles (modernist, post-modernist), it is
too out of the box, the novel is about loneliness.

• Unreliable narrator.

Edward Hopper’s paintings as perfect representation of loneliness for the novel.

PLA 5 (20-02) THE NEXT ROOM – SARAH RUHL

Another reference → Ten days in a madhouse – Nelly Bly 1887/2009

Jill Astbury 1996

Study questions document a parte.

BETTY FRIEDAN (1921-2006)

Economic prosperity after the second WW, the main focus of Friedan. Health (physical and mental).

The Problem that has no name is one of the expressions that she uses to refer to the health issues she talks about.

• Daughter of Jewish immigrants, educated at, at that time, all-women Smith College (psychology major,
1942), married (1947-69) and mother of three. She knew what she was talking about before she
interviewed her college peers for The Feminine Mystique (1963).

• 1940-50s: journalist for left-wing and labor publications; began writing about the problem that has no name
in 1957>> the feminine mystique(1963). She went to a college reunion and talking with her female colleges
realized that there was a pattern, all of them were sad, they were not using their education, from this point
on she started interviewing more women and carried out a research as well as a journalistic investigation,
all of this led to the publication of The Feminine Mystique.

• Impulse for the second wave: one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20 century; for all its
th

flaws, The Feminine Mystique started a revolution. She raises the question of the situation of women,
despite her focus on upper class white women, she centers her attention on what she knew.

• Co-founder of NOW in 1966: equal pay, affirmative action for women, legalization of abortion.

• Organizer of the National Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970, first strike that added the idea of Equality
into it.

• Co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971.

• Women should be able to be economic independent as well of being able to balance working and being
mothers.

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Read and comment on the following excerpts from The Feminine Mystique (1963).[1] Pay attention not only to what
Friedan is saying (content, thematization), but also to how she does it (writing style, form):

The suburban housewife – she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all
over the world. The American housewife – freed by science and labour-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of
childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her
children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfilment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal
partner to a man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that
women ever dreamed of. (pp. 7-8)

• Fulfillment of women, ideal American woman, ideal woman (housewife), she presents the idea of what a
woman is supposed to be according to the patriarchal canon. Idea of resonance (it resonates with the idea
of the angel of the house), postwar wives into the second wave women. She contrasts the ideal vs the real.
Invalidation of complaints, she raises the issue of materialism, fulfilment equated with having money.

Just what was this problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a
woman would say, ‘I feel empty somehow… incomplete.’ Or she would say, ‘I feel as if I don’t exist.’ Sometimes she blotted out
the feeling with a tranquillizer. Sometimes she thought the problem was with her husband, or her children, or that what she
really needed was to redecorate her house, or move to a better neighbourhood, or have an affair, or another baby. Sometimes,
she went to a doctor with symptoms she could hardly describe: ‘A tired feeling… I get so angry with the children it scares me…
I feel like crying without any reason.’ (A Cleveland doctor called it ‘the housewife’s syndrome’.) A number of women told me
about great bleeding blisters that break out on the hands and arms. ‘I call it a housewife blight,’ said a family doctor in
Pennsylvania. ‘I see it so often lately in these young women with four, five, and six children, who bury themselves in their
dishpans. But it isn’t caused by detergent and it isn’t cured by cortisone.’ (pp. 9-10)

• She talks in third person as if she wasn’t a woman, she provides opinions from women and experts, she
introduces her sources, it is not her idea, there is evidence, not only from other women, but also from
experts. Medications are not enough.

Of the growing thousands of women currently getting private psychiatric help in the United States, the married ones were
reported dissatisfied with their marriages, the unmarried ones suffering from anxiety and, finally, depression. Strangely, a
number of psychiatrists stated that, in their experience, unmarried women patients were happier than married ones. So the
door of all those pretty suburban houses opened a crack to permit a glimpse of uncounted thousands of American housewives
who suffered alone from a problem that suddenly everyone was talking about, and beginning to take for granted, as one of
those unreal problems in American life that can never be solved – like the hydrogen bomb. […] They got all kinds of advice from
the growing armies of marriage and child-guidance counsellors, psychotherapists, and armchair psychologists, on how to adjust
to their role as housewives.” (pp. 14-15)

• Married vs unmarried women, adjustment (role), she uses similes. Conceptualization of the problem, from
intuition trough investigation she identifies an issue. The ideal for the women and men to be happy, they
need to adapt, she uses the concept of role, she begins to give shape to a concept that will be lately
developed, and she does it with intense images.

I began to see in a strange new light the American return to early marriage and the large families that are causing the population
explosion; the recent movement to natural childbirth and breastfeeding; suburban conformity, and the new neuroses, character
pathologies and sexual problems being reported by the doctors. I began to see new dimensions to old problems that have long
been taken for granted among women: menstrual difficulties, sexual frigidity, promiscuity, pregnancy fears, childbirth
depression, the high incidence of emotional breakdown and suicide among women in their twenties and thirties, the menopause

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crises, the so-called passivity and immaturity of American men, the discrepancy between women’s tested intellectual abilities
in childhood and their adult achievement, the changing incidence of adult sexual orgasm in American women, and persistent
problems in psychotherapy and in women’s education.

If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a matter of loss of
femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone recognizes. It is the key
to these other new and old problems which have been torturing women and their husbands and children, and puzzling th eir
doctors and educators for years. It may well be the key to our future as a nation and a culture. (p. 20)

• She does a revision of the past. She uses the first person to imply that it is her perspective. Back to the past,
where do we come from? She also includes men and children in this quotation, because it also affects them.

The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfilment of their own femininity.
It says that the great mistake of Western culture, through most of its history, has been the undervaluation of that femininity. It
says this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that manmade science may never
be able to understand it. But however special and different, it is in no way inferior, to the nature of man; it may even in certain
respects be superior. The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women’s troubles in the past is that women envied men,
women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfilment only in sexual passivity, male
domination, and nurturing maternal love.

But the new image this mystique gives to American women is the old image: ‘Occupation: housewife.’ (pp. 28-29)

• Femininity (and by extension masculinity) is something natural? She uses many adjectives to describe the
ideal of the Mystique, contrast between the new and the old, antithesis between both topics, the new is
the old again, from the angel to the house to the postwar wife.

All the quotations have been extracted from the 2010 Penguin Modern Classics edition.

AN ONGOING STRUGGLE: THE GENDERED BODY AS BATTLEGROUND

Second wave: Miss America Pageant Protest September 7 , 1968. th

Third wave: Barbara Kruger 1989: your body is a battleground.

Fourth wave: Women’s March 2022.

Mohja Kahf “My body is Not your Battleground.”

• Syrian American poet, originally from Syria, she is from a Muslim family, in her work she analyses how the
American society traits the Muslim women, but also within the Muslim society.

• Battleground metaphor, women’s and children’s bodies are used as instruments.

• “My body is Not your Battleground.” From the book E-mails from Scheherazade. Angry poem, oppositional
poem, confrontational poem.

NAOMI WOLF, THE BEAUTY MYTH (1991)

A classic from the third wave about the beauty canon. She wrote the book as a follow-up of what the second wave
had done with their protest (Beauty pageant protest) and also after Susie Orbach’s Fat is Feminist Issue (1978).

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A groundbreaking book about unrealistic beauty standards, diet culture, and cosmetics industry> 3rd wave
reference.

This opened the debate on victimization vs agency, social dynamic and individual choice around the female body>
the 4th wave, postfeminism, and choice (McRobbie 2009). Naomi says that is not a choice because if it affects how,
you are perceived then it is not a choice.

Body politics: “a culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession bout female beauty, but an obsession about
female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a
tractable one.”

Revised in the context of 4th wave:

• More diverse beauty standards → more inclusive, less damaging?

• Men targeted by the beauty industry → 25 percent of male anorexics.

• New sources of conflict → social media: selfie dysmorphia.

Fat Black woman poems, Grace Nichols: celebratory poems, beauty is a fat black woman, beauty as a celebration.

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