Women in Literature

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” – Virginia Woolf

From Enheduanna to Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf to Madeline Miller, the stack full of literary texts in resident and university libraries, since centuries back, have constituted pages after pages of extraordinary gems created by women bound in between the expanse of leather-bound hardcovers in genres of all varieties.

Women’s literature is a field of literary studies that holds and serves a multitude of purposes in its unit. Generally defined as “literature written by women”, scholars across the world have exemplified that definition as redundant. The onus of women's literature is to categorize and create an area of study for a group of people marginalized by history and to explore through their writing their lives as they were while occupying such a unique socio-political space within their culture. When delving into the history of women’s writing, it becomes clear how this category of literature has a rather unconventional pathway cut out from the rest.

From the time the printing press was invented in the 15th century, the literature scene has been dominated by men. Scholars, philosophers, scientists, researchers – men would develop concepts, theories and axioms across vast aspects and papers, essays and articles would be published. No sooner than later, the genre of fiction extended its wings of popularity, and men writers in the 18th and 19th centuries birthed a new wave of literary works where fictional stories with deeper philosophical and ethical existential dilemmas aided in the education of the masses about the human psyche.

Where does women’s literature come into play in this history, one might ask? Did women not write during those prime years of the onset of literature? Before the introduction of women’s literary history into academia and the efforts of researchers and scholars to explore, recover and preserve their tradition, women themselves were often the only champions of themselves, their contemporaries and their predecessors.

It is not that female researchers, philosophers, scientists and scholars did not exist during those years. They existed, very dominantly so, and they wrote and read and researched and published. But the concept of patriarchy was so strongly in implement during those years, it was almost a socio-political crisis if men did not dominate all hierarchies of society. Thus, female writers were oppressed, both intentionally and unintentionally.

The Archaic Greek poet Sappho made some of the greatest contributions to the history of Greko-Roman literature. With incrementing popularity of the epic narrative, Sappho’s poetry opened up a differently furnished pathway. Leaning on the more emotional aspects of the human psyche, Sapphic poetries explored themes of love, compassion and anti-war principles. However, many of Sappho’s verses were lost, burned, or banned with the rise of Christianity, mainly throughout the Middle Ages.

Furthermore, female authors across generations used male pseudonyms for their published work to be presented without judgemental overviews. The Bronte Sisters first published their works under the male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Charlotte Bront? herself stated that “we did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.”

Louisa May Alcott frequently used the ambiguous title A.M. Barnard to write sensational gothic thrillers with subject matter deemed ‘unladylike’ for a late 19th-century female writer. Alcott’s works written under A.M. Barnard included?A Long Fatal Love Chase, a dark love story written two years before?Little Women, and the novella?Behind a Mask, with themes of social class and manipulation.

Mary Ann Evans adopted her better-known male pseudonym, George Eliot; Evans believed that a male alias would discourage female stereotyping and justify her characterized politically astute writings.

No matter the sphere, genre or strata, female authors were oppressed by a multitude of arrows hitting from different directions. With limited options present with the bounds holding them, they took up to taking male counterparts to their writer lifestyles.

Despite having ingrained mass suppression, women across the timeline continue to deeply influence the scope of literature around the world. With the rise of new skill and literary criticism theories, female writers, poets and playwrights are taking the world by a storm. Suppression across time and space still continue to prevail, albeit the numbers have reduced a vast amount. But the catastrophe of an oppressed creative will be the most heart wrenching of all.

In her essay “A room of one’s own”, Virginia Woolf concocts a thought experiment where she demonstrates the tragedy of genius restricted. She wrote, “When one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by a devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we’re on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen.”

By:- Abhipsa