First of all, check out Robin's thorough and thought-provoking notes from last week in the Recaps page. Thanks, Robin! Looking ahead: over your break, which I hope is wonderful, you will be reading a portion of Medea as well as Chapters 1 and 2 of A Room of One's Own. We'll be thinking about unconventional, powerful and (ultimately) tragic women over the next few weeks. How do women assert themselves when they live within a system that dispossesses them and deprives them of a tradition? How do you make yourself heard and respected if you have been denied access to the institutions that convey power? The character of Medea and the persona of Woolf are very different, of course, but they both raise pressing questions about female power. To be continued, with your help...
At first sight, Medea and A Room of One's Own seem like completely different stories. Medea, first of all, is a Greek Tragedy written by Euripedes, one of the three greatest tragedians including Sophocles and Aeschylus. Second, Medea was written in 431 B.C. and is derived from a "collection of tales" and mythologies. On the other hand, Woolf's A Room of One's Own occurs in a much more realistic setting, although the author does invent names like "Oxbridge" and "Fernham". In addition, it is a collection of essays.
ReplyDeleteEither way, whether it is mythology, tragedy or essays, both Euripides and Woolf seem to make a point. Their protagonists are both women and the reader is able to study carefully their stream of consciousness by monologue for Medea and narration for A Room of One's Own. Each of these characters are one of the few women of their time who has realized that something is simply not fair for her sexe.
Since Woolf's piece is written in 1929, one might relate more to her situation. Yet, in both cases, these women emphasize on the segregation of sexes. Woolf does it in a more direct way, by more or less stating that women have limited access to knowledge while Medea's direct madness brings to light the woman's plight. In effect, compared to Woolf's character, Medea seems literally "crazy", wanting to kill anyone, including her children. However, in 431 B.C, the woman's stature was not even remotely conceivable even if she was queen. Her explosion of madness, seemingly inexcusable, is a result of the woman being constantly overshadowed by man. When, Jason leaves her, she truly feels abused and her inner female ego simply erupts. Thus, in order to make herself heard, Medea sees that killing and shocking is the only way to prove that women can have power. The fact that Medea does have royal blood protects her from some consequences, but it also gives her the advantageous way to demand power for women in general.
Contrarily to Medea, Woolf demands power for women in a more conventional way, through writing and not killing whimsically. She concentrates more on the denied access to women to institutions, to knowledge, and to fair treatment. By the example of being refused the right to walk to the path because of her sexe, she convinces the reader that there is clear injustice between the sexes. She almost demands of man that in order to write well, a woman needs her own room and a certain amount of money (500 pounds per year) to succeed.
Although Medea's way of succeeding is rather barbaric, she gets what she wants. In a Room of One's Own, women's rights to education are not granted right away, but they convince the reader that the possibility is so close. Both of these pieces are results of female frustration on the equality of sexes face to institutions. Throughout time, they are small steps in literature to achieving that equality of power.