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Conscientious Objectors: Female Authors Who Consciously

Oppose the Idealized Woman Stereotype

Anthony Owens, Copyright 2009

Walter Feinberg and Jonas F. Soltis (2004) define class consciousness as a positive

development in which the members of a lower class or caste, for my purposes women, “become

aware of their common interest and are able to articulate that interest” (49). This awareness can

lead to “progressive social change” (50) for any subordinate class, such as women, if they

organize to exert their power and influence. False consciousness, on the other hand, “illustrated

by the slave who espouses the values of the master,” believing “that he or she is the master’s

property, to do with as the master pleases . . . or by the concentration camp inmate who begins to

think like the prison guard” occurs when “members of the subordinate class . . . express the point

of view and share the values of the dominant class” (50), in this case men. Hence, when women

internalize misogynistic points of view and values, or when they accept and inhabit the role of an

idealized woman stereotype, they themselves contribute to the continued hegemony, or a

“preponderance of influence or authority” (50) of men over women. Louisa May Alcott, Mary

Alcock, and Kate Chopin exhibit class/gender consciousness and combat false consciousness as

writers.

’Do you mean to say you prefer to scrub the hearth to sitting in my charming

room while I read Hegel to you?’ he demanded, glaring down upon me.

‘Infinitely,’ I responded promptly, and emphasized my words by beginning to

scrub with a zeal that made the bricks white with foam.

‘Is it possible!’ and, with a groan at my depravity, Josephus retired, full of

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ungodly wrath. (Alcott 1148)

Thus Louisa May Alcott’s character Louisa in the autobiographical essay “How I Went

Out to Service” (1141-1151) rebels against the abject submission in the guise of entertainment

and enlightenment that Josephus (an allusion to the ancient thinker and alleged misogynist) her

employer, who is based on Alcott’s one-time, real-life employer, James Richardson,

unsuccessfully attempts to inflict upon her mind and spirit. In Alcott’s essay, Josephus would

make of Louisa a “passive bucket, into which he was to pour all manner of philosophic,

metaphysical, and sentimental rubbish. [She] was to serve his [my bold] needs, soothe his

sufferings, and sympathize with all his sorrows—be a galley slave, in fact” (1147). Alcott here

viscerally depicts her own awareness of and resistance to such abject subjugation of women by

men, evidencing an aware or “awakened” state of consciousness, as Chopin put it (1253). Mary

Alcock and Kate Chopin likewise define themselves through their writings as awakened female

authors, whose in their writings resist unflattering and disempowering sexist constructions of

female nature and identity. Such awakening consists of moving from a state of false

consciousness to a state of class/gender consciousness, Marxist concepts that are useful for

analyzing and understanding how these writers define themselves through their works in

opposition to a stereotypical, misogynistic construct of female identity that may be termed “the

ideal woman.” Historically, the ideal woman is a fictional creature who, among other things, is

often depicted as and/or expected to be inherently sentimental versus intellectual and selfless and

servile versus self-fulfilled and autonomous. The idealized woman is also Alcott’s passive

bucket or galley slave. Reading the works of these authors through a Marxist lens reveals how

they define themselves in opposition to one or more of these aspects of the idealized-woman

stereotype.
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Using a hilarious tongue-in-cheek style of writing in the form of a recipe, in “A Receipt

for Writing a Novel” (307-308), Mary Alcock lampoons the tired and misogynistic staples of the

romance novel writers of her time, singling out female authors of such works. In so doing, she

directly defines herself as an awakened female writer consciously opposed to the idealized

woman stereotype, a harmful fiction which owes a lot to sexist depictions of female characters

common to the popular genre Alcock here parodies. The poet sarcastically recommends that

would-be female authors of popular romance novels mechanically follow the recipe for the genre

by imbuing their heroines with some of the most absurdly stereotypical female behavior

imaginable: e.g., all manner of emotional folly like “hysteric fits” (line 16, page 307), “fainting

fits (18, 307), “mad love” (23, 307), and so on. Alcock “presses” female authors to “carry on

[this] bold design” (6, 307) at any cost, even “’gainst nature, reason, and sense” (5, 307). This

dichotomy between what is natural, rational, and sensible versus what is unnatural, irrational and

insensible is the old misogynistic one between man and woman. Some of the more irrational

ingredients of the recipe, for example, include outlandishly incongruous and melodramatic plot

twists, whose only purpose is to gratuitously generate suspense and surprise in readers; one way

to go about this would be to have the madly in love hero and heroine discover that they are

siblings (76, 308), a confusion later cleared up by some minor character, thereby clearing the

path for a tragic Romeo-and-Juliet (Shakespeare) ending (80-84, 308). The poet laments that

such “stores supply the female pen,/ which writes them o’er and o’er again” (69-70, 308), the

meter and rhyme of the couplet emphasizing that enough is enough already. The reason the poet

singles out female writers is because such writing both constitutes false consciousness on the part

of writers and fosters it in readers, thereby exasperating the hegemony of men over women. The
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false consciousness driving the mechanical combination of such ingredients can only serve to

help keep women in the kitchen, as emphasized by the recipe metaphor.

Finally, Kate Chopin takes a radical (for her and our time) step beyond both Alcock and

Alcott with her character Edna in “The Awakening” (Chopin 1253-1344). Edna proves a class

conscious, or awakened being, an independent and autonomous woman who not only longs for

but seizes both spiritual and sexual freedom. She shamelessly throws off the yoke of the

idealized woman as servile and selfless wife and mother, just as she casts off the itchy bathing

suit at the end of her evolutionary journey (1344). Her lack of shame in situations where women

suffering from false consciousness would feel plagued by it evidences her and, by extension, the

author’s class conscious or awakened state. For example, take the passage in which we meet for

the first time Edna’s antithesis in the novel, Mademoiselle Ratignolle, the epitome of the

idealized woman for whom “there are no words to describe . . . save the old ones that have

served so often to picture the bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams (1259),”

both figures of the idealized woman. Embodying the idealized woman stereotype by looking

fabulously decorous while doing so, she busies herself in the middle of summer obsessively

sewing winter clothing, or “night drawers” for her baby that are such a “marvel of construction,

fashioned to enclose a baby’s body so effectually that only two small eyes might look out from

the garment, like an Eskimo’s” (1259). When Chopin uses overly dramatic diction of the sort

found in romance novels to describe that the drawers were “designed for winter wear, when

treacherous drafts came down chimneys and insidious currents of deadly cold found their way

through keyholes” (1259), she reveals to readers the absurd sense of urgency that M. Ratignolle,

the ever responsible mother, is feeling at the time. If she were not constantly busying herself in

such selfless acts of nurture to protect and provide for her children, she would no doubt feel
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wracked with guilt. In opposition, Edna’s “mind was quite at rest concerning the present material

needs of her children, and she could not see the use of anticipating and making winter night

garments the subject of her summer meditations” (1259). In other words, Edna does not feel the

same absurdly selfless (given the season) sense of urgency that her friend does. Indeed, she feels

as though she speaks a different language than M. Ratignolle, as evidenced by their later

argument over Edna not consenting to sacrifice herself, even for her children (1290). We also

learn that, although Edna feels a myriad of differing emotions after having sex with Arobin,

shame is not one of them (1319). In the end, she shamelessly casts off the itchy bathing suit that

reminds us of M. Ratignolle’s winter drawers, the treacherous drafts of censure be damned.

There she stands, nude on the beach in broad daylight, feeling the strangeness and awfulness of

the situation, tasting the deliciousness of it, but certainly feeling no shame (1344).

To conclude, Alcott, Alcock, and Chopin all consciously combat core aspects of the

idealized woman stereotype in their writings. In doing so, they also help their readers to move

from a state of false to class/gender consciousness. In Chopin’s case, her character Edna shows

how difficult and painful awakening to the truth has been historically for women. As Edna

blossoms into her own person, as she wrests possession of her spirit and body away from others,

she learns that for women of the time, liberty and social status varied inversely, perhaps a

realization that was too much for her to bear, but one that is ultimately inevitable for all women,

if they are ever to leave behind “the dull old house” of Josephus, “no longer either mysterious or

romantic in [their] eyes” (Alcott 1150).

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Works Cited

Alcock, Mary. “A Receipt for Writing a Novel.” The Norton Anthology of Literature by

Women: The Traditions in English. Vol. 1. 3rd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and

Company, Inc., 2007. 307-308.

Alcott, Louisa M. “How I Went Out to Service.” The Norton Anthology of Literature by

Women: The Traditions in English. Vol. 1. 3rd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and

Company, Inc., 2007. 1142-1151.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions

in English. Vol. 1. 3rd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2007. 1253-

1344.

Fienberg, Walter and Soltis, Jonas F. School and Society. 4th Edition. New York: Teachers

College Press, 2004.

Gilbert, Sandra, M. and Susan Gubar, eds. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The

Traditions in English. Vol. 1. 3rd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.,

2007.