Tutoveanu Andreea-Miruna

Group 1
First year
READING NOTES
Simone De Beauvoir: from The Second Sex

 The term ‘man’ -> used to refer to the human being, not in particular to the male
being

Man= male -> positive

Human being female -> negative

 A woman have to remove her subjectivity in an argument in order to be considered

‘true’ by males.

 St. Thomas -> woman is an ‘imperfect man’ and ‘incidental being’ because in
Genesis painting Eve is made of Adam’s bone.

 Women will never be independent as long as they only get what men ‘are willing to
grant’.

 The great books are not written by women.

 Emily Brontë -> death

Virginia Woolf -> life
Katherine Mansfield -> suffering

 Women have begun to resign themselves with what men call ‘the human situation’ :
injustice, insecurities, hesitation.

 In order to make art, literature or philosophy a man must have liberty.

Tutoveanu Andreea-Miruna
Group 1
First year
READING NOTES

Elaine Showalter: from Towards a Feminist Poetics

reader (the feminist critique)

 Feminist criticism
writer (‘la gynocritique’)

 The latter type of feminist criticsm is connected to ‘other modes of new feminist
research’.

 Along the history, the males didn’t write truly important things about women, such
as how they’ve felt and experienced, but about how ‘women should be’.

 People should make this great distinction between ‘the lines of the male tradition’
and ‘the visible world of female culture’.

 A Literature of their Own -> the Feminine stage (1840-1880) -> imitation
-> the Feminist stage (1880-1920) -> protest
-> the Female stage (1920- now)

In this ongoing process of writing ‘Female’ literature, ‘women reject both imitation’
(the Feminine stage) and ‘protest’ (the Feminist stage).

 The feminist literature began to ‘emancipate itself from the influences of accepted
models, and guide itself by its own impulses’ (John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of
Women, London, 1869).

 ‘The anatomy, the rhetoric, the poetics, the history, await our writing. [...]’
Tutoveanu Andreea-Miruna
Group 1
First year
READING NOTES

Elaine Showalter: from ‘Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the

Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism’ (1985)

 Ophelia -> ‘the object of Hamlet’s male desire’

feminity
female sexuality

 We can not talk about Ophelia without relating her to Hamlet.

 ‘Ophelia is a creature of lack’ -> ‘I think nothing, my lord’.

‘nothing’ - > female genitalia (Elizabethan slang)
‘Her speech is nothing’ (Gertrude, about Ophelia)

 Ophelia is an important symbol of female insanity.

 On stage, Ophelia was played both by males and women.

 Madness -> Hamlet -> metaphysical

Ophelia -> product of the female body and female nature

 the dishevelled hair -> mad woman

victim of a rape

 female love -> melancholy, erotomania

 The epidemic of melancholy was associated with intellectual and imaginative genius
only in males, whereas in women was seen as biological and emotional.

 ‘the romantic Ophelia is a girl who feels too much, who drowns in feeling’

 ‘The romantic critics seem to have felt that the less said about Ophelia the better; the
point was to look at her.’

 Ophelia was dressed in white -> ‘blanche Ophelia’ -> lily, cloud, snow

 She may be ‘innocent’ and docile, but she is very aware of her body.’

 ‘In her madness there is no one there[...] There is no integral selfhood expressed through
her actions or utterances. Incomprehensible statements are said by nothing. She has
already died. There is now only a vacuum where there was once a person.’ (R.D. Laing)

 Female sexuality and madness -> the decorous and pious Ophelia of the Augustan
Age Age
the postmodern schizophrenic heroine
Tutoveanu Andreea-Miruna
Group 1
First year
READING NOTES