ESSAY CEMETERY

Summary Men don't seek to define themselves according to their sex, whereas women do. Masculinity is the norm whereas femininity is marginal. Men need no explanation whereas women need qualification. It is male perception that is the normative perception of the world. This convention dates to Aristotle, who said that females are defective because they lack things males have, and even to Genesis where woman was created from a mere bone of Adam's. Humanity is male. Male is dominant, and female is secondary, the "Other".  Woman is the product of society, not biology.  New relationships between men and women are already being formed and will continue to be so. Male and female sexuality will always be distinct, but this doesn’t mean that equality otherwise cannot be achieved.  Women need to both become individuals, rather than stereotypes or symbols clumped together in groups. Also, women need to become equal to men. This will not mean the end of passion – sex will always ...

 * Note: I am not sure where the excerpt is from. Women must write about themselves. Detachment from the past is necessary and women must look toward the future. The past must be destroyed and a new future projected.  Women struggle against men. Women have been oppressed for ages.  There is no one type of woman. They are individuals with diverse traits.  Cixous spoke with a woman who revealed to her a rich inner life of sexual and personal exploration. Such experiences are beautiful. Cixous wished that women would write of this so other women would be exposed to this. She herself didn't share her experiences, urges, and emotions because she was ashamed. Due to societal "phallocentrism", she felt ashamed of her own self-expressive urges.  She encourages women to write and to overcome feelings of embarrassment about attempting to participate in a male-dominated profession. There is the same embarrassment as masturbation. Writing and masturbation should be in the o...

Mukherjee calls America a myth. Mukherjee is a naturalized citizen and had to prove her worth to become one. She was born in Calcutta, India and never expected to naturalize, but to return home to marry the man her father picked for her. When she first arrived in Iowa for two years to study it was very homogeneous but now, 35 years later, it is so diverse that there's a cultural   or identity crisis regarding foreigners. In India this was unheard of, because classification matters above all and decrees precisely who each person is. Mukherjee herself was defined by her ancestry, caste and homeland. One day she spontaneously married her Canadian husband. For ten years she felt like an expatriate, and wrote a book that was an expression of this. After 14 years in Canada she decided to become an immigrant instead of an expatriate and moved to America with her family. Canada was hard because it was very racially exclusivist. America on the other hand held the appeal of its egalitari...

A femal protagonist is in a passionless marriage. "She" gave "him" a child because she respected him and he her. He is a professor and she - a poet. She met Ellis, "The Lover", at an artists' colony in New England. This happened while she was being talked at by an old black poet who rambles. This happens a lot because she is a good listener and people take advantage. She stops listening every time people get pompous and starts daydreaming. Ellis whisks her away and she immediately thinks of him as her lover. She finds his hands sensual. They go to dinner and he talks about himself. She is mildly amused. When he starts talking about his unpublished novels, she loses interest. Despite this, she does not show it – she intends to make him her first lover. "Afterwards, she would be truly a woman of her time". She is aware of how pleasing she appears, and notes that people turn to look at her when she is near. She is easygoing and does...

Walker describes Jean Toomer's exploration of the Reconstruction South. Toomer found women sexually abused and lost, but who he saw to hold power, spirituality and beauty of which they were not aware. They were waiting for these unknowns to be made known. In the meantime they did not appreciate any aspects of life. These black women were artists whose creative forces were abandoned to the hardships of life. Black women who were able to create such as Phillis Wheatley and Zora Hurston had divided loyalties, between black and white cultures. They were raised in both and their art is not genuinely hers but confused due to this. Many have criticized Wheatley's poetry for glorifying white people but Walker understands that art for Phyllis was a soulful practice and it sustained her. This is not the end of the story, for the next generation of black women has survived. There is now the quest for black female identity. Society is not understanding of this strife. The quest...

Paley used to only write poetry. This was done using her "ear for literature". Sometime in the mid 1950s Paley had an urge to write, but poetry was not the way to express it. The "beginning of big luck" happened: she got sick and her children had to go to all-day daycare for a few weeks. During this time she succeeded in writing several stories. She wrote them using her other "ear", her "home ear"- the faculty in her that let her be in touch with her early experiences. Early on, as a woman who was no longer a boy, Paley realized that she would be writing domestic fiction. Luck number one. A friend of Paley's made her ex-husband read Paley's work. This ex-husband was a publisher, and he published ten short stories by Paley. The "big luck" is the politics that went on around Paley as she was living her domestic life. This meant Paley, every woman writer in fact, was part of the second wave of the feminist movement. Activi...

Summary Men make war, even though it injures them terribly. Paley asks: how do they come to live this way? When Paley was a little girl, she was a boy. She wanted to continue being a boy and to go to war and do other boy things, a notion that changed only experiencing WWII. She lived in Army camps with her husband much of the time, which she liked because of the boys and the action. As she began to live her own life as a writer and otherwise, she stopped wanting to be a boy; in fact, she thought it was the worst thing that she could never identify with. And after she had children she began to notice the women around her, to really live among women, and ascribe importance to them. She began rejecting the notion that men lived exciting compelling lives. She began to be interested in women.  This is how she came to write about women. She began to explore the female terrain with which she was unfamiliar through her stories. Even though she felt what she was writing was triv...

Featuring exclusively female characters, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls is indeed filled with remarkable women. The 1988 play contains women from across the globe who have distinguished themselves over the span of a thousand years, from Joan, the ninth-century pope, to Marlene, a twentieth-century career woman. The women, despite their vastly diverse backgrounds, have all had to sacrifice their femininity, freedom, and their families in order to pursue their individual goals in a male-dominated, male-oriented world. Churchill cleverly uses historical figures to create powerful criticism of contemporary feminism, particularly of that present in 1980s England, and explores what it really means to be a "top girl". With disorienting theatrical and linguistic technique, she ensures the audience's active participation and encourages critical socio-political thinking and self-reflexivity.             From its very beginning, the play diso...

THEMES Fiction Women Money Chance STYLE ellipsis Stream of thought, the way thought moves from thing to thing Interruption People are not named Self-reflexivity KEY WORDS Woman Fiction Virginia Woolf

Summary of chapters 1 and 2. Bottom line: for women to be independent of men, they need money. Chapter 1 Woolf begins her long essay by explaining how difficult the questions of fiction and women and their relationship are. All she knows for sure, she says, is that " a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". She hopes that through exploring the manner in which she arrived at this conclusion, that the topic of women and fiction will become clearer. She proceeds to tell a fictitious story (I think) to illustrate her point. A woman walks on the lawn on the grounds of a college. She has an idea, which she forgets when she abruptly remembers that only fellows of the college are allowed on the grass, and others on the gravel paths. She ponders the writing of two authors, when she remembers that their manuscripts are in the library on the grounds. She decides to view the manuscripts, but finds that women are not allowed in the library...

THEMES  The struggle of writing Experiences in writing Limitations for woman writers The taboos for woman writers Men's constraints on women The definition of woman The profession of writing Other professions for women The future of women as professionals KEY WORDS Books Women Man Angel in the House Pen Ink Experience Profession Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is addressing a group of women seeking employment in a workforce predominated by men. She speaks of the struggle present for all women writers, and that is to break out of the conventions society has for women- being pure, and conservative, and sycophantic towards men without a mind of their own. This is a mental barrier that she was able to break, with great difficulty, in order to incorporate her own voice into her writing. She was able to do so thanks to her financial independence, which allowed her to not depend on writing for a livelihood and allowed her to break conventions. Now that women will join the workforce, Woolf says that it is important to ask questions regarding what all of this implies, and how women are to behave once they are professionals, and to explore the individual voice that women will need to bring to their jobs. Virginia Woolf