Womens Rights and Empowerment - Essay Example

Women’s Rights and Empowerment in Sula and A Room of One’s Own. The outcry against the unfair treatment of women by a patriarchal and phallogocentricsociety has been championed for centuries by many writers, whether essayist, novelist, poet, political activist or literary critic. The feminist movement and struggles for women’s liberation and suffrage have in common the desire to increase awareness of imbedded patriarchal values that silence and undermine women, and argue for women’s equal humanity, voice and agency. Virginia Woolf’s 1928 essay A Room of One’s Own, and Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula, though separated by fifty years, genre and the Atlantic Ocean, both deal with the issue of women’s rights and empowerment, adding powerful and influential perspectives to the struggle. Room is Woolf’s reflection on the state of women, and fiction by women from a historical perspective, concluding that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (1). For Woolf, fictional production necessitates both economic and intellectual freedom, both of which allows the (woman) writer to cultivate the mind required to produce “great fiction” (29). After being chased off the lawns and refused entry into the library at the chauvinist Oxbridge (2), she bemoans the jobs and careers withheld from women because of fixed gender roles (6) and wishes their mothers had “gone into business” to allow her contemporaries the same economic and intellectual freedoms as men, though she concedes that this “would necessitate suppression of families altogether” (6) as child-bearing and economic freedom are mutually exclusive. She also deplores the poverty of a female literary inheritance. Due to the phallogentric nature of English society and literature, evident from even the newspapers (9), many books were written about women before the 1800s but they were exclusively by men who take liberty to preach, analyze and deprecate women (8). While Shakespeare wrote of strong-willed women who “have burnt like beacons in all the works of the poets from the beginning of time”, in reality they were “locked up, beaten and flung about the room [and] all but absent from history” (11). More importantly, the woman “never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary” (12). In anger at being “told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man” (9), Woolf calls for a female literary voice which she pioneers by subverting masculine traditions. Instead of the weaker sex, she suggests that women have been a mirror that elevates man to his current status of glorious superiority (10), and she re-imagines the lives of women who didn’t have the opportunity to become Shakespeares, and “that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman” (14). Woolf is hungry for information on women from a woman’s perspective and wants historians (men) to rewrite history to include the suppressed stories (13). She notes the change in women’s literary production in the emergence of a female canon, with distinct styles and concerns. While early women writers failed miserably at imitating the male voice, and wrote under the veil of male pen names, others like Bronte and Austen managed to cull out a female space within the canon, to their credit, and have prepared a literary tradition for contemporary writers. Bronte and Austen “wrote as women write, not as men”, fomenting their voices in the space of the communal sitting room as opposed to the male-dominated war fields (20). While the writers of previous centuries faced incredible constraints such as gender prejudice and emotional strain (14-15), with a legacy and the vote, contemporary women are free from patriarchy and can have “a view of the open sky” (11). In Sula, the African-American novelist Toni Morrison is not as concerned with self-assertion through literary production as is Woolf, but through sexual freedom. Set in a black community in Ohio in the 1920s to 60s, the novel is concerned with empowerment but this issue is further complicated by race. Woolf’s historical perspective takes on fictional form as Morrison explores some of the issues raised in Room, giving voice, visibility and agency to women, yet going further in the subversion of traditional gender expectations. In Sula, Helene Wright is raised in church to prevent her from becoming a loose woman in the guise of her courtesan mother (17), and raises her daughter Nel with an iron fist to ensure that she grows into a “proper woman” – obedient and polite, with no enthusiasm and imagination (18). In the train incident (21-22) Helene embodies the traditional portrayal of the (black) woman as a sexual object with her smile of a sex slave to the white conductor. Furthermore, marriage is portrayed in the novel as an institution that destroys women’s, color, fire and laughter, and turns them into gray lump of fat with the “sweetness sucked out of them” (122). Here Morrison rejects traditional gender roles and expectations, especially as she also casts the male characters as invariably impotent and without agency. In contrast to her mother, Nel refuses to be debased sexually (22), and at ten years old is drawn to her grandmother, the “much-handled thing” (27-8). But although Nel aches for the moral freedom of the Peace residence (29) it is the latter through whom Morrison subverts gender expectations. Eva Peace is described as “creator and sovereign”, as she rules over “her children, friends, strays and a constant stream of boarders” (30). The poster child for the economic plight of women discussed by Woolf, Eva achieves financial independence, after being left by her husband with three children, through personal sacrifice (32-33), and achieves empowerment not only by ruling her own house but also by naming the (incompetent) males in her house (the deweys and Tar Baby, for example). Sula, her granddaughter, is largely influenced by this freedom from male domination. While Nel dreams of a “fiery prince” who would rescue her from her mother’s “incredibly orderly house”, Sula’s dreams of be the knight her/himself (51-2), and when Eva says to Sula: “when you gone get married? You need to have some babies. … Ain’t no woman got no business floating around without no man” (92), Sula responds by claiming her right to her own personal fire (93) (see also Beloved), and says to Nel that men “ain’t worth more than me” (143). She represents the “independent-like” college-educated woman who rejects traditional gender constraints, seen especially in her desire to sow “wickedness” in Medallion, infecting the women with her subversive behavior (145). The main aspect of gender-role subversion and empowerment in the novel is seen in “man love” (41) – sexual desire for men with no economic attachment. “The Peace women simply loved maleness for its own sake”. Even as young girls, Nel and Sula are shown as desiring the “the mystery [of] those smooth vanilla crotches [that] invited them” (58-9). With Ajax, Sula finds intellectual equality (127-8), but she seeks empowerment in sexual freedom and superiority, only to find that this position lends itself to “disorder” and is “awful” (129). Morrison is thus ambivalent about certain types of empowerment. Sula’s “freedom” is loneliness, Nel’s is self-effacement and leaves her “gray” and left. The real empowerment, as seen in the last lines of the novel, is in female bonding. In the face of racial prejudice, sisterhood is more important than the rivalry that Woolf mentions in Room (30). Woolf, on the other hand sees real empowerment beyond gender. Her challenge to her contemporaries was to cultivate an androgynous or “man-womanly mind” and to avoid “sex-consciousness” which impoverishes literature. Like Sula, she calls for women to fill the silence and to refuse to be repressed: “I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. 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” (21). Works Cited Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Vintage, 1973. Warhol, Robin, and Diane Herndl, eds. Feminisms: an Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Rutgers University Press, 1997. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (1928). A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook. 2002. 18 May 2006. http://www.gutenberg.net.au/woolf_room.pdf. Read More