The University of Jordan

The English Department

Feminist Theory
Ph.D. Course
Prof. Rula Quawas
Tasneem M. Jweifel
December/2014
Women in a Voyage to the Self

All what they needed was a space where they could find, feel, and live
for themselves. These women lost their sense of identity and inner self as a
result

of

living

in

an

androcentric

world.

Being

dominated,

oppressed,

marginalized and ignored, heroines in different fictional works struggle hard to

untie themselves, free their souls and minds, and creep over the source of their
misery; the male-chauvinist society. For the sake of achieving subjecthood and
break the chains of objectification, some of them go in a voyage towards their
deep self, others transcend their souls through death to the heaven of liberty, and
some other women find their way out of their houses seeking a different kind of
gynocentric life.
For any woman to be fit in this kind of male-dominant societies, she
needs to structure her character with four main qualities; domesticity, piety,
purity, and submissiveness. By rejecting their positions under the umbrella of
the man, some women turn these qualities into what make themselves fit in
their

own

worlds.

Therefore,

characters

structured

with

individuality,

self-

definition, experience and independence come to life as new-born women with

full human identities. In this modest essay, I tend to classify different literary

works into three groups as follows and analyze their female protagonists quests
into their self-realization.
-

Transcending the soul and awakening the self: Chopin & Lessing
Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily
(Napoleon Bonaparte). That what Edna, in The Awakening, and Suzan, in To
Room Nineteen, believe to be true. In other words, both heroines live a life
with dead selves in favor of others; husbands and children, while Edna and
Suzan are lost and marginalized within themselves.
In The Awakening, Kate Chopin represents a woman with a broken self
resulting from being married to a more self-centered husband whose only
concern is his desires, on one hand, and the social conventions on the other,
neglecting the other part of the house; the wife. In fact, Edna suffers three
psychological

oppressions;

stereotyping,

cultural

domination,

and

sexual

objectification. She has to be the idle mother, the perfect wife worshiping her
husband and the pleasing toy of her man. As the novel goes on, we see Edna
growing more and more conscious about herself and her inner needs; she is in a
process of transforming from an object-other into subject-self.
Upon befriending Robert, Edna finds in him the absent spiritual side of
her husband; he fills the gap she feels in Mr. Pontellier. Robert is the only man
who speaks to her soul not to her body. He makes her touch that missing
emotional part of herself. As a result of realizing what she lacks, she begins a
quest

deep

within;

quest

of

spiritual,

physical,

and

sexual

awakening,

searching for the self to see what kind of woman [she is]. Day by day, Ednas

desire for self-independence deepens and begins to see her life away from her
family. Awakened by the fact that she is the only one who has the will to make
the choice, to act and not to be acted upon, to be and not to play roles, she
questions her being and resists essentiality in favor of existentiality. Emerson
creates a shortcut way for Ednas quest; Transcendentalism. Edna believes that
she can assert herself and emphasize her being as a human being comes through
transcending the soul. She goes to the ocean, the widest place of liberty; she
takes off all her social constraints, leaves behind the older version of Edna and
swims deep and deep; to a place where no one has ever gone, somewhere
beyond anybodys expectations, she dives into her deeper self, straight to the
center, without a single peek behind. Edna finds in death a dead body but a
transcended more awakened soul; completely conscious of her being, leaving
behind a memory of a woman who never succumbs to what might be called
male-dominated society.
Moving almost on the same track, we meet Suzan, the female protagonist
of Lessings To Room Nineteen. Suzan is fed up with being the bridge to
others. She gives up her job and completely devotes herself to the husband and
children. She is overwhelmed with what others need, busy satisfying the family
and caring for everyone but herself. Once she is alone at home, she remembers
Suzan and starts to question her being and identity. Suddenly, she realizes that
she doesnt have a room of her own, a space where she can find her true self.
Aware of her lost identity, Suzan finds a secret room, more of a private space
where she feels herself the center of the world, a place where she recollects her

abandoned soul and mind. Failing to endure the happiness she lives in her
private space because of the rational world of her husband, she, like Edna,
finds in death the final resort where the soul transcends and the mind is freed.
-

From marginalizing to centralizing the self: Ibsen

In his A Dolls House, Ibsen introduces a different female character; a
woman who paves the way for a real revolution starting from within and coming
to life with strong footsteps. Nora is a real progressive character who develops
along the process of the play. She is the one, among our targeted female
protagonists, who by the end of the play gets off the stage with a totally different
character full of power and aims at the sort of life that is more self-focused.
As the play goes on, Nora Helmer strives to achieve the perfect ideal that
is set before her by the contexts of her society and her husband, Torvald. In fact,
she is trapped within the dolls house, which is her physical home. Torvald has
built a wonderful little life for his wonderful little doll wife, and their wonderful
dolly children. He even keeps calling her by different names like, my little lark,
my little squirrel, my little spendthrift. Such names give Nora a childish
character, which suggests her submissiveness to her husband as if she were one
of his kids. This kind of relation in marriage gives the husband superiority over
his wife and keeps him in the leading position.
The first time Nora mentions the word myself was actually about
something that is not for herself. She makes her husband and children the
priorities in her life over her own; For myself? Oh, I am sure I dont want
anything. However, this notion of displacing the self in favor of others doesnt

last forever. Later on in the play, Nora realizes that she has been the doll of her
father passed to another man called husband. Only there she is awakened by
the fact that she has been ignored by others and by herself, undermined
intellectually and spiritually. As a result, Nora determines her mind to find for
herself a better world to live in. She manages to cut off all the chains of social
conventions and free herself. At one moment in the play, Nora feels how it looks
like to be independent; [i]t was like being a man. When she works and earns
money, she feels this sense of self-reliance which only man understands, it is
the thing that she lacks under the constitution of marriage.
Fed up with assigned roles and fixed social conventions, Nora decides to
revolt against all these and find her way out of it; I can no longer content
myself with what most people say, or with what is found in books. I must think
over things for myself and get to understand them. This also implies how she
asserts her intellectuality and ability to use the mind. She begins to reconstruct
her character on different levels; intellectually, socially and spiritually. She
decides to stand alone with no man; she believes in herself. She is the center of
power for her quest; I must stand quite alone, if I am to understand myself and
everything about me. She even considers her needs and commits herself to
duties for herself after a long ignorance; duties to myself.
As the play progresses, Nora uses the word myself fourteen times. Ten
times of them are used intensely by the ending of the play when Nora confronts
with Torvald and explains to him what she attempts to do. Theses ten
myself[s] begin with educating it. She knows exactly what she wants and

needs. She realizes that a lack in education means incomplete personality. She
makes up her mind, plans for her coming life, sets her way out of the dolls
house and leaves the colonizer behind; Goodbye. (She goes out through the
hall.) Once she slams the door behind, she begins another quest beginning with
self-realization towards self-actualization.
-

Madness: loss of mind and sense: Gilman & Rifaat

The final quest is more of a psychological one; a revolution from within
towards the deeper self. Both Gilman and Rifaat introduce in their short stories;
The Yellow Wallpaper and Distant View of a Minaret respectively, two
suffering female characters who end up losing something deep but at the same
time liberate them. Jane and the other unnamed woman go through a hard
experience, each on a different level, which awakens in them their real needs
and wantings.
In The Yellow Wallpaper, Jane perceives a reflection of herself in the
wallpaper of her room; a woman imprisoned behind the bars trying to free
herself and break her silence. Jane suffers this kind of treatment for her nervous
disorder that her husband imposes upon her in the name of help, ignoring the
fact that giving her a sense of freedom and a space to write and create are better
sources for cure. Staying alone in the room, staring at the yellow wallpaper turns
her to be more and more obsessed with the room and the walls. It becomes her
private place where she begins to question her being. This leads her to identify
herself with the woman behind the bars. She goes into madness phase, loses her
mind. In her madness, we can see resistance through her actions; a resistance

against her status as an oppressed woman defined within the borders of domestic
life, as a suppressed writer prevented from creating art and expressing the self.
Through her madness, Jane breaks down her tough reality and transcends herself
and her mind to the world of liberation and freedom, to a more self-identified
character. She tears the wallpaper, breaks the bars, frees the woman, and creeps
all over around the room in a triumphant movement. John is the one to creep
over, to creep over the dominant man, the male-chauvinist society. Through
freeing her mind, Jane liberate her spirit and breaks all the tying chains and
ropes.
The

unnamed

woman,

in

Distant

View

of

Minaret,

represents

different women in her Egyptian society. A sexual-suffering woman wishes she

may for one time experience her feminine orgasm during her sexual interaction
with the husband. The first time she asks him to prolong the process, she is
humiliated and dehumanized by the way the man fastens his movement in an
animalistic way as if she were only a prostitute to whom he paid for some
pleasure. By the time this happens, she loses sense, her emotions are cooled the
moment they are ignored, her feelings get killed once he neglects them. The
only thing she notices throughout the sexual affair is that the rooms ceiling
needs some cleaning. This woman is deprived from her senses and her heart
breaks down as if a beat never hits again.
That woman has been objectified by the controlling man; the man on top.
She is nothing but the sexual toy of his. Cold she is turned to be; with lost senses
and dead emotions. By the end of the story, the man on top dies and turns to be

just an object lying on the bed. What of a woman whose husband died but to fall
in grief! For her, it is different. It is the first time she enjoys a cup of coffee
freed from the husbands ties, with calmness and quietness. The mans soul
transcends to heaven (or may be to hell) and the woman is relieved. Her loss of
sense brings to her liberation from suffering her relation with the husband.
Different endings,

different ways

of escaping realities, and different

ways of breaking through and achieving liberation. In all cases, they are
triumphant quests where the target is the self and the search for identity.
Breaking the social chains and overcoming submissiveness and oppression are
awakened

in

our

female

protagonists.

They

turn

from

domesticity

to

individualism, from piety to self-defiance, from purity to experience, and from

submissiveness to independence.

Examined Literary Works:

- Kate Chopin: The Awakening
- Doris Lessing: To Room Nineteen
- Henrik Ibsen: A Dolls House
-

Charlotte Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper

- Alifa Rifaat: Distant View of a Minaret