GLOSARIO BLOQUE TEMÁTICO 2

Sources:

Aanerud, Rebecca. “Thinking Again: This Bridge Called My Back and the Challenge to
Whiteness. This bridge we call home:radical visions for transformation. Gloria
Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating eds. London: Routledge, 2002.

Behrendt, Stephen C. and Harriet Kramer Linkin eds. Approaches to Teaching British
Women Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: The Modern Language Association
of America, 1997.

Enotes. http://www.enotes.com/trifles

Farr, Judith. The Passion for Emily Dickinson. Harvard: Harvard University Press,
1994. http://books.google.es/books?
id=BvOrZHt77WsC&pg=PA52&lpg=PA52&dq=emily+dickinson+poem+486

Gottlieb, Sidney. Approaches to Teaching the Metaphysical Poets. New York: The
Modern Language Association of America, 1996.

Mellor, Anne K. “Distinguishing the Poetess from the Female Poet.” Approaches to
Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period. Stephen C. Behrendt and
Harriet Kramer Linkin eds. New York: Modern Language Association of America,
1997.

Ozieblo, Bárbara. “Una imagen propia: la innovación protagonizada por dramaturgas

norteamericanas de principios de siglo.” Voces e imágenes de mujeres en el teatro del
siglo XX. Dramaturgas anglonorteamericanas. Rosa García Ráyego y Eulalia Piñero
Gil eds. Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2002.

Severin, Laura (Spring 2002). “Interview.” Free Verse. 18 Nov. 2004.

http://english.chass.nscu.edu/freeverse/Archives(Spring_2002)/Interviews/intervies, htm

Widmer, Marcus. “Breakdown in Emily Dickinson’s Poem 280.” Englisches Seminar

der Universität Zürich, Sommersemester 1995. http://www.grin.com/e-
book/14778/breakdown-in-emily-dickinsons-poem-280.

Zozaya, Pilar. “Brujas, ‘top girls’ y criaturas extrañas en el teatro de Caryl Churchill.”
Voces e imágenes de mujeres en el teatro del siglo XX. Dramaturgas
anglonorteamericanas. Rosa García Ráyego y Eulalia Piñero Gil eds. Madrid: Editorial
Complutense, 2002.

“A Room of One’s Own” with “gender on the agenda”/The public versus the
private: Virginia Woolf wrote this essay taking into account the relationship between
form, function and gender. Her concern is with the real conditions which long kept
women from writing. She reckons that women need financial security and space to write
fiction, that is, marriage. However, marriage is neither a sufficient nor a necessary
condition for women’s creative writing. They need genius developed with education and
the freedom to write. [Goodman]

Art and life in nineteenth century poetry: During the first two thirds of the nineteenth
century art for a woman practitioner was thought to be destructive. In Aurora Leigh
Browning lets us see how Aurora claims that art and fame are no substitute for life
itself. Concentrated on her art, Aurora feels that she has denied herself a woman’s true
life. However, Browning demonstrated that the two could be combined as reading and
writing involved escape from a cage, the cage in which brainy women were placed by a
combination of patriarchal authority and Evangelical property. Thus, at the end of the
poem, Aurora acquires a husband on her own terms and controls the relationship.

The Lady in Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” is at work weaving

representations of life. She is cut off from the joys of the world and cursed to emerge
into life only at the cost of her own death. [Goodman]

Aurora Leigh with “gender on the agenda”: readers were scandalized with its
masculine wordliness as Elizabeth Barrett deals with subjects such as socialism, rape,
prostitution and “high society” viewed satirically, which female poets were not
supposed to handle. [Goodman]

Domestic writing vs domestic lives: the role of creative writer may sometimes still
come into conflict with the traditional roles of mother, lover, wife, or even teacher and
friend. Such writers as the Brontës or Jane Austen were able to transcend the limitations
of the domestic by writing about them (writing as creative work and as paid work, of
marriage as a trade, domesticity and creativity, femininity and form or gender and
genius). Writing, even about domestic themes, is not the same as living a domestic life;
the writing either gets in the way of or takes the place of the domestic to some extent,
for better or worse. Cicely Hamilton and George Eliot disdained the domestic ideal for
women while recognizing their awkward position as female writers living and working
in that grey area. [Goodman]

Emily Dickinson with “gender on the agenda:” gender is relevant to the study
of Dickinson’s poetry, even if it is not a central theme of the poet’s. She was always in
touch with the major concerns of other women’s writers, her reading of literature, her
personal experiences and lack of them.

Poem 280 covers a theme in much women’s writing―rationality and madness.

It represents the poetic persona’s fight between rationality, faith and knowledge. The
narrator closes herself/himself to common people and open herself to faith. The author
suffers from a mental breakdown which points out to a new kind of perception beyond
reason which makes the lyrical self enter into an imagined individual reality..
 In poem 486 her image of herself as slight is more metaphorical than a physical
description. The narrator discloses the guarded and secretive idea of a persona
embarrassed by the noise and triviality of shared community; one who therefore depicts
herself living most enjoyably and creatively at night or just before sunrise. Her
existence is preserved and, like the poem itself, literally, formed by her nocturnal acts of
composition. She may be the least member of the family but has been chosen “to catch
the Mint.”

With poem 435 Dickinson is telling us that it is better to be masters of our own
decision than to worry about what society accepts. With madness you can reject social
views and become dangerous.

Poem 1737 involves indignant repudiation to the state of wifehood and the
women’s entrapment in a cage of domesticity which might derive from Dickinson’s
complex relationship with her sister-in-law. By keeping her secrets bandaged, she
displays the fierceness of her feelings. [Goodman, Widmer, Farr]

Gender in nineteenth century poetry: Several poems written by women between 1780
and 1830 specifically addressed the two most important political events of the period,
the French revolution and the campaign to abolish the slave trade.

Gender played a significant role in the poetic arguments for the abolition of
slavery. The most prominent male abolitionist poets, such as William Cowper, Thomas
Day or Robert Southey, tended to attack slavery as an offense against natural law, the
principle that all men and women are born equal and have certain inalienable rights.
Female poets such as Hannah Moore, Anne Yearsley, Hellen Maria Williams or Amelia
Opie tended to condemn slavery because it violated the domestic affections by
separating mothers from their children and husbands from their wives and subjected
black women to sexual abuse from their white masters. [Mellor]

“Gendering of rhyme” and language: Female poets often write in “masculine rhyme,”
and male poets in “feminine rhyme.” The distinction exemplifies perfectly how
language creates “gender.” It assumes that men are stronger and firmer, women lighter
and weaker. Lyric poetry was thought more suitable for women. The sonnet, which was
developed in the Middle Ages, was a versatile medium suited to “lyric” expression of
passion as well as to philosophical exploration and political statement and available to
nineteenth century women in Britain. Verse by present-day poets is commonly written
in free forms, even with no element of rhyme at all. [Goodman]

“Girl” with “gender on the agenda:” Focused on domestic detail and physical
appearance, this short story written by black American writer Jamaica Kincaid in 1978,
offers a girl’s perception of her place in a familiar and cultural context. This story
presents two voices, a young woman and her mother who teaches how to be a proper
woman. The protagonist is in the middle of a conflict between her view of herself and
how is viewed by the others. [Goodman]
Language and nineteenth century poetry: Lucy Aikin’s Epistles on Women (1810) is
based on a concept of poetry as conversation or linguistic mothering which vividly
contests the Wordsworthian concept of poetry as the overflow of powerful feeling in a
solitary, contemplative mind. [Mellor]

Major male poets: the Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English

(1994) includes biographical entries for equal numbers of “British Isles” and US poets,
and represents Canadian, Australian and New Zealand writers fully. Out of 1500 poets,
only about 200 are women. Poetry has always attracted lots of women and a taste for
verse is most times considered effeminate. Poetry has never been gendered male but it
has been far easier for male poets to get published. [Goodman]

Objectified women and language in English poetry: Such Metaphysical poems as

John Donne’s “The Flea” (1633) or Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (1681)
are parodies of Petrarchan seduction to flatter and persuade the poets’ shy lady lovers
who have no reason to deny them physically but, on the contrary, to fully indulge carnal
pleasure. Both poems (written by Puritans!) represent a moment in an ongoing
relationship in which a shocking male poetic persona tries to shape the future by
controlling the response of the person addressed. Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Sonnet
XIV from Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) wants to be loved neither by her looks
nor by her thought but “for love’s sake.” Christina Rossetti in “In an Artist’s Studio”
(1890) presents a female objectified sitter whose beauty is fed by a male artist for the
purposes of his art. In “O Distinct” (Tulips and Chimneys, 1922), “since feeling is first”
or “some ask praise of their fellows” (is 5, 1926), the American poet Edward Estlin
Cummings shows gorgeous women as assertive presences who just smile, cry or make
gestures with their bodies but with apparently no capacity of response. It is the audience
who has to envision the woman’s responses in the empty spaces between lines and
stanzas. In his last works written at the end of the 1950s, Cummings approximates to the
universe of the feminine and claims for the unity of the lovers. “Standing Female Nude”
(Standing Female Nude, 1985) or “Small Female Skull” (Mean Time, 1994) are
examples in which the British poet Carol Ann Duffy help discover hidden implications
which challenge traditional gender roles more effectively than conventional ones,
making female voices more dominant and self-sufficient in a traditional masculine
word. Through women’s discourse, Duffy shows disrespect for the tradition of the
individual great man by exaggerating his weaknesses and faults so as to reduce him to
an almost comic figure. [Gottlieb]

Poetess: in the nineteenth century this term seems appropriate for women who self-
consciously embraced the aesthetics of the beautiful, who celebrated domestic
affections, and saw themselves as writing a specifically feminine poetry, however much
they questioned that category. A great deal of poetry by women of this period does not
conform to this poetic practice. [Mellor]
Poet Laureate: the official poet of Great Britain appointed a member of the royal
household by a British monarch, and, especially formerly, is expected to write poems
celebrating great national or royal events. The heir to the epic poets of ancient Greece
and Rome, who were ceremonially awarded laurel wreaths (hence the modern term
“poet laureate”). Carol Ann Duffy and Kay Ryan are the Poets Laureate of Great Britain
and the United States respectively. [Encarta, Goodman]

“Reincarnation of Captain Cook” with “gender on the agenda:” Margaret Atwood

is a feminist and the poem may be well read as a feminist statement. Apart from “kings”
no word in the text has been specifically gendered. “Historians,” recently, have not
always been men. However, most history has been written to serve the interests of
ruling élites, then “kings” and “historians” both evoke power and class as strongly as
gender.

“Cook” carries a kind of pun: Cook was a man but his surname is the same as
the noun describing one who enacts the traditional domestic role which is
conventionally assigned to women. [Goodman]

“Shakespeare’s sister:” a female figure created by Virginia Woolf to stand for all the
unrecognized and underdeveloped genius of the past. She named Shakespeare’s sister
Judith, a brilliant but uneducated, talented but unappreciated woman who was written
out of history by her gender. [Goodman]

Short story and women’s writing: such characteristics as identity, fragmentation,

alienation, multiplicity, open-endedness, presentation of characters, brevity, isolation in
time, the description of present moments, alienation, the fact of giving voices to the
submerged voices of women, the lack of emphasis on traditional narrative as far as
illuminating the dark lives of women constitute a particularly feminine way of writing
and an exemplary feminine strategy.

As all these features are also available to men. Similarly, women writers are now
taking up the form of the short story that have been traditionally associated with men
such as the adventure story or the hard-boiled detective story. [Goodman]

“The Bridge Poem” with “gender on the agenda:” written by Donna Kate Rushin in
The Black Back-Ups (1993), makes self-education a primary theme. With great passion
and frustration the speaker outlines her sheer exhaustion with explaining, translating,
mediating, legitimizing, and connecting people across difference. [Aaneraud]

“The New Dress” with “gender on the agenda:” in this short story published by
Virginia Woolf in 1927, insecure and depending on her image Mabel Waring redefines
herself by means of creativity. The stream of consciousness narrative shows Mabel’s
fear of not belonging to a society that has limited the freedom of the individual,
particularly of women, especially due to financial considerations. She decides not to
depend on people any longer letting her true self appear, making her dress the vehicle to
leave an uncomfortable social environment. Dreams of romance will never have a
conflict with reality again and the protagonist transforms herself by means of a good
book as a way to combat a male-dominated reality and leave her apprehension for that
the idea that surface appearance is emblematic of women’s social status.

Language works in the manner of poetry. The reader is not interested in the
progress of Mabel’s actions but the in the progress of her thought and the language in
which she expresses them, being “it” the key word in the whole story. “It” mostly
represents the protagonist’s search for self-identity. [Goodman]

“The Telling Part” with “gender on the agenda:” In Jackie Kay’s “The Telling Part”
(The Adoption Papers, 1991) identity is at a crossroads of nation, race, gender,
sexuality, and class. Voiced in Glasgwegian, different typefaces distinguish the child
from the adoptive mother with no father impinge.

She stated in an interview: “I consider myself a Scottish writer, in the sense that
I am, and I consider myself a black writer, in the sense that I am a woman writer, in the
sense that I am.” [Severin]

The Tradition of the Female Poet: the tradition of the female poet is explicitly
political; it self-consciously and insistently occupies the public sphere. It originates in
the writings of the female preachers who embraced seventeenth-century Quaker
theology and a belief in a divine inner light that authorized them to speak in public in
Quaker meetings. However didactic much of this poetry seems today, it inaugurated a
tradition of explicitly feminist poetry that insisted in the equality of women and men
and on the right of women to speak publicly about good government and children
education.

The female poet’s writing responds to specific political events; argues for wide-
ranging social and political reform; or attempts to initiate a social revolution, what Mary
Wollstonecraft in a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) called a revolution in
female manners, a redefinition of gender that will ensure equal rights for women.
[Mellor]

Top Girls with “gender in the agenda:” written by Caryl Churchill in 1982, faces the
idea of a bourgeois feminism versus a social feminism and demonstrates the price
women have to pay for the right to act like men. It proves that in Thatcherite England
the distribution of jobs depending on sex issues does not work any longer. However,
when a woman has obtained a powerful position, she can be oppressed not only by a
man but also by another woman. Marléne represents the individual success of capitalism
while Joyce symbolizes the Marxist idea of communitarian fight. The play concludes
that personal matters must never exclude social ones, at the same time that denounces
the restrictions of the political context. There was still a long way in Thatcherite
England to find how a woman can have a successful professional career without having
to choose between social and personal concerns. [Zozaya]
Topics and symbols “with gender on the agenda:” madness, domesticity, silence/the
right to be heard through literary creation, motherhood, submission to patriarchal
structures, political activism, male manipulation, independence through creativity,
fractured identities, marriage with healing purposes, irrationality, social position, death,
desolation, frustration, the dichotomy of sad life vs joyous art, art=poetry and nature,
the imagery of a cage bird, threatening brotherhood, the suffering isolated woman
writer, or the search for identity are among the many topics and symbols in women’s
writing.

Trifles “with gender in the agenda:” written by the American author Susan Glaspell at
the end of the American suffragette movement and first produced in 1916, represents
the absent invisible silenced woman who recovers her presence and her voice in front of
the audience thanks to the other characters. Trifles is a murder mystery of detective
fiction that explores gender relationships, miscommunication between men and women,
power between the sexes, and the nature of truth. While the men bluster and tramp
around the farmhouse searching for clues, the women discover bits of evidence in the
‘‘trifles’’ of a farmer’s wife—her baking, cleaning and sewing. Because the men
virtually ignore the women’s world, they remain blind to the truth before their eyes.
Men and women are good people who do not seem to speak the same language or to
value work, emotions and words in quite the same way. In Triffles Glaspell highlights
the relationship between gender and deduction. [Ozieblo, enotes]

Writing as work: in previous centuries writing as a form of work required some

prerequisites (access to formal education, time to read and write, and connections to the
male literary establishment for publication). Many women could not write because
another form of work occupied most of their time and energy―domestic work. In a
patriarchal structure, they depended economically on men. Writing as a form of work
was clearly influenced by gender and social constructions. As most middle- and upper-
class women spent the majority of their time in the home, their frame of reference was
the domestic, private world even though fiction. It is true that many of them had written
secretly but publishing under male pen names, or anonymously, or not publishing at all.

Women were socially influenced and culturally trained to be domestic and make
themselves appear attractive according to the male norms of feminine beauty. Many
sacrificed their creative self for domestic harmony. [Goodman]

Wollstonecraft, Mary: the author of Vindication of the Rights of Women

written in 1778 emphasizes the right for women to be educated and sees early marriages
as a stop to improvement, especially if a woman is joined to a not sensible man. For her,
education is a palliative to marriage. Other writers such as Cicely Hamilton or Virginia
Woolf saw marriage as a trade. [Goodman]