PASSAGES

That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to me .And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is? (30-31)

Elly

Elly says:
The idea of female inferiority to male superiority allows men to justify their acts of oppression against women. If she is deemed beneath his notice, then his only competition or critic, the only opposition he pays attention to, is that of his fellow man. As long as women are thought inferior to men, man can go on congratulating himself for his accomplishments and continue to do things he believes to be great.

Carolyn

Carolyn says:
The need to categorize and differentiate through hierarchy is most pervasive in gender (since we see this phenomenon in racism as well). This may be because of the nature of patriarchal society where men feel the need to assert their dominance and power. However, I think Woolf is going further by saying that men's perception of their superiority is validated externally; in other words, men can only feel superior if they make women inferior. I would even go as far to say that the male sense of self, his identity, is authenticated in relation to women. And this sense of self and identity, Woolf claims, "diminishes" or is threatened once women start to tell the truth to them.

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband. (36)

Elly

Elly says:
Within literature women have been portrayed as nearly equal to the men around her. In fiction, she is depicted as a being who is capable of intellectual thought, a woman who expresses profound ideas, a woman worthy of sitting upon the throne, fit to rule and lead men beneath her. In reality, she was deemed unimportant, a slave to the whim of the men around her, subject to their will, their oppressive, dominate hand.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And woman have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. (90)

Elly

Elly says:
Women have always been hindered from bettering themselves, from doing for themselves, as they were never given the chance. While men went to school to study philosophy and the sciences women were expected to spend their time within the household, living under their father’s thumb and waiting to be married off to a man her parents deemed fit to be her husband, whom she would be expected to dutifully serve as faithful wife and mother to his children.

Carolyn

Chelsea says:
This reminds me of Penelope in The Odyssey, probably because the mention of Athenian, but nonetheless the immense about of misogyny that she faced in that story was frustrating to say the least. Penelope had to literally dupe people to avoid the fate that was set in front of her because she wasn’t given any sort of freedom as a woman. It wasn’t only a lack of intellectual freedom, it was of all freedom.

Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! (83)

Carolyn

Carolyn says:
It is true how women are so one-dimensionally depicted in literature. Women are hardly seen as anything but the wives and lovers—as such seen belonging to men rather than being separate human beings.

Tiana

Tiana says:
Woolf expresses the lack of solidarity/camaraderie between women throughout not only literature but the many spheres of entertainment and pop culture. Essentially, she is bringing up "The Bechdel Test" prior to its creation.
The Bechdel Test works to not only examine the amount of female-involvement within a composition but also, to verify the validity of said involvement. The test, popularized/introduced in the 1980's, has three rules:
1.) The movie/work has to have at least two women in it,
2.) who talk to each other,
3.) about something besides a ma
Thus, Woolf is introducing the test by using men as the sample instead of women. If the roles were reversed as Woolf introduces, it would be apparent how unrepresented and unauthentic many representations of women in the media are. Woolf's commentary of women within literature is that not only is the female-experience limited, but that the provided female-experience in many pieces of literature isn't encompassed authentically. The patriarchal view of femininity and the female-experience is, as argued by Woolf, limited to what pertains to said patriarchy, “lovers and wives” or the negative, "Most women have no character at all.”

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