Woolf & Baym

Virginia Woolf takes into consideration the necessary conditions required for the creation of a literary work. She considers the schooling as the first pre-requisite for this purpose. Shakespeare’s sister is a manifestation of that aggravation that women writers felt over the passage of time over the issue of lack of equal opportunities for women in the literary domain. In this way she contemplates over the socio-historical reason for the inability of female writers to create a high quality work.

She looks at the female historical experience and relates it with her thesis. She poses a historical questions why great women writers were absent from the literary realm in the early history of English literature and why there no Shakespeare and/or Chaucer; “Why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. ” (p. 363) Her dismay over the absence of any female literary giant turns into anger and gloominess when she learns about the pathos and miseries of female life.

Although she tries to search for any available evidence on Shakespeare’s sister but lack of substantiation compel her employ her imaginary and fictional faculties in relating the predicaments of Shakespeare’s sister. Woolf’s theory postulates that “For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people” because she is of the view that literary genius is a production leisure class activity. She further thinks that financial independence nurtures freedom of thought and action and this elevated flight of imagination can only produce a work of the calibre of Shakespeare.

Women of that time were not free from these obstacles, so were unable to produce a great literary piece. There was female talent and genius but they wasted their talent in making money. “Hundreds of women began as the eighteenth century drew on to add to their pin money, or to come to the rescue of their families by making translations or writing the innumerable bad novels”(366) That is the reason that “She died young – alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. ” (367)

Baym has evaluated the American literary landscape and has tried to search for the reasons for “the critical invisibility of the many active women authors in America. ” Nina Baym considers the similar question about the plight of women writers in American history as Woolf described. But her attitude toward the topic is not literary but rather feminist. She says that women writer “has entered the literary history as the enemy. ” (593). Even the serious critics cast doubt about the female writings. She further elaborated her point of view and questioned the female presentation in the American literature by the male writer.

She described three form of male suppression that is manifested subtly in literature. Firstly, a woman is equalized with nature or landscape instead of her real life-like portrayal. She considers it a form of subjugation done by the conscious omission of real female characters. Secondly, she is of the view that women has been presented as an epitome of “entrappers” or “domesticators”. She considers this misrepresentation and distortion of female character as a manifestation of male suppression. She draws upon various literary sources and texts to support her arguments and to arrive at her conclusions.