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Feminism

Feminism is an important theme that many writers drew their novels around. In the other hand, many critics approached this theme as well and tried to judge these writers' works. And two of the famous feminist novels will be discussed in the following discussion; Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" and Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre".

"All of Jane Austen's opening paragraphs, and the best of her first sentences, have money in them; this may be the first obviously feminine thing about her novels, for money and its making were characteristically female rather than male subjects in English fiction. . . . From her earliest years Austen had the kind of mind that inquired where the money came from on which young women were to live, and exactly how much of it there was" (Moers, 67). Like this Moers criticized Jane Austen's works.

Another critical approach was held by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar the authors of "The Madwoman in the Attic" : The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, published in 1979, examines Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. The two Authors draw their title from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, in which Rochester's mad wife Bertha stays locked in the attic.

Gilbert and Gubar examine the notion that women writers of the 19th Century were essentially "madwomen" because of the restrictive gender categories enforced upon them both privately and professionally. In their re-examination of these writers, they argue that madness often became a metaphor for suppressed female revolt and anger. They write that the madwoman "is usually in some sense that author's double, an image of her own anxiety and rage." Gilbert and Gubar argue against many popular, explicitly phallocentric literary theories popular at the time. They especially argue against literary critic Harold Bloom's theory of Oedipal poetics, proclaiming that the relationship he describes does not hold true for female authors....