Women in literature essay questions and plans
“Capturing the women’s viewpoint often means telling the story in an entirely different way” By
comparing Mrs Dalloway and one other text, explore how far you agree with this claim
All 3 novels explore the female condition at a particular time and place. What types of the
female condition do they explore?
MRS DALLOWAY
- Woolfe explores what it means to be a middle aged woman in post WW1 Britain.
- Mrs Dalloway struggles to find herself in a world that remains patriarchal and where post
menopausal women, no longer potential wives and mothers, are rendered “invisible, unseen,
unknown”
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
- Austen explores what it is to be a young woman in Regency England where the only option
available to those without their own fortune is to engage in the marriage market. Dashwood
sisters are placed in a precarious financial position and their mother sees the need for her
daughters to make good and financially secure marriages (there is a point in which she thinks
she has made good marriages for both her daughter)
- Charts the daughters’ journey to marriage
- Atmosphere that has a “soul destroying effect”
THE BELL JAR
- Does belong to a different society- 1950s America- where women did have more options-
leads to the paralytic choices that Esther has to make regarding what kind of woman she
wants to be.
- Nevertheless, post WW2 saw a regression for women. Stifling nature of Cold War and
McCarthyism lead to women like Esther walking a precarious tightrope between the need to
conform and the desire to rebel
The woman’s viewpoint- do they all tell the viewpoint in a new way?
MRS D
- Stream of consciousness, rejection of Edwardian writers focus on plot and external factors.
Inner life and feelings
- Follows a character across one day- this is different
- Moving from one character’s thoughts to another destabilises the authority of the omniscient
narrator.
- Multiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives. Concerned with subjective reality, how
different characters think
- Non linear- abrupt shifts in time. Merging of the past and present- viewing a character’s past
and present synonomously
- Use of double
- Cinematic techniques
Imagery
- Water imagery- sometimes suggests lack of control, sometimes to indicate clarity and serenity
(Clarissa’s party dress)
- Language of diving and plunging, as though she’s bravely entering water to encapsulate her
engagement with life
TBJ
- Merges past and present (like Woolfe)
- Goes inside the mind of her first person narrative character Esther. We hear her thoughts, see
everything she sees, feel every nuance of fear, disgust, delight, shock. This intensely
subjective POV is moderated by the fact that the events are narrated from the perspective of
an older Esther.
, - Unfiltered narrative.
- Doubles
Imagery
- Depict the fragmentations of Esther’s identity (trolley bus, black dot, sick Indian)
- Symbols- fig tree, mirror, bell jar
- Humour- mordant wit, irony.
S&S
- Free Indirect Discourse- lots of Elinor’s perspective. Shifting POV. Pioneered the expansion of
free indirect discourse as a way of exploring the human mind. Melding of the narrator and the
character.
- At some times, she uses certain characters as focalizers
- Narrative layering- Austen’s perspective is threaded through the novel.
- Famously and intentionally kept her novels limited to the ordinary day to day lives of the rural
lower gentry. Both Woolfe and Austen zoom in the day to day lives of women. Captures the
women’s lives, shed a light on the mundane
- Little description
- Told a lot in dialogue. Use of natural and realistic dialogue as a mark of progress to the novel-
gives each character a distinctive style of speech that Austen uses to reveal character traits.
- Mullen- Austen is “undiluted authorial opinion.” Authoritative summations of characters,
sometimes with gentle irony and biting satire.
AO3-
- Woolf- Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown- she says that she wanted to reject the methods of
Edwardian writers that were preoccupied with plot and external factors, and she wanted to
unpack the consciousness of her characters. A “Tunnelling process, by which I tell the past
by instalments”
- Women as the “spirit we live by”- the munutii of women’ s lives is just as important. Worth
telling
- Modernism
- Cubism
- Woolf- A Room of One’s Own. Woolfe sets out deliberately to tell the story in a new way- to
unpack the consciousness of women and female characters. Room of One’s Own suggests
that even history is subjective, the feelings of women in a drawing room are just as important
as the lives of men in war.
-
AO5
Bonds- “Plath offers a brilliant evocation of the oppressive atmosphere of the 1950s and the soul
destroying effect this atmosphere could have on ambitious, high minded young women like Plath”
Women are shown as being in charge of the social sphere and social world- how far do you agree?
Both occupy social worlds that control them, yet Esther seems to be more able to break out of the
social sphere.
THE BELL JAR
In control of the social world
The internship at the magazine- rather than focusing on real journalism, the girls are trained only to
assimilate into the social world expected of them
- Ferried from decadent lunches with food “piled” and “paved” on their plates, to hat making
workshops. They occupy the materialistic and hedonistic social world, encouraged into its
conformity- wear the same “size seven Bloomingdale’s leather shoes”
“Capturing the women’s viewpoint often means telling the story in an entirely different way” By
comparing Mrs Dalloway and one other text, explore how far you agree with this claim
All 3 novels explore the female condition at a particular time and place. What types of the
female condition do they explore?
MRS DALLOWAY
- Woolfe explores what it means to be a middle aged woman in post WW1 Britain.
- Mrs Dalloway struggles to find herself in a world that remains patriarchal and where post
menopausal women, no longer potential wives and mothers, are rendered “invisible, unseen,
unknown”
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
- Austen explores what it is to be a young woman in Regency England where the only option
available to those without their own fortune is to engage in the marriage market. Dashwood
sisters are placed in a precarious financial position and their mother sees the need for her
daughters to make good and financially secure marriages (there is a point in which she thinks
she has made good marriages for both her daughter)
- Charts the daughters’ journey to marriage
- Atmosphere that has a “soul destroying effect”
THE BELL JAR
- Does belong to a different society- 1950s America- where women did have more options-
leads to the paralytic choices that Esther has to make regarding what kind of woman she
wants to be.
- Nevertheless, post WW2 saw a regression for women. Stifling nature of Cold War and
McCarthyism lead to women like Esther walking a precarious tightrope between the need to
conform and the desire to rebel
The woman’s viewpoint- do they all tell the viewpoint in a new way?
MRS D
- Stream of consciousness, rejection of Edwardian writers focus on plot and external factors.
Inner life and feelings
- Follows a character across one day- this is different
- Moving from one character’s thoughts to another destabilises the authority of the omniscient
narrator.
- Multiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives. Concerned with subjective reality, how
different characters think
- Non linear- abrupt shifts in time. Merging of the past and present- viewing a character’s past
and present synonomously
- Use of double
- Cinematic techniques
Imagery
- Water imagery- sometimes suggests lack of control, sometimes to indicate clarity and serenity
(Clarissa’s party dress)
- Language of diving and plunging, as though she’s bravely entering water to encapsulate her
engagement with life
TBJ
- Merges past and present (like Woolfe)
- Goes inside the mind of her first person narrative character Esther. We hear her thoughts, see
everything she sees, feel every nuance of fear, disgust, delight, shock. This intensely
subjective POV is moderated by the fact that the events are narrated from the perspective of
an older Esther.
, - Unfiltered narrative.
- Doubles
Imagery
- Depict the fragmentations of Esther’s identity (trolley bus, black dot, sick Indian)
- Symbols- fig tree, mirror, bell jar
- Humour- mordant wit, irony.
S&S
- Free Indirect Discourse- lots of Elinor’s perspective. Shifting POV. Pioneered the expansion of
free indirect discourse as a way of exploring the human mind. Melding of the narrator and the
character.
- At some times, she uses certain characters as focalizers
- Narrative layering- Austen’s perspective is threaded through the novel.
- Famously and intentionally kept her novels limited to the ordinary day to day lives of the rural
lower gentry. Both Woolfe and Austen zoom in the day to day lives of women. Captures the
women’s lives, shed a light on the mundane
- Little description
- Told a lot in dialogue. Use of natural and realistic dialogue as a mark of progress to the novel-
gives each character a distinctive style of speech that Austen uses to reveal character traits.
- Mullen- Austen is “undiluted authorial opinion.” Authoritative summations of characters,
sometimes with gentle irony and biting satire.
AO3-
- Woolf- Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown- she says that she wanted to reject the methods of
Edwardian writers that were preoccupied with plot and external factors, and she wanted to
unpack the consciousness of her characters. A “Tunnelling process, by which I tell the past
by instalments”
- Women as the “spirit we live by”- the munutii of women’ s lives is just as important. Worth
telling
- Modernism
- Cubism
- Woolf- A Room of One’s Own. Woolfe sets out deliberately to tell the story in a new way- to
unpack the consciousness of women and female characters. Room of One’s Own suggests
that even history is subjective, the feelings of women in a drawing room are just as important
as the lives of men in war.
-
AO5
Bonds- “Plath offers a brilliant evocation of the oppressive atmosphere of the 1950s and the soul
destroying effect this atmosphere could have on ambitious, high minded young women like Plath”
Women are shown as being in charge of the social sphere and social world- how far do you agree?
Both occupy social worlds that control them, yet Esther seems to be more able to break out of the
social sphere.
THE BELL JAR
In control of the social world
The internship at the magazine- rather than focusing on real journalism, the girls are trained only to
assimilate into the social world expected of them
- Ferried from decadent lunches with food “piled” and “paved” on their plates, to hat making
workshops. They occupy the materialistic and hedonistic social world, encouraged into its
conformity- wear the same “size seven Bloomingdale’s leather shoes”
