Essay Two – Non-fiction Essays

INTRODUCTION

The historical representation of women in sexual politics has undoubtedly retained a thread of cohesion rooted in a sense of injustice, despite variations in its underlying principles over time.¹ Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own, written towards the end of the first wave of feminism,² demonstrates this attitudinal consistency towards problems facing women whose positions were drastically improved upon since the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.³ This is particularly evident in the discussion of the effects of material wealth imbalances, which were far more institutionalised in the time of Wollstonecraft, and yet were still prevalent issues for Woolf in her analysis of their effect on intellectualism. Despite over a century of disparity between the circumstances of women being addressed by these authors, there is undoubtedly a significant degree of commonality between their notions of inequity.⁴

1. This essay question is clearly begging you to disagree with it in this circumstance, but you should always feel just as comfortable disagreeing with the question even if it’s not as obvious as this if it suits your analysis! However, planning before writing your essay is always important so you know you can follow through.

2. This is just a quick nod to the authorial and societal context, but we will revisit this in greater depth in the body paragraphs where we can really unpack our analysis.

3. Unlike with speeches, you can introduce the texts and their themes in conjunction when doing textual comparisons like this for non-fiction essays.

4. I like to end comparative introductions with a statement of similarity between the texts, and then use the body paragraphs to tease out the more nuanced differences between them.

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While the value of material wealth is disputed amongst Woolf and Wollstonecraft, both authors concur upon the advantage afforded to men through its unequal distribution in society.⁵ Woolf places the empowering value of material wealth at the core of her thesis, saying that “a woman must have money and a room of her own to write fiction.”⁶ She develops this notion with use of logos,⁷ insisting that “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.” By employing hyperbole to emphasise the antiquity of this phenomenon, Woolf asserts with conviction, the necessity of material comfort and independence in order for a woman to explore the reaches of her intellect and creativity. While women were legally able to own property in the time of Woolf’s writing, this was far from the sights of Wollstonecraft,⁸ who conversely deplores excessive or unearned wealth with high modality, as “destructive to the human character” given their tendency towards idleness. Nonetheless, she still acknowledges the advantage afforded to men in this arena, who may “still to some extent unfold their faculties by becoming soldiers or statesmen”, unlike women who could not undertake professions. Consequently, while conceptions surrounding the utility of material wealth differ according to the contexts of these writers, there is nonetheless a shared sentiment of affrontation when these authors discuss the imbalance between men and women.

5. Your essay will look so much more sophisticated if you can amalgamate both comparing and contrasting!

6. Try to start analysing within the first two or three sentences of your first body paragraph. Once you set the scene with themes and ideas in the introduction and topic sentence, you should prioritise showcasing your analytical skills, since that what assessors will most want to see by this stage.

7. Where relevant, feel free to use rhetorical techniques in textual analysis.

8. This is a very effective, specific comparison of historical contexts used to bridge our discussion of both texts.

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Both Woolf and Wollstonecraft heavily reference male conceptions of women in literature as evidence of their misrepresentation and subsequent social mistreatment. Woolf utilises the motif of the fictional character of Shakespeare’s sister, to frame her analysis of Nick Greene’s commentary that “a woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing,” emphasising through this crude⁹ zoomorphism, the debilitating force upon female intellectuality of such condescension which could have lifted Shakespeare’s sister to great heights. The collective attitude of men towards women is encapsulated by Woolf in the character of Professor von X whose “expression suggested he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen to paper as if he were killing some noxious insect when he wrote.” This singular personification of an attitude gleaned from a wide scope of sources analysed by Woolf, encapsulates the extent of her research which has led her to the conclusion of men’s historic disdain for women, expressed through their writing.¹⁰ Mary Wollstonecraft, closely analysing the work of Rousseau throughout her essay, attains a similar conclusion with a nuanced differentiation that men emphasise the fragility of women, saying that “All writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners... have contributed to render women more artificial, weaker characters than they would otherwise have been; and, consequently, more useless members of society.” This accumulation of adjectives in a lexical chain¹¹ emphasising the pathetic construction of women, addresses in a similar vein to Woolf, an empirical discovery that men’s writings about women grossly misrepresent, and consequently manifest to disempower women in society.

9. Qualifying technical analysis with adjectives can strengthen your argument (as long as you don’t get too judgemental!).

10. The research process can sometimes lend depth to analysis if incorporated right.

11. Try to use some sophisticated and unique literary devices throughout your essays, as these can help set you apart from the pack. That being said, don’t refer to techniques that you don’t understand. Try to learn a handful of relevant devices and memorise them alongside the quotes they apply to so you can easily integrate them into your arguments.

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The retaliatory attitudes of women toward men as a result of this misrepresentation, also finds coherency across the works of these feminist authors from their respective historical contexts. As Woolf reflects on her drawing of Professor von X, she remarks that “anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there?” Personifying anger to reinforce the potency of its force, and engaging readers to consider the consequences of this through a rhetorical question, Woolf encapsulates a core theme of her essay which addresses the stifling of female intellect given their reactionary positions to the injustices afforded to them. This is evident in her perception of Charlotte Brontë’s disjointed prose in her intertextual analysis of the book Jane Eyre, where “She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write about her characters.” Using anaphora and accumulation¹³ to emphasise the juxtaposing dualism between the real, and ideal manifestation of female literature, Woolf effectively uses empiricism to demonstrate the efficacy of women’s reactionary status to gendered injustice in the quality of their writing. While Jane Eyre was long after the time of Wollstonecraft, a similar acknowledgement of universal female anger emerges in her own text, where she despairs, “How grossly do they insult us, who thus advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes!” Employing an exclamatory statement fused with the emotive connotations of “brutes,”¹⁴ Wollstonecraft imbues her writing with a similar acknowledgement that women are, to some extent, defined by their status as objects of misrepresentation.¹⁵

12. It is a good idea to incorporate technical analysis as fluidly as possible for coherency in your essay. Don’t feel like you have to conform to rigid sequences if it inhibits your flow.

13. We’ve mentioned a wide array of techniques and structural devices already – remember that your assessors want to see both the depth and breadth of your knowledge, so delving into lots of different kinds of evidence is highly advantageous.

14. Again, I’ve isolated the most important connotative language from within this quote and explained that in more detail. This is great when you have a slightly longer quote that you want to include for context, but you know that there is a particularly powerful word or phrase that you want to flesh out.

15. You don’t necessarily have to add a whole extra sentence in at the end to conclude a paragraph if you can incorporate this into your analysis. However. be careful that you do have a summative statement if you are doing this.

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A strong sense of conviction concerning the necessity for female self-empowerment is a prevalent theme of both texts, despite the differential manifestations of this phenomenon according to context.¹⁶ Woolf writes in a confronting direct address developing a reproachful tone, “Young women, I would say and please attend... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant.” She goes on to explain this statement with an outline of the opportunities afforded to women in the early nineteenth century including education, land rights, the vote, and professional opportunities. While she critiques the injustice of the patriarchy as she perceives it, she sees this as urgently necessitating an equally energetic resistance by women, whom she rouses to action through this statement.¹⁷ While none of these rights existed for women in the time of Mary Wollstonecraft, she acknowledges nonetheless with a comparably emphatic enthusiasm, the danger of female ignorance, saying that “the mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury where there are no barriers to break its force.” The use of metaphor to create vivid imagery in her description of ignorance, suggests that like Woolf, she sees the urgency necessity for women to be liberated from ignorance enforced by the unjust forces of the patriarchy.

16. By this point in a comparative essay, you should be prepared to write some high-level remarks like this that articulate the specific differences between the two texts.

17. Notice how this paragraph weaves the historical context and the essence of the text together? This is much more effective than simply dumping a chunk of research in the middle of the discussion, or conversely, ignoring the context entirely and only analysing bits and pieces of quotes in isolation.

CONCLUSION

The disparity between the societies experienced by Woolf and Wollstonecraft in their respective texts serve as evidence of the inherent consistency of attitudes within the feminist movement. Both writers closely reference empirical examples of men’s writings which they perceived as misrepresenting the place of women in society, demonstrating a shared indignation despite the disparity of materials analysed. Furthermore, the conviction garnered from this indignation is used in both texts, to call women to action in order to attain self-empowerment within the confines of the historical contexts discussed.¹⁸ With each presenting a unique conception of gendered wealth imbalance, male misrepresentations of females, consequent female attitudes towards men, and the idea of reclaiming a degree of power for their gender in light of this, it is clear that these themes run deeper than the mere historical contexts in which they belonged.