Women: A Historical Fiction
Mar. 25th, 2006 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ink_splotchIn honour of finally having started A Room of One's Own, two quotes from that text, one a footnote, taken from another book, another an observation of Virginia's.
'It remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in Athena's
city, where women were kept in almost Oriental suppression as
odalisques or drudges, the stage should yet have produced figures like
Clytemnestra and Cassandra Atossa and Antigone, Phedre and Medea, and
all the other heroines who dominate play after play of the "misogynist"
Euripides. But the paradox of this world where in real life a
respectable woman could hardly show her face alone in the street, and
yet on the stage woman equals or surpasses man, has never been
satisfactorily explained. In modern tragedy the same predominance
exists. At all events, a very cursory survey of Shakespeare's work
(similarly with Webster, though not with Marlowe or Jonson) suffices to
reveal how this dominance, this initiative of women, persists from
Rosalind to Lady Macbeth. So too in Racine; six of his tragedies bear
their heroines' names; and what male characters of his shall we set
against Hermione and Andromaque, Berenice and Roxane, Phedre and
Athalie? So again with Ibsen; what men shall we match with Solveig and
Nora, Heda and Hilda Wangel and Rebecca West?'
--F. L. LUCAS, TRAGEDY
----------------------------------------------------------------------
It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the
historians first and the poets afterwards--a worm winged like an eagle;
the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet. But these
monsters, however amusing to the imagination, have no existence in fact.
What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and
prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with
fact--that she is Mrs Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing
a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction
either--that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces
are coursing and flashing perpetually.
--Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
'It remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in Athena's
city, where women were kept in almost Oriental suppression as
odalisques or drudges, the stage should yet have produced figures like
Clytemnestra and Cassandra Atossa and Antigone, Phedre and Medea, and
all the other heroines who dominate play after play of the "misogynist"
Euripides. But the paradox of this world where in real life a
respectable woman could hardly show her face alone in the street, and
yet on the stage woman equals or surpasses man, has never been
satisfactorily explained. In modern tragedy the same predominance
exists. At all events, a very cursory survey of Shakespeare's work
(similarly with Webster, though not with Marlowe or Jonson) suffices to
reveal how this dominance, this initiative of women, persists from
Rosalind to Lady Macbeth. So too in Racine; six of his tragedies bear
their heroines' names; and what male characters of his shall we set
against Hermione and Andromaque, Berenice and Roxane, Phedre and
Athalie? So again with Ibsen; what men shall we match with Solveig and
Nora, Heda and Hilda Wangel and Rebecca West?'
--F. L. LUCAS, TRAGEDY
----------------------------------------------------------------------
It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the
historians first and the poets afterwards--a worm winged like an eagle;
the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet. But these
monsters, however amusing to the imagination, have no existence in fact.
What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and
prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with
fact--that she is Mrs Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing
a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction
either--that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces
are coursing and flashing perpetually.
--Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-25 08:41 pm (UTC)It's fantastically wonderful. :D
You should be - she was incredible.
*imagines you with nose*
*giggles*
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-25 08:49 pm (UTC)I do, in fact, have a nose, thankyouverymuch, she said haughtily, but couldn't keep from grinning.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-25 08:52 pm (UTC)And a very cute one it is too.
Also, I have to show you The Hours at some point.