shakespears sister.docx

1、shakespears sisterVirginia Woolf 学习参考资料 Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a novelist, essayist, editor, feminist, and influential force in English life and letters. She was born in a famous intellectual family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a well-known literary critic and historian. She was one

2、of the core elements of the Bloomsbury Group, which had a great influence upon English literary and intellectual life between the wars. On 29 May 1912, Virginia Woolf married Leonard Woolf. Under the encouragement of her husband, Virginia devoted herself to the craft of fiction, publishing a series

3、of novels that made her, by the middle twenties, one of the best-known innovative literary artists in England. Her major works include The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), Jacobs Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1930), The Years (1937), B

4、etween the Acts (1941), A Room of Ones Own (1929), and Three Guinese (1938), etc. In 1941, depressed about the war and fearful of the attack of her mental illness, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the Ouse.Virginia Woolf is now acclaimed as one of the great innovative novelists of the 20th century

5、and one of the principal exponents of modernism. Her skillful use of the Stream of Consciousness and interior monologue in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, which established her reputation securely. Mrs. Dalloway is a daringly structured analysis of post-World War I London society tha

6、t shifts from one characters mind to anothers even while it focuses on a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a well-born Westminster hostess, and her mad double, Steptimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran, who paradoxically functions as a kind of “other self” for her. To the Lighthouse

7、 is partly a nostalgic memoir of Woolfs own childhood summers at Talland House and partly a sardonic critique of the environment, especially for girls like the rebellious Virginia Stephen. In some ways, The Waves represents Woolf at the height of her avant-garde experimental powers. This innovative

8、novel consists of a series of meditatively lyric monologues spoken by six central characters, yet the book is already notably elegiac: each figure is, in one way or another, an aspect of the central human self, and all are haunted by the ultimate death of an ambiguously heroic youth named Percival.A

9、 Room of Ones Own is a luminous extended essay on “women and fiction” which is, as most literary historians would agree, the first major achievement of feminist criticism in the English language.A Room of Ones OwnChapter 3 Shakespeares Sister1It was disappointing not to have brought back in the even

10、ing some important statement, some authentic fact. Women are poorer than men becausethis or that. Perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for the truth, and receiving on ones head an avalanche of opinion hot as lava, discolored as dish-water. It would be better to draw the curtains; to shu

11、t out distractions; to light the lamp; to narrow the enquiry and to ask the historian, who records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions women lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say in the time of Elizabeth.For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of th

12、at extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spiders web, attached e

13、ver so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeares plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these web

14、s are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one of the latest. Professor Trevelyans

15、History of England.2 Once more I looked up Women, found “position of,” and turned to the pages indicated. “Wife-beating,” I read, “was a recognized right of man, and was practiced without shame by high as well as low. Similarly,” the historian goes on, “the daughter who refused to marry the gentlema

16、n of her parents choice was liable to be locked up, beaten, and flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an affair of personal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the chivalrous upper classes. Betrothal often took place while one or bo

17、th of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage when they were scarcely out of the nurses charge.” That was about 1470, soon after Chaucers time. The next reference to the position of women is some two hundred years later, in the lime of the Stuarts. “It was still the exception for women of the up

18、per and middle class to choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law and custom could make him. Yet even so,” Professor Trevelyan concludes, “neither Shakespeares women nor those of authentic seventeenth century memoirs, like the V

19、erneys and the Hutchinsons3, seem wanting in personality and character.” Certainly, if we consider it, Cleopatra must have had a way with her; Lady Macbeth, one would suppose, had a will of her own; Rosalind, one might conclude, was an attractive girl.4 Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than t

20、he truth when he remarks that Shakespeares women do not seem wanting in personality and character. Not being a historian, one might go even further and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of timeClytemnestra, Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth,

21、Phedre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then among the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Madame de Guermantes5the names flock to mind, nor do they recall women “lacking in personality and character.” Indeed, if wom

22、an had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as

23、Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten, and flung about the room.A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. Sh

24、e dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell,

25、and was the property of her husband.It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets afterwardsa 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 exist

26、ence 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 factthat she is Mrs. Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction eitherthat she is a v

27、essel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually. The moment, however, that one tries this method with the Elizabethan woman, one branch of illumination fails; one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substant

28、ial about her. History scarcely mentions her. And I turned to Professor Trevelyan again to see what history meant to him. I found by looking at his chapter headings that it meant“The Manor Court and the Methods of Open-Field Agriculture.The Cistercians and Sheep-FarmingThe Crusades.The University.Th

29、e House of Commons.The Hundred Years War.The Wars of the Roses.The Renaissance Scholars.The Dissolution of the Monasteries.Agrarian and Religious Strife.The Origin of English Sea-Power.The Armada.”and so on. Occasionally an individual woman is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great l

30、ady. But by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historians view of the past. Nor shall we find her in any collection of anecdotes. Aubrey6hardly men

31、tions her. She never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful other letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one wants, I thoughtand why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton7 supply it? is a mass of information;

32、at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like; had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring. I thought, looking about the shelves for books that were not there, to suggest to the stude