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In both Shakespeare’s, Taming of the Shrew, and Wolfe’s, A Room of One’s own, the writers’ illustrate the deviously suffocating repercussions of sexism on liberty and the human spirit. Judith and Katherine are both intelligent and free-spirited characters with the brightest of futures, yet society and its rules perniciously choke their existence from them. The slow destruction of each woman is made more tragic by the promise and potential stolen from them and the world.
An example of Judith’s untapped intelligence is in Wolfe’s description of her ability to read, write, and think for herself despite the restrictions placed on her by her family, “She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil (Wolfe 1021).” Katherine’s self-confidence and pride are seen in her world-wise response to Petruchio’s advances in Act II, “Too light for such a swain to catch, And yet heavy as my weight should be (2.1 .204-205).” Moreover, her true nature, that of a caring and loving person not a mean and spiteful shrew, is displayed in the first thirty lines of Act II when Katherine in genuinely concerned about her sister’s predicament and the hurt she suffers when her flippant sister merely taunts while metaphorically and literally hiding behind their father. As both authors continue to develop their characters, they begin to describe the shackles that their families and society place on them and their eventual downfall.
Baptista and Judith’s fathers similarly believe they have their daughters best interests at heart, when they chastise and scold them for not being docile and loving daughters that should want nothing more from life than to please their fathers and witlessly obey their husbands as shown in, “Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage (Wolfe 1021).” The irony that a man feels that he is the injured and betrayed one, when his child refuses to...