“The critic asks “is this believable?” The novelist, “how can I get them to believe this”? In short she argues that a good novelist always has some sort of conflict to tell and it must be suspenseful. “Something other than breakfast”. She uses witty humour to loosen the audience up. Atwood discusses the several genres of fiction that are available in this time and explains how this is not only a time of gender crossover but of genre crossover.
Addie's genuine character as a living human will be a mystery; a few may view her as someone who was playing with the devil and others might see her as someone with admiration because she was one to believe that actions speak louder than words. The different characters throughout the novel and the difficulty stream-of-consciousness method all work together to create a novel that is open-ended and a matter of understanding. There is no intent truth to the narrative any more than there is any ideal certainty to the events that happen in it. The way that Faulkner uses the multiple narrators serves the purpose of trying to figure out what is the truth of these events that took place throughout the story and this is what makes this novel such a success. Faulkner desires to enchant his audience and grasp their mind.
As an example two influential short stories will be discussed in depth in order to shed light into the lives of the two authors and their stories. The short stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) and Angela Carter (1940–1992) both sideway the same idea; the confinement of women in particular roles and positions in both personal and professional lives, posed on them by patriarchal figures. Toril Moi quotes in her examination of feministic criticism, Sexual/Textual Politics (2002), Elaine Showalter’s idea that “women writers should not be studied as a distinct group on the assumption that they write alike, or even display stylistic resemblances distinctively feminine” (Moi, 2002: 49), which comes across when reading the two stories which are stylistically already very different. It might be so that a feminist reader of both times (there’s some 80 years difference between the two stories) did not only want to see her own experiences mirrored in fiction, but strived to identify with strong, impressive female characters (Moi, 2002: 46), and looked for role-models that would instil positive sense of feminine identity by portraying women as self-actualising strong identities who were not dependent on men (Moi, 2002, 46). The two stories bring out two female characters, very different by position and character; the other a new mother, scared and confused of her own role, and the other a young newly-wed girl, still a child, being fouled by a much older man, mainly as a mark of his authority over women in general.
Arguably women achieved the vote as the social position of women was improving which helped erode male prejudices against them. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 and 1893 granted women full legal control of all property they had owned at marriage or that they had gained after marriage, by earnings or inheritance. Changing attitudes was therefore an important factor in winning women the vote in 1918 The militant suffragettes
A Slight Hysterical Tendency – An Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper Fiction by standard definition is a body of literary work that is not real, or is imagined. So what do you get when you have a story that is in fact fiction, but is so personal to the author that is could almost be considered autobiographical? You get the fictional story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The story about a woman who is suffering from postpartum psychosis is parallel to the difficulties that Gilman faced in her own life. At a time in history when women were thought to be hysterical and not taken seriously especially in the area of mental health, Gilman bravely brought the topic to the surface in a dark, but truthful manner. Her use of imagery and personification throughout the writing draws the reader into the sick mind of a young mother struggling to find herself again and broaches the issue of feminism.
Just as the narration is set free and unleashed into a world of fantasy, the reader is held captive in a place that they cannot determine as absolutely real or absolutely fantastical. In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the reader is held captive by the narrative of a woman with a worsening nervous condition, left with no way out of her increasingly demented view of reality. There are words that the narrator uses to convey to the reader, and really, to herself, that what she is describing and the way the she is describing it is metaphorical and not true in a tangible or logical sense. She states, “John is a physician, and perhaps - (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) - perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.” The word “perhaps”, along with other words of the like, are used in the beginning of the piece to lend a sense of reality to what the narrator is saying. These words also do the task of presenting the narrator’s nervous condition in its earlier stages, when she is wary of her husband
As a result, those people found themselves a little expose and decided to tell their own side story about her. Thus, Yo is described from point of views of different narrators in each chapter creating a unique personality and character of her and providing the readers a unique insight about Yo, the protagonist. The author successfully created a protagonist “who never tells her own story yet one who comes to life vibrantly through the miscellany of impressions and observations that people make about her” (Shuman, “¡Yo!,” par. 2). In this novel, Julia Alvarez manages to capture and express the true feelings of women which deconstructs the stereotypes through Yo.
Her work when she graduated took her to England where she became active in the Women's Suffrage Movement, which followed by her joining the National American Woman Suffrage Association. This is where Alice realized her true calling. She didn't want to be the social worker she graduated college to be. She wanted to win the battle of equal rights for women. Alice Paul, a Quaker, invariably described by her contemporaries as “slight and frail,” was by temperament and training a
In the attempt to capture truth in writing, writers and readers alike are cognisant of the artifice that occurs in the process of writing. This oxymoron; that truth and authenticity can result from artifice is the basis of the conflict that occurs between concepts of reality, truth and literary realism. The nature of fiction itself presents tension between truth and artifice: writers abide by the facets of literary realism, which has a “fidelity to the truth” (M.H. Abrams), and must create artifices to deliver meaning and create truth, utilising techniques of fiction such as metaphor, figures, imagery and dialogue which aren’t necessarily true. In order to create a sense of authenticity, Nam Le abides by verisimilitude in his short stories “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” and “Tehran Calling” in his collection The Boat.
Graduating from Strathmore College in 1901, Alice later went on to receive additional including earning a PhD. and graduating from a law school. While studying social work in England, she was introduced to more radical ideas in the Women’s Suffrage movement. No longer a timid Quaker girl, Alice became a radical advocate for women’s rights when she met Christabel Pankhurst, one of the daughters of Emmiline Pankhurst. The Pankhurst women were militant suffragist who stood by the notion of “deeds, not words”.