ENGL347: Women Writers: Assessed Essay
“Becoming a mother will be the one thing that frees you as a woman. But it will also be the one thing that traps you...” – Anon.
Discuss the way in which women writers use the concept of motherhood as a gender-divide to explore the themes of entrapment and escape in literature.
Since the 19th century, the broader sense of literature as a ‘totality of written or printed works’, and the foundational means of communicating information or ideas, has given way to a range of more exclusive and specific definitions. The rapid growth of adult literacy, combined with economic, social and political developments have vastly increased the sheer spectrum and quantity of subject matter and forms which fall under this umbrella term, forcing the need for greater categorisation in order to make ‘literature’ more accessible to the general reader. The resulting categories which attempt to standardise this process may take many forms, including observation of the structure or literary genre of the text (for example, categorising the text as a novel, poem, report or article) or perhaps the particular literary period or movement, which will link all associated texts with underlying principles or stylistic traits, such as the Romantic era or Post-Colonial literature.
However, due to a long-standing patriarchal tradition dominating the history of literature- a literary practice challenged and corrected by the rise of the Feminist movement, particularly following the introduction of universal suffrage in 1928- the gender of the author has also become a means by which works may be categorised and interpreted, forcing the modern-day critic to analyse the works of each sex in isolation from one another. Political and social discriminations against women, rising from the historical lack of sexual equality, have also produced long-standing