Literature in English

American writer, economist, and lecturer, an early theorist of the feminist movement, who wrote over two hundred short stories and about ten novels, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was also famous for her positions as a feminist - although she refused to call herself so.  She used to say that the domestic environment had become an institution which oppressed women.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860.  Her father, a librarian and writer, abandoned her mother, Mary Westcott Perkins, after their infant died in 1866 - Mary Perkins lived with her children on poverty and was often forced to move from relative to relative.

Gilman was a voracious reader and largely self-educated. She studied two years at Rhode Island School of Design (1878-80) and then earned her living designing greetings cards. In 1884 she married Charles Walter Stetson, an aspiring artist. From her early adulthood, she had suffered from periodic bouts of melancloly, and after the birth of their daughter Katharine, she was beset by depression. Gilman began treatment with a famous doctor at their time, who recommender her to ”live as domestic a life as possible” and “never touch a pen, brush or pencil as long as you live”. Gilman later satirized this in her autobiography, and used the discussions in her most renowned short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Loosely based on Gilman’s own experiendes it tells of a young mother suffering from a temporary nervous depression. John, her husband, is a physician, who doesn’t believe in supernatural things. He has ordered her to “rest” in the bedroom of their rented house. There narrator records her psychological torment in a secret diary. The patterns of the room’s hideous yellow wallpaper start to haunt her. She sees a woman creeping around it, as if she wanted to get out. Finally she locks her inside the room to creep around as she pleases:

 “Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what to do?
I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal - having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.
I sometime fancy that in my condition, if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus - but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.” (from ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’)

After divorcing her first husband in 1894, Gilman moved to California and married her cousin George Houghton Gilman, a New York lawyer. She worked as an editor as well as a lecturer and writer, and had her own feminist newspaper, , The Forerunner, in which most of her fiction appeared. The magazine had nearly 1,500 subscribers.  She also wrote non-fiction books such as economic analysis of the U.S. and sociological discussions on labor and women’s conditions. 

In 1932 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After her husband died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1934, she returned to California to live near her daughter. Gilman died on August 17, 1935, in Pasadena, California - an advocate of euthanasia, she ended her own life by taking an overdose of chloroform.  Gilman and her work were mostly forgotten for two decades until the feminist movement of the 1960s revived the interest in her work.

“Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?”

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a British author who made an original contribution to the form of the novel - also distinguished feminist essayist, critic in The Times Literary Supplement, and a central figure of Bloomsbury group. Virginia Woolf’s books were published by Hogart Press, which she founded with her husband, the critic and writer Leonard Woolf. Originally their printing machine was small enough to fit on a kitchen table, but their publications later included T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land (1922), fiction by Maxim Gorky, E.M. Forster, and Katherine Mansfield, and the complete twenty-four-volume translation of the works of Sigmund Freud.

She was born in London, the daughter of a member of the Duckworth publishing family and a famous literary critic.  In her home, she kept in contact with her father’s friends - a group of famous writers that included Henry James, Alfred Tennyson and George Eliot.

Woolf, who was educated at home by her father, had a youth shadowed by a series of emotional shocks: Gerald Duckworth, her half-brother, sexually abused her; her father suffered a slow death from cancer; when her beloved brother Thoby died in 1906, she had a prolonged mental breakdown.

Following the death of her father in 1904, Woolf moved with her sister Vanessa and two brothers to the house in Bloomsbury. Vanessa, a painter, agreed to marry the critic of art and literature Clive Bell. Their house become central to activities of the Bloomsbury group, formed by artists and writers - including E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, her brother-in-law Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, and her husband Leonard Woolf.  In 1905, Woolf began to write for the Times Literary Supplement, and in 1912 she married the political theorist Leonard (Sidney) Woolf, who had returned from serving as an administrator in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and was also a writer himself.

With TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927) and THE WAVES (1931), Woolf established herself as one of the leading writers of modernism. On the publication of To the Lighthouse, Lytton Strachey wrote: “It is really most unfortunate that she rules out copulation - not the ghost of it visible - so that her presentation of things becomes little more… than an arabesque - an exquisite arabesque, of course.” The Waves is perhaps Woolf’s most difficult novel. It follows in soliloquies the lives of six persons from childhood to old age. Louis Kronenberger noted in The New York Times that Woolf was not really concerned with people, but “the poetic symbols, of life–the changing seasons, day and night, bread and wine, fire and cold, time and space, birth and death and change.” To the Lighthouse had a tripartite structure: part 1 presented the Victorian family life, the second part covers a ten-year period, and the third part is a long account of a morning and reconciliation. The central figure, Mrs. Ramsay, was based on Woolf’s mother. Also other characters in the book were drawn from Woolf’s family memories.

MRS. DALLOWAY (1925) formed a web of thoughts of several groups of people during the course of a single day. There is little action, but much movement in time from present to past and back again. The central figure, Clarissa Dalloway, married to Richard Dalloway, is a wealthy London hostess. She spends her day in London preparing for her evening party. She recalls her life before World War I, her friendship with the unconventional Sally Seton, and her relationship with Peter Walsh. At her party she never meets the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith, one of the first Englishmen to enlist in the war. Sally returns as Lady Rossetter, Peter Walsh is still enamored with Mrs. Dalloway, the prime minister arrives, and Smith commits suicide. Most critics consider that Woolf’s masterpiece is ORLANDO (1928), a fantasy novel, in which Woolf traced the career of the androgynous protagonist, Orlando, from a masculine identity within the Elisabethan court to a feminine identity in 1928.

In these works Woolf developed innovative literary techniques in order to reveal women’s experience and find an alternative to the male-dominated views of reality. In her essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ Woolf argued that John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and other realistic English novelist dealt in surfaces but to get underneath these surfaces one must use less restricted presentation of life, and such devices as stream of consciousness and interior monologue and abandon linear narrative.

In the event of a Nazi invastion, Woolf and Leonard had made provisions to kill themselves. After the final attack of mental illness, Woolf loaded her pockets full of stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her Sussex home on March 28, 1941. On her note to her husband she wrote: “I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer. I owe all my happiness to you but cannot go on and spoil your life.” Woolf’s suicide has much colored the interpretation of both of their work.

Dear Workshop participants - this is our fifth exercise, related to the topics we have discussed in the sixth meeting. Good luck!

 I wrote this little short story in the DRAMATIC MODE:

“Mom, I have something to tell you…”
“Not now, I am making a cake.”
“But, Mom!… It’s important!”
“More important than your birthday cake? We have fifty guests tonight!”
“It is the most important thing in my life, Mom…”
“I know, your birthday, that’s why I’m in a hurry! Your father’s boss, Colonel McGregor, will be here in a couple of hours, and all our friends from the club, and…”
“I’m not talking about the party, Mom… It’s about this thing I have to tell you. I need to know your opinion.”
“Oh, you’re eighteen now, my little baby… you can manage your own problems, can’t you?”
“Mom, but I…”
“Can’t we talk about it later, after the party? I still have a hundred cucumber sandwiches to prepare… Want some?”
“MOM!”
“All right, tell me at once! You’re making me nervous!”
“I have a boyfriend, Mom… and I invited him to the party tonight.”
“Oh, such a fuss!… What is the problem?  You can invite anyone you want, it is your party, my little baby… Wait a minute… Did you say…’boyfriend’, Michael?!?!?”

Your task is to write new versions of the story using these types of narrator:

First version: Neutral Omniscience

Second version: ‘I’ as witness

Third version: ‘I’ as protagonist 

Send me by e-mail: frizero@yahoo.com

Captain Smith came into the room. All people silenced. Only Mary Martinez stood up.
“May I help you, sir?”, she whispered.
“Rum”, he said, “Two glasses.”
She went to the bar and ordered their best rum. The bartender handed her the glasses with trembling arms.
“Here you are, sir.”
He got just one of them and didn’t say a word.
“The other glass, sir?”, Mary asked.
“Sit down”, he dragged a chair to his table, “this one is for you, miss.”
Mary looked around and did what she was told to. Everybody was looking at her. She raised her glass.
“God bless you, sir”, she blinked, “first gentleman to enter this place in ages…”
“Nah”, he drank his rum at once, “I’m no gentleman, miss. Just want you to have something warm inside when I kill you.”
And Captain Smith drew his sword before her very eyes.

Robertson Frizero Barros

Katherine Mansfield revolutionised the 20th Century English short story. Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story, for the first time, the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality. She is taught worldwide because of her historical importance but also because her prose offers lessons in entering ordinary lives that are still vivid and strong. And her fiction retains its relevance through its open-endedness—its ability to raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire.

Virginia Woolf once said that Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) had produced ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ After Mansfield died, Virginia Woolf often dreamed at night of her great rival. The dreams gave her a Mansfield who was vividly, shockingly alive, so that the ‘emotion’ of the dream encounter remained with Woolf for the next day. Hermione Lee, Woolf’s biographer, writes that ‘Katherine haunted her as we are haunted by people we have loved, but with whom we have not completed our conversation, with whom we have unfinished business.’ It is a formulation that captures wonderfully the current position of Mansfield. She is a key figure in the development of the short story and yet she remains somehow on the margins of literary history. She is also the great ghost of New Zealand cultural life.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield left for London in 1908 aged 20, never to return to New Zealand.  In the context of a long and arduous sea journey – six or seven weeks—this might not appear significant.  Later in her life, she was frequently incapacitated by illness and never able to return to her hometown. Howeverm her biographers also consider that it is obvious that she saw no point in a return voyage to her birthplace—and that has had an effect on how New Zealanders see her. Though D.H. Lawrence believed the most important fact about her was that she was a colonial, Mansfield can seem to her own people, at first glance, ‘too English’.  And yet her masterpieces—the long stories ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude’—are lovingly detailed recreations of a New Zealand childhood, reports from the ’edge of the world’ as she felt it to be. Of course these luminous re-imaginings are lit with the affection and nostalgia of the expatriate. They would not exist without their author’s estrangement from the scenes and places and people she describes. They are set in a New Zealand of the mind, composed at the edge of Mansfield’s memory.

Mansfield’s relationship with her country of birth was, like most of her relationships, marked by extremes. In the beginning, as a precocious, literary schoolgirl, she despaired of her uncouth colonial home where ‘people don’t even know their alphabet’. As a mature writer she found in that ‘hopeless’ material a way of pushing the boundaries of the form—in the words of her biographer, Antony Alpers, a means of ‘revolutionising the English short story’.

Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. A number of her works, including “Miss Brill”, “Prelude”, “The Garden Party”, “The Doll’s House”, are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian writer Anton Chekhov and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing. The fact that Mansfield died relatively young - thirty-four years old, by Tuberculosis - only added to her legacy.

Source: http://www.nzedge.com/heroes/mansfield.html and Wikipedia

Dear Workshop participants - this is our fourth exercise, related to the topics we have discussed in the fifth meeting. Good luck!

Take this event:

 a man enters a restaurant to tell his wife he is in love with her sister and wants the divorce.

Write several versions of a brief story – one to three paragraphs – using this event:

First version: the man’s point-of-view

Second version: the woman’s point-of-view

Third version: the point-of-view of another customer sitting on a table besides the couple’s table.

Send me by e-mail: frizero@yahoo.com