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The IUP Journal of English Studies :
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Abstract |
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Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the 20th century. In the 20th century, she was one of the prominent writers who produced literature asserting her female identity. In her novels, Woolf portrays her characters, especially the female, as vulnerable, earthly beings, pulsating with life. Through her writings, she gives a new dimension, new color, new awareness to the thinking, consciousness, and expression of a woman. By studying her two novels, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), I wish to analyze the emerging image of women. In these novels, she has tried to explore the true character of a new woman through the technique of “stream of consciousness”. In her novels, she has tried to liberate the woman from male domination. The present study portrays that very struggle between the traditional and the ‘emerging’ images of women. |
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Description |
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The woman has always been the subaltern across cultural boundaries. Man
needs her, loves her, adores her and writes about her, but he does so in relation to his
own life. In this respect, the woman has always been the ‘second sex’ as Virginia Woolf has called: “Imaginatively she is completely insignificant, she pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history”.
Woman has always been projected as secondary and inferior. The bias against women can be seen right away from the day one of creation. It is said that God created man in his own image. The suggestion is that God is male. Further it is said that, after creating man, made woman from the rib of man. As Adam, the first man on earth, remarks about Eve: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man”.
In other words, woman is secondary to man. She has to depend on man for her existence. Her image and position are bound up and determined by religion, cultural-codes and societal setup.
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Keywords |
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English Studies Journal, Emerging Image, Women, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway, The Window, Time Passes, The Lighthouse, A Room of One, Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs Dalloway, The Window, Time Passes, Lighthouse. |
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