Women’s & gender studies

For each of the identification quotes, you will need to discuss the importance for the particular source (i.e. in terms of core themes, symbols, characterization, style) with reference to larger class themes (connecting to another source or a recurrent idea). Answers should be approximately a paragraph in length. The books you are going to use are: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Norton Critical Edition) Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Norton Critical Edition) Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (Pantheon) Zadie Smith, White Teeth (Vintage) Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Mariner Books). Here are the quotes you need to identify: (Just need to write first 3 words of the quotes and after that discuss, so that I can know which quote you are talking about) -“All I could do was offer you an opinion upon one minor point – a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.” (Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 1) -“What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached every so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” (Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 3) -“Meanwhile [Shakespeare’s] extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had not chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil.” (Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 3) -“One might say, I continued, laying the book down beside Pride and Prejudice, that the woman [Charlotte Bronte] who wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted.” (Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 4) -“When I rummage in my own mind I find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and influencing the world to higher ends. I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else.” (Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 6) -“‘I am not deceitful: If I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare, I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world except for John Reed…I am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again as long as I live. I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty.’” (Bronte, Jane Eyre, Chapter IV, pg. 30) -“‘You must be on your guard against her; you must shun her example: if necessary, avoid her company, exclude her from your sports, and shut her out from your converse…this girl is a – a liar!’” (Bronte, Jane Eyre, Chapter VII, pg. 56) -“During these eight years my life was uniform; but not unhappy, because it was not inactive. I had the means of an excellent education placed within my reach; a fondness for some of my studies and a desire to excel in all…” (Bronte, Jane Eyre, Chapter X, pg. 71) -“‘You examine me, Miss Eyre,’ said he: ‘do you think me handsome?’ I should, if I had deliberated, have replied to this question by something conventionally vague and polite; but the answer somehow slipped from my tongue before I was aware: – ‘No, sir.’” (Bronte, Jane Eyre, Chapter XIV, pg. 112) -“‘You – you strange – you almost unearthly thing! – I love as my own flesh. You – poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are – I entreat to accept me as a husband…I must have you for my own – entirely my own.’” (Bronte, Jane Eyre, Chapter XXIII, pg. 217) -‘Sir,’ I interrupted him, ‘you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady: you speak of her with hate – with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel – she cannot help being mad.’ ‘Jane, my little darling, (so I will call you, for so you are)…If you were mad, do you think I should hate you?’ ‘I do indeed sir.’ ‘Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing about the sort of love of which I am capable.” (Bronte, Jane Eyre, Chapter XXVII, pg. 257)-“There would be recesses in my mind which would be only mine, to which he never came; and sentiments growing there fresh and sheltered, which his austerity could never blight, nor his measured warrior-march trample down: but as his wife – at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked – forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital – this would be unendurable.” (Bronte, Jane Eyre, Chapter XXXIV, pg. 347) -“I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest – blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate that I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh.” (Bronte, Jane Eyre, Chapter XXXVIII, pgs. 383-84) – “I NEVER gave a lock of hair away To a man, Dearest, except this to thee, Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully I ring out to the full brown length and say ‘Take it.’ My day of youth went yesterday; My hair no longer bounds to my foot’s glee, Nor plant I it from rose or myrtle-tree…” (Browning, XVII) – “I have no heart?–Perhaps I have not; But then you’re mad to take offence That I don’t give you what I have not got: Use your own common sense. Let bygones be bygones: Don’t call me false, who owed not to be true: I’d rather answer “No” to fifty Johns Than answer “Yes” to you.” (Rossetti, “No, Thank You, John”) -“Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 10-11) -“When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. I looked at her and I saw her face crumple as she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 27) -“Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger. Her pleading expression annoys me. I have not bought her, she has bought me, or so she thinks.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 41) -“She was undecided, uncertain about facts – any fact. When I asked her if the snakes we sometimes saw were poisonous, she said, ‘Not those. The fer de lance of course, but there are none here,’ and added, ‘but how can they be sure? Do you think they know?’ Then, ‘Our snakes are not poisonous. Of course not.’” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 52) -“‘England,’ said Christophine, who was watching me. ‘You think there is such a place?’” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 67) -“‘Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that’s obeah too.’” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 88) -“If she too says it, or weeps, I’ll take her in my arms, my lunatic. She’s mad but mine, mine. What will I care for gods or devils or for Fate itself. If she smiles or weeps or both. For me. Antoinetta – I can be gentle too. Hide your face. Hide yourself but in my arms. You’ll soon see how gentle. My lunatic. My mad girl.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 99) -“As I walk along the passages I wish I could see what is behind the cardboard. They tell me I am in England but I don’t believe them. We lost our way to England. When? Where? I don’t remember, but we lost it.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 107)-“I heard the parrot call as he did when he saw a stranger, Qui est là? Qui est là? And the man who hated me was calling too, Bertha! Bertha!” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 112) -For Persepolis: consider pages 95, 133, 182, 193, 285 and 302 as identifications (for the exam, if chosen, I will project the page in question). -“‘I GIVE YOU A GLORIOUS NAME LIKE MAGID MAHFOOZ MURSHED MABTASIM IQBAL!’ Samad had yelled after Magid when he returned home that evening and whipped up the stairs like a bullet to hide in his room. ‘AND YOU WANT TO BE CALLED MARK SMITH!’” (Smith, White Teeth, 126) -“The question is: are the pretty men with the big white teeth willing to play you, et cetere…Pande’s not pretty enough, is he? Too Indian-looking, big nose, big eyebrows.” (Smith, White Teeth, 188) -“‘You go back and back and back and its still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure fait, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy-tale.’” (Smith, White Teeth, 196) -“There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection.” (Smith, White Teeth, 222) -“It was the Chalfen way, handed down the family for generations; they had a congenital inability to suffer fools gladly or otherwise…Truth was truth to a Chalfen. And Genius was Genius.” (Smith, White Teeth, 260) -“Why had she said Captain Charlie Durham? That was a downright lie. False as her own white teeth. Clara was smarter than Captain Charlie Durham. Hortense was smarter than Captain Charlie Durham. Probably even Grandma Ambrosia was smarter than Captain Charlie Durham…Captain Charlie Durham was a no-good djam fool bwoy.” (Smith, White Teeth, 294) -“It meant I wanted to write my name on the world. It meant I presumed. Like the Englishmen who named streets in Kerala after their wives…It was a warning from Allah. He was saying: Iqbal, you are becoming like them…No thought Millat…It just meant you’re nothing.” (Smith, White Teeth, 419) -“‘They open a door and all they’ve got behind it is a bathroom or a living room. Just neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody’s historical shit all over the place…Really, these people exist…every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be.’” (Smith, White Teeth, 428)