Thursday, January 12, 2012
Week One: Which includes Bradstreet, Cavendish, Fern, and King
This first week we focused on different poems written in different styles. My favorite is Bradstreet's "The Author to her book". Bradstreet expresses how authors view their works as children. I have read many prefaces and notes to the reader about how characters in a story will grow and change and become something completely different then the author intended. I also really liked the cover of Joanna Russ's book How to Suppress Women's Writing it is a good example of how people viewed women in the past. It reminds me of an article I read last semester where a critic was degrading Harriet Beecher Stowe. They also said that the books written by Francis Hodgson Burnett were crap. I highly disagree with this critic and love both Stowe and Burnett. If those same books had been written by men they would have been viewed differently. The poem by Fern "Mrs. Adolphus Smith Sporting the 'Blue Stocking'" shows the struggles a women would have had. With women being the primary care givers for their children and husband it would have been hard for them to have time to sit down and write.
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I actually stumbled across a book in the library of early 19th century writer criticisms. I couldn't believe what some of them were saying. One was discussing Charlotte Bronte and (this is when her gender hadn't been revealed and she was just the "writer of Jane Eyre")said that she was "obviously a female" and didn't have any talent. He compared her to Jane Austen and said her writing was juvenile and that she had too many things going on at once. He said she would never amount to anything. I just thought it went nicely along with the "How to Suppress Women's Writing". This book reviewer obviously had no idea what he was talking about, because he also said Charles Dickens wouldn't amount to anything either.
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