“She was very young, oddly like Shakespeare, the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows.”
From the above description that was given of Judith, I came to the conclusion that she must’ve been William’s twin. I researched it and some sources confirmed that this is the image which Virginia Woolf wanted to portray. By portraying them as twins, she was able to show how gender inequality caused people who were so much alike to be treated so differently.
Allow your imagination to run wild with me for a second. Let’s picture Judith Shakespeare. She had “a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. The birds that sang in the edge were not more musical than she was”. Yet she was silenced! She was refused the chance to utilize that gift and was forced to be subjected to the norms of a standard Victorian woman. She was expected to marry! She was expected to take care of the household! When she cried out that “marriage was hateful to her”, she was severely beaten by her father.
Judith's unwillingness to get married reminds me of Strachey's Florence Nightingale whom we studied earlier this semester. The same rebellious nature is seen through Judith Shakespeare. Not rebellious in a negative way ofcourse, but simply through her refusal to comply with the standards that her society had imposed on her. It’s quite evident that Marriage was of great importance. “Almost before they [women] were out of the nursery, they were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all power of the law and custom”. But sadly, this was not all that was expected of a woman. She was also expected to kill her dreams and live in the nightmare that had been created by the society in which she lived.
This brings me to Woolf’s point that “Any woman born with a gift in the sixteenth century would certainly had gone crazed, shot herself or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.” I definitely agree with this claim. As evidently depicted through Judith, the fictional twin sister of William, a woman would be forced to commit suicide. However, Woolf infers that she does not commit such an act on her own. The typical Victorian society along with all of its gender inequalities can be seen as accomplices because once a person’s dream has died or in fact when it has never been given the chance to live, the person no longer has anything to live for.
All in all, a woman as talented as Shakespeare would have never been able to achieve such great success. Through the character Judith Shakespeare, we are able to distinctly see the extent to which society discriminated against women of that time. Truth be told, even if a woman was as talented as Shakespeare, she would’ve never been given the chance to even step on “stage”. Why? Because she lacked a room of her own...
The decription of Judith made an impression on me too. Also, I like that you drew a line between Woolf's piece and Strachey's work about Florence Nightingale. By considering both pieces of writing we can see how the evidence mounts in favor of the argument that marriage in the Victorian era was always a hindrance to a woman's ambition. It is also interesting to note that the biography of Florence Nightingale was written by a man, showing that by this time women were no longer alone in their cry for equality.
ReplyDeleteThe horrible part of Judith's scenario is that her fate turned out to be even worse than if she had gotten married! Woolf creates a visual picture of the hindrances faced by female writers. Marriage is included as mere fraction of the issues Judith faces in a patriarchal society. Judith's story reveals the ills of not just marriage, but society that treated women poorly.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I really think Woolf tried (and succeeded) on making an emphatic point about gender ineqality and its consequences with her description of "Judith and William Shakespeare." Clearly Woolf was trying to convey the point that it doesn't matter how much inherent creativity and talent a woman possesses, if she is not given the adequate resources, materials, and opportunities, that creativity will burn out and ultimately amount to nothing.
ReplyDeleteGood post, Sharia! It made me think of the Elizbethean era. While it is true that women were given the opportunity to write on the level of Shakespeare or act in his plays, it is interesting that he wrote during the time period a woman ruled England - Queen Elizabeth I. Does this mean that she was complicit in not allowing women's voices to be heard? The main problem was that women were rarely educated except in the art of keeping a home for the husband. This really did not change for more than two hundred years, which is what Virginia was writing about. This is why she was so obsessed with the idea that women needed to have an education, a place to write, and enough financial resources to develop their writing in peace.
ReplyDelete