around the time in which dracula was written, the concept of women and womanhood was being redefined and revolutionized - so much so that there was even a name for this phenomenon of female power: the new woman.
the new woman was a feminist archetype used to describe independent women who were feminists, educated, career-driven, and sought to make a space for themselves outside of the home sphere. mina is introduced in dracula by talking of her career as a school mistress’s assistant, her hopes at getting better at stenography and typewriting, and equating herself to a journalist; mina is basically The New Woman archetype personified. yes, she still cares for and loves her fiancé, but it’s obvious that she has her own drives and goals, and that she is educated and independent.
as the book continues (and if you’d like to think about these things as you read), i think it would be beneficial to pay attention to how mina is treated by the narrative and other characters. because she is the archetype of the developing modern, independent woman, her place in the story matters a whole lot, and keeping an eye on how her power (or lack thereof) impact the narrative may just mean keeping an eye on how women were dealt with and thought of at the time
“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.” - Sylvia Plath
Native American/First Nations Woman Writer of the Week: JOY HARJO
Joy Harjo is the first Native American Poet Laureate for the United States, receiving the honor in June 2019, and is known as a major figure in contemporary American poetry. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation from Oklahoma, Harjo draws on First Nation storytelling and histories alongside feminist and social justice poetic traditions in her writing. Her critically acclaimed work is often autobiographical and focused on the need for remembrance and transcendence, earning her the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas among many other awards. She published her first volume, a nine-poem chapbook entitled The Last Song, in 1975, demonstrating a powerful insight into the fragmented history of indigenous peoples that later evolved into What Moon Drove Me to This?, a full-length volume of poetry combining everyday experiences with deep spiritual truths. She earned a BA from the University of New Mexico and MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Before being named Poet Laureate, Harjo was a Professor and Chair of Excellence in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
UWM Special Collections holds 15 titles by Harjo in our Native American Literature Collection. Shown here from top to bottom are:
Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night.
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
(Beloved, 1987)
Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019) - women in history(40/?)
Toni Morrison was an American writer who was known for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience). She won the Nobel prize for literature in 1993.
Toni published her first book, The Bluest Eyes, in 1970 in which she talks about a black girl who is obsessed with white beauty standards. In 1973, her book Sulafollowed.Song of Solomon came out in 1977; in this book, Toni intruduces her first male protagonist and she blends African American folklore and history in a book about the search for identity. Ten years later the critically acclaimed Belovedcame out. In this work, Toni tells a story, based on true events, of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery. This book won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Toni wrote many other books, in which she talked about many aspects, important to the black community, such as a Black utopian community (Paradise, 1998).
What is always central in the works of Toni Morrison is the Black American experience: her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity in an unjust society.
Have you ever seen a child sitting on its mother’s knee listening to fairy stories? As long as the child is told of cruel giants and of the terrible suffering of beautiful princesses, it holds its head up and its eyes open; but if the mother begins to speak of happiness and sunshine, the little one closes its eyes and falls asleep with its head against her breast… . I am a child like that, too. Others may like stories of flowers and sunshine; but I choose the dark nights and sad destinies.
- Selma Lagerlöf (November 20, 1858 - March 16, 1940)
On this day, the first female author to win a Noble prize of literature, was born.
“It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such.”
—Anne Carson,Autobiography of Red
“Who hasn’t ever wondered: am I monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
—Clarice Lispector,The Hour of the Star
—Catherynne M. Valente,The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden
“They say I’m a beast. And feast on it. When all along I thought that’s what a woman was.”
—Sandra Cisneros,Loose Woman
“The she-monster is hardly a new phenomenon. The idea of a female untamed nature which must be leashed or else will wreak havoc closely reflects mythological heroes’ struggles against monsters. Greek myth alone offers a host - of Ceres, Harpies, Sirens, Moirae. Associated with fate and death in various ways, they move swiftly, sometimes on wings; birds of prey are their closest kin - the Greeks didn’t know about dinosaurs - and they seize as in the word raptor. But seizure also describes the effect of the passions on the body; inner forces, looser, madness, arte, folly, personified in Homer and the tragedies as feminine, snatch and grab the interior of the human creature and take possession.”
—Marina Warner,Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time; “Monstrous Mothers”
“I don’t want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.”
—Anne Carson,Decreation
—Louise Glück, “Blue Rotunda”
“How can I teach her / some way of being human / that won’t destroy her?”
—Margaret Atwood,Two-Headed Poems
“…and what I want to say / is that I am not what I was, I am / a changeling, half-creaturely,”
—Camille Norton,Corruption: Poems; “Wild Animals I Have Known”
“People feel that in her, the nonhuman. People are afraid of her. Something in her inspires a nonhuman attachment. Sur elle, the human feelings seem to slip, they glisser—”
—Anaïs Nin,Nearer the Moon
—Camille Norton,Corruption: Poems; “Index of Prohibited Images”
“She had a feral gaze like that of an untamed animal,”
—Margaret Atwood,Murder in the Dark: Stories; “Women’s Novels”
“…does she wander still, searching human faces / For one who might speak of her / In her own language, look into her eyes / And gentle the wildness once and for all?”
—May Sarton,Letters from Maine: New Poems
“How can she bear the pain of becoming human? The end of exile is the end of being.”
—Angela Carter,The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; “The Lady of the House of Love”
—Hélène Cixous,The Laugh of the Medusa
“A woman in the shape of a monster / a monster in the shape of a woman / the skies are full of them”
—Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium”
“A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”
—Ocean Vuong, “A Letter To My Mother That She Will Never Read”
“Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole. I doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way. It’s the core of monster making, actually. Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable—your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers—and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves. Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper.”
—Richard Siken,Spork’s Editor’s Pages: Black Telephone
“Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?”
—Friedrich Nietzsche,Good and Evil
“I was driven because I wanted to be like others. / I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.”
—Czesław Miłosz, “Account”
“When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster?”
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole - oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel(what we would consider a novel in modern terms)was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905. The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Got that?
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
C. L. Moore invented the Space Western genre, and her NorthWest character was the inspiration behind Han Solo and many other characters of his ilk.
And back to the inspiration for Batman. Mary Roberts Rinehart wrote a play called The Bat in 1920, which featured a man dressed in a bat costume. Bob Kane said that he was heavily inspired by The Bat when creating the Batman comics.
So not only did a woman create a masked vigilante before Batman, a woman created Batman before Batman.
In Issue #17, Managing Editor Rivka Yeker interviews the owners of Chicago-based independent bookstore Volumes Bookcafe about community and their intentions with the store.
“Rebecca and Kimberly George are two sisters who once dreamt about opening up a bookstore. Both sisters have master’s degrees and are certified to teach, but they have focuses in different areas. Kimberly’s foundation is rooted in theatre and working with younger children while Rebecca’s is focused primarily on English and teaching high school and college students. This is why their passion for Volumes is so strong. As former teachers, they deeply understand the benefits and difficulties of the American education system, recognize the needs that the Chicago Public Schools have, and are actively working on giving young people resources and spaces that help them feel empowered and comfortable. Due to their hard-work and ambition, they were able to create something that encompassed their visions of what a bookstore should look and feel like.”
Why is it, that in lots of books the author takes pains in describing the heroine/ female protag as ’ plain’ or not conventionally beautiful but then the fanart/ representation of the character looks like a perfectly proportioned barbie doll?! Are womens feats in literature not enough ?
Its almost like we’re brainwashed in thinking only beautiful women can be successful…sound familiar?
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) is a writer most famous for her 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which depicted the harsh life of African Americans during that time. The book became highly popular and influential all over the United States, energizing the abolitionist movement to which its author belonged.
In 1868 she became one of the first editors of Hearth and Home, one of a few new publications for women, and also argued continuously for female emancipation and extended rights. Her most important work still remains a very popular and widely-studied piece of literature today.
Sarah Waters (b. 1966) is a Welsh author, known for her Victorian-era novels featuring lesbian characters. Each of her novels has received various literary awards.
Her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, was released in 1998 and was subsequently translated in 24 languages. The 2002 novel Fingersmithwas shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. She won Author of the Year on several occasions.
Carolyn Wells (June 18, 1862 – March 26, 1942) was an American writer and poet.
Born in Rahway, New Jersey, she was the daughter of William E.andAnna Wells.
After finishing school she worked as a librarian for the Rahway Library Association. Her first book, At the Sign of the Sphinx (1896), was a collection of literary charades. Her next publications were The Jingle Book and The Story of Betty (1899), followed by a book of verse entitled Idle Idyls (1900). After 1900, Wells wrote numerous novels and collections of poetry.
Carolyn Wells wrote a total 170 books. During the first ten years of her career, she concentrated on poetry, humor, and children’s books. According to her autobiography, The Rest of My Life (1937), she heard That Affair Next Door (1897), one of Anna Katharine Green’s mystery novels, being read aloud and was immediately captivated by the unraveling of the puzzle. From that point onward she devoted herself to the mystery genre. Among the most famous of her mystery novels were the Fleming Stone Detective Stories which—according toAllen J. Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1749–2000 (2003)—number 61 titles. Wells’s The Clue (1909) is on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list of essential mysteries. She was also the first to conduct a (brief, in this case) annual series devoted to the best short crime fiction of the previous year in the U.S., beginning with The Best American Mystery Stories of the Year (1931) (though others had begun a similar British series in 1929).
In addition to books, Wells also wrote for newspapers. Her poetry accompanies the work of some of the leading lights in illustration and cartooning, often in the form of Sunday magazine cover features that formed continuing narratives from week to week. Her first known illustrated newspaper work is a two part series titled Animal Alphabet, illustrated by William F. Marriner, which appeared in the Sunday comics section of the New York World. Many additional series ensued over the years, including the bizarre classic Adventures of Lovely Lilly (New York Herald, 1906–07). The last series she penned was Flossy Frills Helps Out (American Weekly, 1942), which appeared after her death.
She died at the Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City in 1942.[10]
Wells had been married to Hadwin Houghton, the heir of the Houghton-Mifflin publishing empire founded by H.O.Houghton. Wells also had an impressive collection of volumes of poetry by others. She bequeathed her collection of Walt Whitman poetry, said to be one of the most important of its kind for its completeness and rarity, to the Library of Congress.
Emily Jordan Folger (May 15, 1858 – February 21, 1936), was the wife of Henry Clay Folger and the co-founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library. During her husband’s lifetime, she assisted him in building the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare materials. After his death in 1930, she funded the completion of the Folger Shakespeare Library to house the collection, remaining involved with its administration until her death in 1936.
In 1932, she became the third woman to receive an honorary degree from Amherst College, following Mary Emma Woolley, president of Mount Holyoke College, in 1901; and Martha Dickinson Bianchi,editor of Emily Dickinson’s poems, in 1931.
Mary Ansell (1 March 1861 – 30 June 1950) was an English actress and author. She was born on 1 March 1861 in Paddington (London), the third child of GeorgeandMary Ansell, who ran and lived over the King’s Head pub in Paddington. Ansell’s father died in 1875 and the family moved to Hastings, in Sussex.
Her first stage performance was in 1890 in a play called Harbour Lights. She met J. M. Barrie in 1891, when he was looking for an actress for a role in his play Walker, London. She was introduced to him by their mutual friend Jerome K Jerome.
Barrie and Ansell developed a friendship and she nursed him when he fell ill in 1894. After his recovery, they married on 9 July 1894 in a simple ceremony in Kirriemuir, his home town.
The couple first bought a house at 133 Gloucester Road, Kensington and a few years later, in 1900, moved to Leinster Corner, a house at 100 Bayswater Road overlooking Kensington Gardens. In the same year, Ansell bought Black Lake Cottage, a country house in Farnham, Surrey where they would go at weekends and in summer.
During her honeymoon in Switzerland, she and Barrie adopted a St. Bernard puppy, Porthos, marking the start of her lifelong love of dogs. After Porthos’s death, they took on a black and white Newfoundland, Luath, who was the inspiration for NanainPeter Pan.
In 1897 Barrie met Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and her sons, first George,JackandPeter, and later MichaelandNicoand enjoyed a close friendship with the family, to the detriment of Ansell who felt neglected. To fill her time, Ansell developed a strong interest in interior design and gardening which kept her occupied at both Black Lake Cottage and Leinster Corner.
She wrote about her passions in three books, Happy Houses, The Happy Garden (1912) and Men and Dogs(1924).
In 1907, Ansell met Gilbert Cannan who aspired to be a writer and came to work with Barrie on an anti-censorship campaign. Cannan had been courting sculptress Kathleen Bruce but was heartbroken when the latter accepted Robert Falcon Scott’s marriage proposal. He turned to the Barries for comfort and became very close to Ansell, leading to an affair, despite the 20-year difference in age.
When Barrie learned of the affair in July 1909, he demanded that she end it, but she refused. To avoid the scandal of divorce, he offered a legal separation if she would agree not to see Cannan any more, but she still refused. Barrie sued for divorce on the grounds of infidelity, but in the course of divorce proceedings, it was revealed the marriage had been unconsummated. The decree nisi was granted in October 1909. Ansell and Cannan married the following year and in 1913 they moved to a disused tower mill in Hawridge, Buckinghamshire, Hawridge Windmill.
Her marriage to Cannan was not a happy one as Cannan suffered a mental breakdown and was unfaithful; he had an affair with their maid Gwen Wilson, who became pregnant. In 1917, Ansell left Cannan and found herself in straitened circumstances. She was working for the war effort rolling bandages and packing medical supplies when Barrie came to find her and offered financial help, giving her an annual allowance which carried on until his death in 1937. She was left a bequest of £1,000 and an annuity of £600 in his will.
In the 1920s, Ansell moved to Biarritz (France). Barrie paid for a villa to be built for her, the Villa La Esquina, rue Constantine, where she died on 30 June 1950. She is buried in the Cemetery Sabaou, in Biarritz.
