This essay will focus on the ways in which the house, and indeed the right to own property, shaped female experience in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1843), The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and Howard’s...Show moreThis essay will focus on the ways in which the house, and indeed the right to own property, shaped female experience in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1843), The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and Howard’s End (1910). The relationship between houses and female power will be explored through three chapters. The first will focus on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and will examine the relevance of the house as a physical space within women’s lives. The second will look at The Spoils of Poynton in the context of female homelessness, shedding light on the importance of the female home in wielding power, as women without property are left disenfranchised throughout, as well as the precarious nature of female inhabitance of the home. The third and final chapter will examine Howard’s End in light of this. Women, able to take full ownership of the home, are able to exert control over their environment and exercise a relatively high degree of independence. Howard’s End, then, I will examine in terms of legal female ownership of the house and female inheritance. This essay will examine the role of the house in female agency within the novel, and how these novels emerge from, and form part of, the shifting political, social and legal context of the 19th Century.Show less
Focusing on second-wave feminism, this thesis explores the representation of gender and the expression of the predominant feminist ideas in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969),...Show moreFocusing on second-wave feminism, this thesis explores the representation of gender and the expression of the predominant feminist ideas in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) and Pamela Sargent’s The Shore of Women (1986).Show less
In this thesis, I am going to interrogate what might be meant by ‘feminism’ in the 1810s, what Austen might have understood by it, what we now understand by it and how we might apply those ideas to...Show moreIn this thesis, I am going to interrogate what might be meant by ‘feminism’ in the 1810s, what Austen might have understood by it, what we now understand by it and how we might apply those ideas to Austen’s fictions. I shall argue that, although Austen uses the rather conservative genre of the courtship novel, or according to Marilyn Butler, the conservative partisan novel, she employs this genre to subversively express her radical ideas (Butler 3). I shall explore the idea that Austen rarely made her views explicit in her work, due to the prejudice that was attached to feminist opinions at the time due to the life story of Mary Wollstonecraft; I shall trace the effect of Wollstonecraft’s biography on Austen in the next chapter. By investigating different aspects of the family in Austen’s novels, I shall demonstrate how Austen did express her ‘feminist’ opinions through her works, albeit subversively. In particular, I shall examine the weakness of authority figures in her novels. The weakness of these authority figures allows Austen’s heroines to exert more power and therefore have a greater sense of their own agency. I shall further argue that Austen employs the weakness of authority figures in her novels to inspire more feminist behaviour in her heroines, who are not the ‘perfect’ image of Georgian femininity but are nevertheless, as is clear to the reader, favoured over the other characters by Austen. I attempt to show that Austen’s ‘feminist’ tendencies can be seen in her praising her heroines beyond all other characters while these are the characters that display the most agency and therefore are seen to possess ‘masculine’ properties.Show less
Since the beginning of the 1980s, much debate in the jurisprudential literature on freedom of speech has been about the (alleged) right to produce and publish pornography. Law professor and...Show moreSince the beginning of the 1980s, much debate in the jurisprudential literature on freedom of speech has been about the (alleged) right to produce and publish pornography. Law professor and feminist Catherine A. MacKinnon produced an interesting argument to justify censorship: pornography itself silences women (and we are allowed to silence silencing speech). This thesis seeks to investigate this normative defence of the 'silencing of the silencing', particular in the form promulgated by Rae Langton from the 1990s on. It argues that Langton and other feminists are right to conclude that free speech implies more than a mere 'right to locution' -- there must also be a right to be heard. Yet, it puts into question the premise that that fact alone could justify a censorship. That usually constitutes an offence against the spirit of autonomy, one of the main reasons to accept free speech in the first place.Show less
