Max Taylor-Gill; Reading list/Work
1st wave feminism;
Considered to have first formally started at the seneca falls convention in 1848, where 300 men and women gathered for the cause of equality for women, Elizabeth Stanton drafted the Seneca falls convention, which summarised their ideology and strategies.
In its early life the feminist movement was related to the temperance (anti-alcohol) and abolitionist movements.
The first feminist leaders and figureheads were mainly white and middle class, who focused mostly,though not completely, on the concerns of middle class women.
Early on in the movement feminists noticed that a lack of funding for single or widowed women was one the most severe problems for women, so they initially protested for basic and secondary education, alongside their protests for the right to vote, which would not be granted until 1928.
The way the victorian and early 20th century women protested, demonstrating, time in jail and an extreme case where a suffragette through herself underneath the queens horse at a race killing herself, threatened the so called ‘cult of domesticity’ which believed woman's place was only supposed to be in the domestic sphere.
2nd wave feminism;
Second wave feminism, though lacking a formal point that can be indicated and said “here the second wave of feminism started”, started at some point in the late 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s.
The second wave of feminism was closely involved with the anti-war movement, but more closely with the civil rights movement and the growing awareness of the needs for rights of those within other minority groups e.g gay rights.
The first annual conference of feminist groups in britain happened at Oxford in 1970 where the four main objectives of the uk’s women's movement were laid down; equal pay for equal work, equal opportunities and education, free contraception and abortion on demand and free all day, 24 hour childcare, for those in need of it.
The second wave of feminism is seen by some as becoming increasingly theoretical as the feminist movement grew and spread out, with it being commented that “Radical second-wave feminism was theoretically based on a combination of neo-Marxism and psychoanalysis”
Near the end of the second wave of feminism major divisions were starting to show within the feminist movement, over how people protested, to just how much the feminist movement wanted to achieve, One of the largest splits was over political beliefs between liberal feminists, radical feminists and marxist socialist feminists.
3rd wave feminism;
Third wave feminism started in the mid 1990s formed partially by “post colonial and post-modern thinking”
One of third wave feminisms objectives was to throw off the notion of ‘universal womanhood’ brought about by first and second wave feminists, arguing that women are just as different and separate as men, united only by their biological gender.
Some third wave feminists also argued for the “right (a) to define one’s own identity and to expect society to respect it and (b) to make decisions regarding one’s own body.” Allying parts of the movement with the LGBT movement and other social minority movements.
One statement that many see as capturing the feel of third wave feminists is this statement from Pinkfloor “It's possible to have a push-up bra and a brain at the same time."
marxism in the 20th century;
Marxism was the movement founded by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Though Marxism as many think of it today is based off diluted and mutated versions of what Marx originally wrote, with Marxism as we know it today being influenced by the russian revolution and ‘marxists’ such as Che guevara and Fidel Castro
Standing for the destruction of the capitalist state by the organised working class, Marxism opposes reform or ‘evolutionary socialism’, “Marxism is revolutionary”
“The political curriculum of Marxism in the 20th century began, after the sheet lightning of
the Russian revolution”
After the Lenin's death, Marxism mutated into multiple beliefs all claiming to follow Marxism, this includes the “stalinist” branch, and a movement called the fourth international founded by Leon Trotsky, its purpose was to develop Marxism in theory as well as in practice, it continued to do this even after Trotsky’s assassination.
Marxism after the fall of the soviet union became increasingly fractured with the term Marxist now becoming an umbrella term for many social and political beliefs with very few agreeing with each other or resembling what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels first laid down.
Citations:
http://www.wolfgangfritzhaug.inkrit.de/documents/XXCenturyMarxism.pdf
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/marxism.htm
Angela Carter’s other works
Angela carter wrote multiple fictional stories and many literary and feminist essays. Starting with two poetry collections in 1966, five quiet shoulders and unicorn. Carter then branched out to write novels, literary essays and collections of short stories, such as; the passion of new eve, the infernal desire machines of dr hoffman and burning your boats. Prior to her death Carter had started to work on a sequel to Emily Bronte's Jane Eyre, to tell the story of Adeline Vares, however when Carter died all she had written was a brief synopsis.
The passion of New Eve chapters 1.
Chapter one: This chapter is about a woman, called Evelyn, who along with this girl who she has met and promptly forgotten the name,go to see a movie containing Tristessa De St Ange, who she loved in her childhood and teenage years in the late forties. This chapter concerns Evelyn's love of Tristessa or to be more precise the images and ideas associated with her, as we see Evelyn lose her love for Tristessa once she sees her as a human. At the conclusion of the chapter we see Evelyn be quite surprised by this girl crying over her leaving, she also mentions straight after on a very thin link her occasional preference for bondage during sex, the chapter ends with Evelyn flying to JFK airport at New York.
Context of the bloody chamber, major events three years before and after its release in 1979 (in the UK):
The bloody chamber was published in 1979 in the three years preceding its publication multiple major news stories occurred, many which marked huge events in history. In july 6th 1976 the first class of women is inducted at the united states naval academy, the first ever class of women,in the US, to be inducted for combat purpose role.
On the 4th may 1979 Margaret Thatcher, the first female prime minister in the UK came to power, seen by many as a watershed event in the fight for female equality and feminism.Though Carter herself was a large critic of Margaret Thatcher describing her as “ the madwoman who’d always been gibbering in the Tory attic” or as “the personification of the Tory lady who’d grounded successive Tory Party conventions in a morass of meanness and cruelty” {1}
June 5th 1981 the first recognized case of AIDs comes to light when five homosexual man are diagnosed with a rare form of pneumonia, caused by a lowered immune system, that was caused by AIDs .
On september the 18th 1981 france abolished capital punishment, one of the last western european countries to do so.
On November the 12th 1981 the Church of England synod voted to admit women to holy orders, one of the first steps along the path of female ministers (leading to the recent placement of a female bishop by the Church of England.)This is an Interesting development in relation to Carter as one of her problems with organised religion was the sexism that it seemed to so often preach, this change by the Church could be seen as the start of the process of refuting Carter’s criticisms.
On december the 12th 1982,a peace protest of greenham common over 30,000 women joined hands to form a human chain, to cause a blockade around greenham RAF air base. This could be seen as both a feminist move with the women empowering themselves by aggressively protesting the Government, as well as a marxist move with the common people protesting an aggressive move of the placement of cruise missiles, by the bourgeoises ruled government, of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative party.
Polemical:
Positive reviews;
An excerpt from the New york times, Grotesques by John Bowen,February 19, 1967{2}
Characters in Angela Carter's first novel live in "the twilight zone.They have neither enduring talent, nor ambition; they live in the moment. They are grotesque.They are grotesque, these people, yet familiar.We may look inwards and find them in each of us. We may look inwards and find them in each of us.Hyde with Jekyll's face. He is the id.
Marina warner, in the Scotsman “why Angela carter’s bloody chamber still bites” {3}
Angela Carter made an inspired, marvellous move, for which so many,will always be indebted to her.
The title story of The Bloody Chamber,directly inspired by Charles Perrault’s fairy tales of 1697,s she lingers voluptuously on its sexual inferences.Within a spirited exposé of marriage as sadistic ritual, she shapes a bright parable of maternal love. “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” (Little Red Riding Hood), is unforgettably transfigured in “The Company of Wolves”.
“Puss-in-Boots” also takes off from Perrault, spliced and spiced with opera and pantomime and commedia dell’arte motifs to create a far more exuberant, amorous and freewheeling tale than its source.She warns of the greater danger of wolves who are “hairy on the inside”.the knowledge of what it is like to be there, be on the inside, was her goal and her achievement, and it has enthralled her readers.
Carter sharpened the laconic chill of the Brothers’ cruel fairy tales like “Snow White” with her splintering fable of jealousy and incest, “The Snow Child
In this counterblast to the virtuous claims of feminism, Carter identifies the Marquis de Sade as an honest witness to the conditions of bourgeois marriage, the economics of sexual relations, and the collusion of women with their own enslavement and subjugation.the Sadeian Woman makes a Swiftian “modest proposal” about pornography, and it provides a valuable gloss on themes in The Bloody Chamber:
The literary omnivore, review; the bloody chamber {4]
Here, Carter not only invests the sexuality of these young women with some agency but also, interestingly enough, their virginity.
It is not a state of innocence, but a state of potential so powerful it provides its own protection, allowing Red to laugh in the face of the wolf, knowing that she is safe.
The existential questions posed to these women as they discover the limitations society puts on them by virtue of being women are rendered lushly, making them all the more heartbreaking.
The Bloody Chamber, as Carter intends, extracts the dark sexuality from fairy tales and shows us their beating hearts. Dark sexuality is the watchword here, as young women discover their agency through their sexuality.
Helen Simpson on Angela Carter’s bloody chamber {5}
The Bloody Chamber is like a multifaceted glittering diamond reflecting and refracting a variety of portraits of desire and sexuality.
Chamber are fired by the conviction that human nature is not immutable, that human beings are capable of change. Some of their most brilliant passages are accounts of metamorphoses.
The heroines of these stories are struggling out of the straitjackets of history and ideology and biological essentialism.
the unnamed first-person heroine,changes during the narrative, and finishes by escaping her inheritance - female masochism as a modus vivendi (and morendi) - after a full-scale survey of its temptation.
Nearly all her writing is strikingly full of cultural and intertextual references, but this story is extremely so. It is an artfully constructed edifice of signs and allusions and clues.
the heroine victim is rescued from decapitation by the sudden arrival of her pistol-toting mother, who puts a bullet through the Marquis' head. Her fate is not immutable after all; she discovers that her future looks quite different now that she has escaped from the old story and is learning to sing a new song.
In each one of them, lovers are lethal, traditional romantic patterns kill, and sex leads to death.
“The Snow Child" is only a page long, just a few hundred words, and yet in some ways it is the most shocking piece of all, with its incestuous rape and murderous sexual rivalry.
But, of course, interpreting these mysteries is just what Carter does attempt in "The Company of Wolves", at the end of which Red Riding Hood refuses to feel fear (she "burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat") or disgust (she will delouse the wolf and eat the lice "in a savage marriage ceremony"), and ends sleeping "sweet and sound" in bed with the now "tender wolf".
There are a myriad such musical echoes in this collection - herbivores and carnivores, death and the maiden, the image of a system of Chinese boxes opening one into another - while certain phrases like "pentacle of virginity" or indeed "the bloody chamber" crop up repeatedly
BOOK REVIEW: THE PASSION OF NEW EVE BY ANGELA CARTER {6}
Evelyn, the protagonist, His past is smeared with women’s pain that he caused by having a heart as bare and barren as a “desert”. He is transformed by another character called ‘Mother’ into a woman.
Mother is not a man’s woman, but a woman with eternal and controlling fertility. She appeals to her followers because she is unthreatening and is in turn their mother. They intend to live forever without men
the plot takes is relevant to something; containing some sort of symbolism attaining to equal rights, liberty or feminism. Carter writes with such fervour that some passages and certain words spark out at you in their violence
After being with Mother and her tribe of severe women Eve encounters danger and has to develop a female personality to be a convincing woman enough to survive
There are many other examples of duality or twin images that create paradoxes within and for many of the characters. In a way, all the characters fit seamlessly together because of the facades and multiple personalities.
The novel itself signifies things that a crazy, yet with a touch of logical discourse. It could advocate order from disorder; the reader has to fathom what they think for themselves.
Critical reviews;
Position paper by Richard Gilman, a review of the sadeian woman And the Ideology of Pornography By Angela Carter {7} (an extremely biased review)
Pornography seems to encourage the worst intellectual qualities in nearly everybody who writes about it.
Angela Carter's position is fierce, unaccommodating and aggressively stated: Pornography is a means of perpetuating the oppression of women because it conceives of sex purely in terms of power and thus reinforces men's pre-existing impulses toward the exercise of dominance.
For the most part she sees Sade in a traditional -- and somewhat excessive -- way, as a key shaper of "aspects of the modern sensibility; its paranoia, its despair, its sexual terrors, its . . . egocentricity, its tolerance of massacre, holocaust, annihilation."
There are a number of shrewd insights of this kind, but far too much of the book is in the grip of an iron set of biases and dubious presuppositions.
Miss Carter is a rigid ideologue, fervidly feminist, furiously antireligious and against transcendence of any kind.
In Miss Carter's case, the radical positions tend to injure both scholarship and clarity of thought.
Her inability or refusal to see that pornography, like any form of imagination, is an effort at compensating for finiteness, at getting past limitations. It deals with possibility, not the actual, and imaginative possibility at that. If she could see this, she wouldn't be likely to construe pornography as treating only of violence. Like so many other writers on the subject, she clearly hasn't read enough pornography to know that within its obviously circumscribed intention it's as various as any other form of expression.
She fails to see how the pornography wasn't in the service of a repressive state but precisely part of a dream of a totally, impossibly free one. That it was a dream, and not a recommendation, is crucial.
The point is that there was a greatly significant gap between Sade's sexual writings and his actual nature. Miss Carter writes that "rather than his misdeeds, is seems it was the ferocity of his imagination that led to his confinement." It was the other way round.
Bewitchment,James Wood {8}
The novel is not remotely likeable, and, like a hated teacher, it shows no interest in being likeable
Already Carter’s language is rich and bright-buttoned. One marvels at the confidence with which she rolls up the old heavy carpet of detailed narration and dangles instead her own brighter mat: menacing fairytale.
And there is much to forgive. The greatest weakness of Shadow Dance is its odour of meaninglessness.
There is something here about the danger of living life as display, and the evil of collecting humans as things, of course. But this dissolves into the texture of the novel itself
Carter’s need to deliver messages becomes comic in The Passion of New Eve (1977), which is itself an entire postal system of messages: a cathedral of hints
Most of Carter’s writing until Nights at the Circus seems to me to be coercive, theoretical in ambition, over-fermented. The same kind of detail that Christina Stead (a writer admired by Carter) lavished on her captivating egotists and eccentrics is, in Carter’s work, painted onto what Sage calls ‘shadows’ and what Jordan calls ‘roles’. And often the reader longs to escape this gilded cage. The tragedy of Angela Carter is that she died just as her work was beginning to make that escape.
Critical Anthology:
The ‘problem’ with Marxist criticism;
The ‘problems’ with Marxist criticisms are that they traditionally “tend to deal with history in a generalised way”, rarely dealing with the precise details of historic situations, or relating them closely enough to interpretations of certain literary texts.
The ‘problem’ with Feminist criticism
The ‘problems’ with feminist criticisms are that they see that “for better or worse,everything seems somehow related to everything else”, possibly seeing connections where there are none.
Viewpoint;
A story that could be viewed from a feminist perspective is; The murder of a 57 year old woman in cardigan, the only murder reported on in a four day period on UK news on the BBC despite the murder of a male in london. Showing a bias towards reporting the deaths/murder of women, possibly for shock value, still showing today’s societies sexist bias.
A story that could be viewed from a marxist perspective is; The shooting and killing of two police officers in new york, on the 21st of december. This could be viewed from a marxist perspective as the police could be viewed as a symbol of the the government, and possibly a symbol of, bourgeois rule.
{2} http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/27/specials/carter-honey.html
{9}http://mywordlyobsessions.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/book-review-heroes-and-villains-by-angela-carter/
