Women Writers in the Romantic Age (ePub)

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Englisches Seminar), course: Romanticism in the Light of Cultural Studies, language: English, abstract: The time of Romanticism is historically regarded as a masculine
phenomenon. As Anne K. Mellor pointed out, Romanticism as a literary
movement was constructed and defined by a masculine discourse and
ideology, a "masculine Romanticism". This masculine Romanticism is the
traditional understanding of the literary movement - based on the
writings and thoughts of the five canonical writers Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Mellor suggests that "feminine
Romanticism" occurs to recover the erased and neglected voices of women
writers within this movement. To understand these differences of
masculine and feminine Romanticism, one has to realize that both terms
serve as an ideological gender construction, not in terms of the author¿s
sex. To analyse female romantic literature also means to consider the
division of ¿private¿ and ¿public¿ sphere occuring in the eighteenth
century, a phenomenon that should be discussed in the following
chapter.
This paper aims to show how women writers could made a career in the
male-dominated time of Romanticism. In order to show the problems they
experienced within a patriarchal society, I will explore the subordination
of women by a construction of femininity which did not grant them the
status of rational thinking subjects. For this purpose I have chosen the
example of Mary Wollstonecraft, the revolutionary founder of feminism.
Wollstonecraft was not only a writer herself, but she was also the wife of
the well-known political philosopher, William Godwin, and she gave birth
to Mary Godwin Shelley, the famous author of Frankenstein. As a member
of the literary circle around Joseph Johnson, she was surrounded by famous contemporary writers and was involved in literary relationships
within her own family circle.