THE USA JOURNALS
THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY INNOVATIONS AND RESEARCH (ISSN- 2642-7478)
VOLUME 06 ISSUE06
5
https://www.theamericanjournals.com/index.php/tajiir
PUBLISHED DATE: - 05-06-2024
DOI: -
https://doi.org/10.37547/tajiir/Volume06Issue06-02
PAGE NO.: - 5-6
FEMININE HEROES: THE WOMAN’S MAN IN A
LITERATURE OF THEIR OWN: BRITISH WOMEN
NOVELISTS FROM BRONTE TO LESSING, BY ELAINE
SHOWALTER
Hameed Abdulameer Hameed Alkhafaji
Department of English Language, AlToosi University, Iraq
Email id: - hameedh@altoosi.edu.iq
INTRODUCTION
The chapter V highlights the feminine perspective
of women novelists when they present the man in
their novels. In another word, the novelists have
described the man through “female glasses” which
didn’t care much of the realty. That’s why the term
“Woman’s Man” has embodied what mentioned
recently.
The chapter has also shown many examples about
how the women novelists have dealt with the man
personality depending on the personal viewpoints
of novelists towards the man.
The author, Elaine Showalter, has explained that,
by the 1850s the "woman's man," impossibly pious
and desexed, or impossibly idle and oversexed, had
become as familiar a figure in the feminine novel as
the governess.
On another hand, some women novelists have
confessed that they didn’t giv
e real reading for
man’s personalities. As a result, Mrs. Linton
thought it is "impossible for a woman to
understand the loftier side of a man's nature,"
Therefore women's men were all absurd,
contemptible and unrealistic; all were either angels
or devils.
On third hand, the woman’s man characteristics
were different on term of the nature of era and
impacts of that time including social and political
dimensions which may be different as known. As a
result, there are many terms we could apply to the
tradition of these heroes of woman : light and dark,
conservative and radical, classical and romantic.
Moreover, Margaret Oliphant admitted to her
friend Isabella Blackwood: "The men of a woman's
writing are always shadowy individuals, and it is
only members of our own sex that we can fully
bring out, bad and good.
The result is that the men in a woman's book are
always washed in, in secondary colours as George
Eliot stated.
Also, the women novelists have used their
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Abstract
THE USA JOURNALS
THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY INNOVATIONS AND RESEARCH (ISSN- 2642-7478)
VOLUME 06 ISSUE06
6
https://www.theamericanjournals.com/index.php/tajiir
imagination to create a model hero to meet their
fantasy and desires. The model hero was even less
the product of adulation than of ignorance. To a
considerable degree, he was the projection of
women's fantasies about how they would act and
feel if they were men.
Also, the chapter has focused on the
differentiations between the eras like Victorian and
mid-Victorian and how the novelists highlighted
the emotions of the society towards the role of man
and woman.
On other hand the religious novels, which adopted
spreading the concepts and instruction of church
inside the society, has also given different
ideologies to understand the nature of man and
women depending on the religious perspectives.
The religious novels have shed lights on the
“Clergyman” who represents the spiritual
fatherhood and the perfect personality who lead to
virtue and then to heaven.
The writer, Saturday Review, observed in 1859,
"the English Clergyman is a person who can be
easily worked up into a hero or an ideal. He is a
gentleman, he is going to Heaven, he may make
love. He has the attractions of both worlds."
Elaine Showalter added that Most of the religious
novels by male authors during the middle of the
century were in fact by clergymen, who saw the
potential of the genre for religious propaganda and
moral suasion.
An interesting novel that appeared in 1869
contains one of the clearest expositions of this
process of emotional education through symbolic
role-reversal. In Florence Wilford's Nigel Bartram's
Ideal, the heroine, Marian Hilliard, is a novelist
obviously modeled on Charlotte Bronte and George
Eliot. She has written an anonymous best seller
called Mark's Dream, a book that no one can believe
is from a woman's pen. Marian, who is restoring a
church with her profits from the book, is a quiet,
retiring person whom no one suspects even of
intelligence, much less genius. She carries Eliot's
ideal of unpretentious female culture to its
extremes of self-abnegation.
REFERENCE
1.
Showalter, E. (1977). A Literature of Their
Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to
Lessing:
Feminine
Heroes.
Princeton
University Press.
