professions for women课前知识了解.doc

1. Virginia Woolf1. Virginia Woolfs Life Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London on January 25, 1882 to Leslie Stephen, statesman and man of letters学者, and Julia Duckworth Stephen. A successful innovator in the form of the novel, she is considered a significant force in 20th-century fiction. Virginia Woolf suffered mental breakdowns in 1895 and 1915; she drowned herself in 1941 because she feared another breakdown from which she might not recover. She died in a river in her hometown. Most of her posthumously published works were edited by her husband. Virginia was educated at home in her fathers library. She was keenly aware that if she had been a boy she would have gone on to Cambridge or Oxford(It was not until 1976 that girls were allowed to enter Oxford). Later, with this sense of injustice, she wrote two feminist works, A Room of Ones Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). In 1895 Virginias mother died, and her father went into deep mourning. At the age of 13 Virginia had a mental breakdown. In 1902 Leslie Stephen was knighted. Two years later he died. Virginia had a second mental breakdown and tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a window. She remained in frail health all her life. Virginia and her sisters Vanessa and Adrian and her brother Thoby moved to Bloomsbury. She published her first essays and soon became a regular book reviewer for the Time Literary Supplement增刊. She also taught at an evening college for working men and women. The four Stephens traveled to Greece, where Vanessa and Thoby became ill. Thohy died of typhoid fever伤寒at the age of 26. The sudden death of her favorite brother is reflected in the deaths of Percival in The Waves and Jacob in Jacobs Room. Virginia and Vanessa hosted gatherings of artists and writers. The gradual gathering of the Bloomsbury Group was comprised of such people as E. M. Foster and John Maynard Keynes.Vanessa married one of the friends, Clive Bell; Virginia married another, Leonard Woolf, a writer on politics and economics. Virginia had a third mental breakdown, which lasted for three years. During this time, she completed the novel The Voyage Out. In 1917, the Woolf bought a secondhand printing press, and set up the Hogarth Press. Later the Press would publish Foster, Dostoevski, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Freud, Gorki and all of Woolfs novels and writings. Her first two novels The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919) are fairly conventional and realistic. These were followed by Jacobs Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando (1928), the book-length feminist essay A Room of Ones Own, The Waves (193I), The Years (1937), Three Guineas. In 1940 she completed the draft of Between the Acts. Woolfs writing gained not only swift but also persistent and increasing attention and praise. Her name is typically associated with early 20th century modernism in fiction.During the Battle of Britain, bombs destroyed her home in London. At the onset发作 of another mental breakdown, which she feared would be permanent, Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse on March 28, leaving suicide notes for her husband and sister. Her husband Leonard Woolf published various essays, short stories, letters and diaries of hers, as well as several autobiographies, which detail their life together.2. Her famous novelsThe Voyage Out 出航(1915) Night and Day 夜与日(1919)Jacobs Room 雅各的房间(1922) Mrs Dalloway 达洛维夫人(1925)To the Lighthouse 到灯塔去(1927) Orlando 奥兰多（自传）(1928)The Waves 海浪(1931) The Years 岁月(1937)Between the Acts 幕间(1941) 3. Her achievement: 1. Stream-of- Consciousness Technique As a novelist Woolfs primary concern was to represent the flow of ordinary experience. Her emphasis was not on plot or characterization but on a characters consciousness, his thoughts and feelings, which she brilliantly illuminated by the stream of consciousness technique.Woolf and Joyce are the most gifted and innovative of the stream of consciousness novelists2. A Feminist:She was very much concerned with the rights and position of women, especially of intelligent women and women writers. She actively took part in the struggle for womans rights of suffrage & rights to work which is shown in her Three Guineas She wrote several essays on the subject, notably in A Room of Ones Own 3. An insight into gender The meaning of the word gender has evolved as differentiated from the word sex to express the reality that women and men roles and status are socially constructed and subject to change.4. Characteristics of her creation: 1. Special personal experience and view; 2. Relations between people above the social environment; 3. Not concern much about politics, but concern much the rights of women. 4. Limitation in depth and wideness of reflecting society, but contributed much in content and technics of creation. Her writing style is also noted for poetic and symbolic quality besides the techniques of interior monologue 内心独白and stream of consciousness. 2. Stream of consciousness1. Definition: The literary technique was first used in the late 19th century, employed to evince subjective as well as objective reality. It reveals the characters feelings, thoughts, and actions, often following an associative rather than a logical sequence, without commentary by the author. Stream of consciousness, as a term, was first used by William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, in his book The Principles of Psychology (1890). Widely used in narrative fiction, the technique was perhaps brought to its highest point of development in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan Wake (1939) by the Irish novelist and poet James Joyce. Other exponents of the form were American novelist William Faulkner and British novelist Virginia Woolf. Stream of consciousness writing is a variant of third person point of view, in which the narrator relates only what is experienced by a characters mind from moment to moment.2. Features of stream of consciousness 1. Presents thoughts and feelings of a character as they occur.2. It shows a mind at work.3. It may contain parts that do not see coherent because that are based on the free association of ideas and feelings of an individuals mind.4. It is in 3rd person5. Interior monologue: Stream of consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow. Stream of consciousness emphasizes the origin of a narrative from inside the mind of a single character, rather than from an objective, distanced, third party. 6. Inversion of time and space3. Multiple points of view Multiple points of view: it is one of the literary techniques William Faulkner used, which shows within the same story how the characters reacted differently to the same person or the same situation. The use of this technique gave the story a circular form wherein one event was the center, with various points of view technique makes the reader recognize the difficulty of arriving at a true judgment. 4. Representative writer1. James Joyce (Irish) Ulysses 尤利西斯2. William Faulkner (America) The sound and the fury 喧哗与骚动3. Marcel Proust (France) Remembrance of things past 追忆似水年华4. Virginia Woolf To the lighthouse 到灯塔去 1927年 3. Women in the Victorian era1. Introduce The status of women in the Victorian era is often seen as an illustration of striking discrepancy between the national power and wealth and what many, then and now, consider its appalling social conditions. During the era symbolized by the reign of British monarch Queen Victoria, women did not have suffrage rights, the rights to sue, or the rights to own property. Discrimination was rampant surrounding the idealistic impression that aristocratic women should be “pure” and “clean”. This paradoxical form of repression used positive words to restrict upper-class Victorian-era women from becoming “dirty” with the jobs that would nave provided them with economical freedom and the lifestyles that would have provided them with social freedom. It was sometimes even claimed that “decent” women were untroubled by sexual pleasure. In stark contrast to Queen Victoria, the powerful female monarch of the time, the duties of the average upper-class women were to maintain children and the house. Upper-class professional women faced great discrimination in employment beyond the role of childrens teacher.2. Restriction regarding womens right 1. Limited rights of married women The law regarded a married couple as one person. The husband was bound by law to protect her. The law expected her to defer to his judgment. Women lost the rights to the property they brought into the marriage, even following divorce. A husband had complete legal control over any income earned by his wife. Women were not allowed to open banking accounts. Married women were not able to conclude a contract without her husbands legal approval. It was impossible to charge the wife with concealing her husband or for stealing from her husband as they were one person in law.2. Opportunities for women limited to the household 3. Limited socially acceptable pastimes for women4. Double standard in sexual activities 5. Lack of gender equality in education Women were not freely offered the opportunity to study subjects of an extended, classical, and commercial nature. This made it difficult for a woman to break free from the societal constraints to achieve independen