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Showing posts from September, 2018

Is Lady Brett really a bitch?

The most compelling character in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is unquestionably the flamboyant, sexy, and independent Lady Brett Ashley. Brett represents a new kind of woman who is freed from sexist stereotypes. She abandons the confines of marriage, instead floating between various men who satisfy her sexual and financial needs. However, Brett doesn't always behave morally to those around her, and many readers see Brett as a selfish, manipulative character. Hemingway depicts Brett in a way that criticizes her flamboyance and sexual desires, making her seem like a classic "bitch" - a woman who has overstepped the boundaries that men create. While Brett isn't faithful to any of her partners, I would argue that Hemingway's masculine voice is what makes Brett seem like such an unkind person. As a man living in the postwar period, Hemingway and other men would have felt threatened by women like Lady Brett. In fact, Brett's sexual flamboyance and promiscuit...

Woolf's Critique of Edwardians and Doctors

Remember when we read Woolf's nonfiction essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown"? One of Woolf's main points in her essay is that Edwardian writers didn't fully develop their character's emotional profiles, instead settling for an incomplete and unsatisfying sketch through describing surface characteristics. She writes: "[the Edwardians] have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her [Mrs. Brown], never at life, never at human nature." Woolf calls for a dramatic shift in British writing practices -- she insists that writers must be brave enough to fully explore their characters' entire psyches. This radical idea is echoed in Woolf's critique of Dr. Bradshaw, who is supposed to treat Septimus' schizophrenia and PTSD. Dr. Bradshaw takes one glance at Septimus, assumes him to be simply "a case of extreme gra...