Literature,
for it is either, as the never-stopped
argumentative speculation in defining its meaning as a theory,
of argumentations before issues of what is truth or just merely considered as
either a myth or a fiction, or, about life of human being which is somehow regarded
to be represented as an image (
catherine belsey ) in it as if literature is as a
significant formation as what Mitchell notes “...then representation is exactly the place where “life”,...gets into
the literary work.”, is truthfully considered to have its own relation as a
medium or significantly a place to one’s ideology as a personal consistency as
what Paul de Man argues that literature “towards
the integrity of a social and historical self rather than towards the impersonal
consistency...”,
which, that ”a social and historical self”, a
“personality”,
is viewed as a reasonable matter
of literature in creating
the identity, as to
what Foucault says identity is a self-made creation depends on a person’s own “bio power”.
Oscar
Wilde, a young and remarkable playwright over the era of Victorian-late has
fascinatingly created a medium of expressions
of what is called identity, through many
of Wilde’s remarkable English playwrights. To be more significant, Oscar
Wilde’s Woman of No Importance (1893)
shows his particular tendency in building the identity through his work of
drama, that, it is hereby viewed by the side of feminist criticism that Wilde truly
makes that men domination in western be visible enough to make a disgraceful
view for woman, as represented in one of its line by the character of Lady
Stutfield, “Ah! The world was made for
men not for woman.” (p.9) In western’s patriarchal culture, woman does not
allowed to do such similar thing as what man can do, because of, the world
is represented not to made for woman. Gilbert
and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic constructs the idea of women’s
incapability to present their selves to society through literature. Women lost
their power of defining their selves as a subject of authority, in this case
when she turned to be a writer or a poet.
“Thus the "anxiety of influence" that a male
poet experiences is. felt by a female poet as an even
more primary "anxiety of authorship"-a radical fear that she
cannot create, that because she can never become a "precursor" the
act of writing will isolate or destroy. “Literature in a history of
western was never authorized to a ‘second sex’ – by what Mitchell calls "the inferiorized and 'alternative' (second sex) psychology of women
under patriarchy.", and the literature itself
was a very male-dominated. The power of men in the western literature had
erased woman’s equality in writing as what Cixous’s “writing is at once too high,
too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is, for "great
men" , that
woman loses her right to be equally viewed as great as men in writing.
However Wilde’s Woman
of No Importance has also been so
differ about this kind of view that if writing has been so absolutely regarded
as man’s signature manners, then why in such one of this 19th century’s western
remarkable play, there is still a given-part to an idea of woman who writes
down the letters in a piece of paper like what the character of Mrs. Arbuthnot
does very gracefully under her consciousness, “She...Writes
a beautiful hand, too, so large, so firm.”
The play insists that this Idea of woman who does a handwritten-text shall be
viewed as a very clear representation that writing is particularly done as not only
an absolute matter of man’s masculinity but that “...beautiful hand...so large, so firm” is somehow responsible to
be viewed as a woman’s textual form of femininity also. In Wilde’s Woman of No Importance, the argumentation
grows up more arguable related to what old critics have pointed out about the
relation between man’s superior power in western’s literature and their claim
of writting as an absolute masculinity, that there is lied an irony represented
through, “What a curious handwriting! It
reminds me of the handwriting of a woman I used to know years ago” (p.20),
that if writing is inappropriate to woman then how is that possible to define
an inappropriate thing is fascinatingly able to reform the identity of oneself
only by her handwriting?
The
difference class of sexuality, woman as what is quoted as ‘second sex’, loses
the acclaim value of being the authentic writer for her authentic work referred
to the dominant authority of male. However it gives a different perception here
to Oscar Wilde, who have been popularly known as one of the most remarkable
London’s playwrights that most of his works are done by holding that a value of
femininity, represents the idea of a woman in that era of 19th century.
The
literary authority has never been addressed to the female sex, as critics Gibert
and Gubart give the idea of how impossible it is, “the woman writer substitutes what we have called an "anxiety of
authorship," an anxiety built
from complex and often only barely conscious fears of that authority which seems
to the female Ilrtist .to . be by definition· inappropriate., to her sex.”
It indicates that to act as a writer or to write something, woman seemed to
have been mistaken herself as a woman, referring to what is inappropriate to
her. However, a representation against this view is appeared again by Oscar
Wilde in one of his nowadays-regarded masterpiece play, The Importance of being Ernest (1895),
the character of Cecily is built as an young, admirable, fully educated girl
who at her 18th ages she is so powerfully appeared to be a character of a girl
who writes a diary about her everyday life. The diary is necessary used as a
symbol by Wilde to represent the idea that woman has a condition of doing a
right thing to have an act of writing;
ALGERNON
Do you really keep a
diary? I'd give anything to look at it.
May I?
CECILY
Oh no.
(Puts
her hand over it)
You see, it is simply a
very young girl's record of her own
thoughts and
impressions, and consequently meant for
publication. When it
appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.
An inappropriate manner to woman is in the
19th century, when she is likely be bounded with a creativity that to write one
must have a creativity, that woman having a creativity is regarded to make her
way out from woman’s nature, she is asked to be as pure as an “angel”, or if
not she will be tragically regarded as “active monster” by what Gibert &
Gubar notes, “It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women
are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters.”
However this inequality is contrastingly represented
in a very different view that in Wilde’s The
Importance of being Ernest, the character of Cecily is ideally treated very
well by her society, that to commit in writing a diary does not bring her into
the “illness”, that the idea of her as an upper class woman who writes is even
more extended to be more admirable, that to the character of Algernon, a young
and wealthy man, Cecily is;
“... the
sweetest, dearest, prettiest girl in the whole world.”
It is perhaps that Cecily ‘s characterization
has constructed another point of view of men-woman’s masculine-feminine, that writing
is not that whole performance only addressed to a man, not also be permanently
considered as a total form of masculinity, but there is also the idea that woman
has been fundamentally built to be likely committing herself for a dishonor
manner while she writes, as feminist Helene Cixous on her most influential work
The Laugh of the Medusa (1976), had
been sexually analogized writing is equally as shameful as masturbating to
woman, “...Because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the
way; or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret...” and this idea is also bounded to the
character of Cecily that she does write, indeed, but her power is symbolized in
a form of diary which at society, diary is generally known as “secret”, a very
personal account, a secret not to get known by another person;
CECILY
I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful
secrets of my life.
that she makes her power to be hidden, and this is
responsible to be related to the idea which is noted before, the idea that
writing is “it's "silly."
However if writing is as similar as
“silly”, why do woman still need to do thing which has been called “silly”? In
her arguments, Cixous had been pointed out so clearly that, “By writing herself, woman will return to the
body.” She needs, as a living
creature, to own her power, that, for instance, not to write means not to own a
power and be selfless. Not writing is defined that woman does not belong to her
body, which to Judith Butler the body is, “a
set of boundaries, individual, and social, politically signified and
maintained”(Gender Trouble – 1990), because her body has been taken by the
“great” and if not writing, woman would not experiencing to live in her “real”
existence as a woman.
However, if woman needs to write to speak up her
voices for taking back her existence again over the man, it is bounded with a
question of how is it possible to be as simple as that while the action of
writing itself has never been addressed to woman? It reminds our memory back to
what Gibert & Gubar argued about the 18th-19th century woman’s “anxiety of authorship” in defining the
idea of woman as a writer, that there is none of a person who deserves the
title of author/writer but only to the man, as if there is woman who writes,
her action will be defined as an imitation, to imitates a man, to be as what is
shown by Homi
Bhabha on his Of Mimicry and Man,
that woman is, “almost the same, but not
quite” with the man whose power is a
dominant power of the society, since the very past time of western’s literature
history.
References
1.
Manis, Jim. A Woman of No Importance by Oscar
Wilde, The Electronic Classics
Series. Pennsylvania State University,
2006.
2.
Wilde, Oscar, and Alyssa Harad. The importance of being earnest and
other plays. SimonandSchuster. com, 2005.
3.
Sandra, Gilbert, and Susan Gubar. "The Madwoman in the
Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination."
(1979): 493.
4.
Cixous, Hélène, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. "The laugh
of the Medusa."Signs 1.4
(1976): 875-893.
5.
De Man, Paul. "The resistance to theory." Yale
French Studies 63 (1982): 3-20.
6.
Mitchell
7.
Butler, Judith. Gender
trouble. routledge, 1999.
8.
Bhabha, Homi. "Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of
colonial discourse."October 28
(1984): 125-133.
Monicha Nelis
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