Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Woolf -Vs- Beauvoir

Virgina Woolf's the "New Dress" is a direct approach on women of most fiction stories and how they are viewed. Virgina Woolf along with Simone De Beauvoirs another writer of women's views , they both target the same ideas of women being misunderstood by those of either the opposite and same sex. Virgina Woolf use the example of a social event to show women's insecurities around the opposite sex. In the "new dress" i see that these groups of women becoming so irate over a simple party , and the manner of how they carry themselves, each women was so worried about what the other ones think, that it seems to really overwhelm their thoughts. This only reminds me of what we as women go through today , not one of us can say we don't feel like the next person is watching our very move, or even judging us, or that it seems like its so easy for some (meaning men ) to able to accomplish so much.
Why is it so easy for Men and not women ? Simone De Beauvoirs say that " Men need not bother themselves with alleviating the pains and the burdens that physiologically are women's lot since these are intended by nature; Men use them as a pretext for increasing the misery of the feminine lot still further, for instance by refusing to grant to women any right to sexual pleasure, by making her work like a beast of burden." That only meant that men would never have to go through have of what we go through and still come out on top. Women being the fragile creatures that we are can only bear but so much , but that is a very misleading fact , because now a days there are so many women in a men's field and still carrying on the same roles as their own sex.
It's only now that the women's rights is starting to be noticed , but for those women then in Virgina Woolf's stories , it wold take much longer to get any where close to what we have gotten to now. Virgina Woolf seems to agree and come back at Beauvoirs by saying that women are made to be comfortable within her own shell till she learns to embrace what has been considered a gift and a treat to many other women.
" Made her feel that she had come out of her chrysalis and was being proclaimed what in the comfortable darkness of childhood she had never been- frail and beautiful creature, before whom men bowed, this limited and circumscribed creature who could not do what she liked, this butterfly with a thousand facets to it's eyes and delicate fine plumage , and difficulties and sensibilities and sadness innumerable; a woman." Virgina Woolf said this only to , give comfort to many women who didn't know their own self value. Because it like what she said as a young child it easy for people to keep your level of self-esteem up ,by letting us know how important we are and going to be but it is between that stage that everything seems to be good, but it's after that time that a young women gets involved with the world and society and those around them starts to change their personal view's of themselves
I really believe that in their own way the were trying to get women of that time and now to value themselves and know that each creature is not meant to do the same job as the other , it a very cool way of doing this but i just feel that with times changing maybe we should invert some of these old traits to the young women of today.

No comments: