Wednesday, October 3, 2012

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
Pride and Prejudice.
Opening line of the novel.

"Whether she becomes an objet d'art or a saint, however, it is the surrender of her self- of her personal comfort, her personal desires, or both- that is the beautiful angel-woman's key act, while it is precisely this sacrifice which dooms her both to death and to heaven."
"The Madwoman in the Attic"
LT page 817

Looking at the combination of these quotes, one can figure that a man must always want a wife, but that woman, on becoming a wife, must make many sacrifices in order to do what she needs to do as a wife. This angel-figure that the man falls in love with is an image, driven by the creation of man, written down by men. This figure is then spread all throughout literature, that a woman is divine and that she needs to be there to care for the man, and this is what Gilbert and Gubar argue in the article, "The Madwoman in the Attic." From the woman's perspective though, this marriage could drive the woman to become the monster, and could drive her to become something that the husband did not see when he first saw her as the angel. This struggle between what is right for the woman, and what is right for the man, causes a division in literature, and in the image that we use on both men and women in real life.
Women, driven by this concept of being perfect because that is what literature has told us to become, then become overwhelmed and turn into the monsters. They could also become monsters, with the knowledge that the man they are going to marry is "in possession of a good fortune," and its this fortune that turns the women into monsters, because they  only marry they man for their money, and are angels to begin with because they are trying so hard to win over the man with the money. If it's not the woman trying to be the wife, it's the mother or father of the woman that is creating this angel/ monster combination to earn money for the family. This can be seen in Pride and Prejudice, especially with the girls' mother trying to marry all five of them off. So, in retrospect, it is the man's money that is turning the mother into a monster, and therefore turning the angelic daughter into a monster because she wants to money because her parents tell her she needs to money to save them.

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