This course offers five weeks of online learning about (predominately white western) female-identified writers, with a whimsigoth slant. This course will be an intentional space where we can be curious and creative together, discussing writers and artists whose dark nights of the soul still resonate with and permeate our culture today.
What you get:
This first class serves as an introduction to the course and here we will unpack philosophies espoused by key thinkers during the Enlightenment period such as Mary Wollstonecraft. We will then take ourselves off to the windswept moors of Yorkshire and spend time with Jane Eyre - who may be poor, obscure, plain, and little, but has full as much heart!
Jumping forward to the 1960s, we will then reflect on the work of Jean Rhys and her novel Wide Sargasso Sea - as well as feminist arguments from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar whose reappraisal of Bertha Mason has brought fresh life to Charlotte Bronte's work - and has arguably seen this character eclipse all others in the novel in terms of literary importance.
The Cult - She Sells Sanctuary
In this second class, we will dive straight into the course by learning about the predicament of women writers in the late 1800s, with close textual analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (text provided).
The class will also explore some of the key takeaways from historical and sociological studies from critics like Elaine Showalter and her canonical text, The Female Malady as well as touching briefly on some theory relating to the interiority of women's writing.
Bringing a Neo-Victorian twist to the class, we will also take a look at some contemporary novels like Affinity by Sarah Waters to reflect on how the imprisonment of women might be seen as a transformative textual device in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
Cocteau Twins - Cherry Coloured Funk