ELF 2010 (Vol. 2) 9
The Woman in Modernism
Heike Wrenn, English 428
“King and Queen of Serbia Murdered!” “Revolts in Russia!” “Greeks Revolt in Crete!” “King
Carlos and Crown Prince Assassinated!” “Bulgaria declares Independence!” “Revolution in Portugal!”
“Archduke Ferdinand Assassinated in Serbia!” These were just some of the headlines that appeared in
newspapers at the turn of the twentieth century. The beginning of the century was a time of confusion and
growing tension, of unease with social order and of uproar and revolution which eventually led to World
War I. It was also a time of new advents, inventions, thought patterns and a sense of liberation from many
traditional bonds; it was the beginning of the modernist era. Modernism is often defined as a response to
the scientific, political and economic developments of the time and the way people dealt with those
issues. The tension and unease that these issues brought along with them also manifested in the art of the
time; it affected music, philosophy, visual art, and of course literature. Writers and authors of the time
who reflected on these issues could not help but to give voice to the tension and change in their work, and
a new literary genre, the modernist movement, was developed.
Modernism embraced the issues of class, gender, the struggle for knowledge, and the
senselessness and alienation of the time. The movement was a response to an international sense of
depression, the helpless feeling held by many at that time that nothing was concrete or reliable anymore.
It dealt with the way human personality seemed to change, as Virginia Woolf once stated in 1910, and it
embraced disruption and rejection to move beyond the simplistic. Gender issues have always been a topic
in society as well as in literature, so naturally gender became a major focus of the modernist movement.
Women, their intelligence and their judgment had always been regarded with contempt by a male-
oriented society (Marsden). Women had been seen and treated more as complements to the men in their
lives than as individuals or spiritual entities; they were depicted in literature as womanly, weak, dutiful,
and stupid. Most authors continued to write with the misguided perception that women were always
inferior to men.
For centuries, women were defined by men; the world was male-centered and male-dominated.
Male philosophers and social theorists were the ones who identified woman with disorder, savagery,
chaos, unreason, and the excluded “other.” According to James Branch Cabell women were considered
nothing more than conveniences; they were useful for keeping a household as well as for copulation and
pleasure. Hegel describes womankind as the “eternal irony of the community,” and Freud defines it as
“the implacable enemy of civilization” (qtd. in Glasgow). Theory, logic, and order were considered to be
masculine traits, the opposite of femininity. In her article “Feminism,” Ellen Glasgow states that “in the
past men have confidently asserted that woman exists not as an active agent of life but merely as a passive
guardian of the life force and that it is nature’s purpose that woman sit and watch.” The philosopher
Schopenhauer claims that one needs only to look at a woman in order to realize that she is not intended
for great mental or physical labor. Schopenhauer goes as far as to state that women are childish, silly, and
short-sighted; he does not acknowledge women as human, but instead implies that men are the only fully
human beings and that women exist on a plane somewhere between them and children (qtd. in Glasgow).
Evil is another trait that has been attributed to women for centuries, a characteristic that dates back to the
Biblical allusion of Eve’s temptation of Adam in the Garden of Eden. Until the early twentieth-century,
these traits and characteristics were all considered feminine and women were portrayed and treated
accordingly.
In 1912, Mary Coolidge asked whether the characteristic behavior described as feminine is in fact
an inalienable quality or merely an attitude of mind produced by the coercive social habits of past eras.
After she carefully studied societies which stress gender differences from infancy and compared them to
primitive societies where men and women were mostly equal in status she concluded that it is the
stressing of these differences, the imposing of values and traits rather than inherent biological
characteristics, which is responsible for perceptions of “the feminine.” Coolidge suggests that it is
civilized man who has molded woman according to his standards and desires: “A successful woman must
