Women Writers in the Romantic Age

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Englisches Seminar), course: Romanticism in the Light of Cultural Studies, language: English, abstract: The time of Romanticism is historically regarded as a masculine

phenomenon. As Anne K. Mellor pointed out, Romanticism as a literary

movement was constructed and defined by a masculine discourse and

ideology, a ¿masculine Romanticism¿. This masculine Romanticism is the

traditional understanding of the literary movement ¿ based on the

writings and thoughts of the five canonical writers Wordsworth,

Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Mellor suggests that ¿feminine

Romanticism¿ occurs to recover the erased and neglected voices of women

writers within this movement. To understand these differences of

masculine and feminine Romanticism, one has to realize that both terms

serve as an ideological gender construction, not in terms of the author¿s

sex. To analyse female romantic literature also means to consider the

division of ¿private¿ and ¿public¿ sphere occuring in the eighteenth

century, a phenomenon that should be discussed in the following

chapter.

This paper aims to show how women writers could made a career in the

male-dominated time of Romanticism. In order to show the problems they

experienced within a patriarchal society, I will explore the subordination

of women by a construction of femininity which did not grant them the

status of rational thinking subjects. For this purpose I have chosen the

example of Mary Wollstonecraft, the revolutionary founder of feminism.

Wollstonecraft was not only a writer herself, but she was also the wife of

the well-known political philosopher, William Godwin, and she gave birth

to Mary Godwin Shelley, the famous author of Frankenstein. As a member

of the literary circle around Joseph Johnson, she was surrounded by famous contemporary writers and was involved in literary relationships

within her own family circle.