Throughout this course there have been many themes explored, but one of the ones I am most interested in is the underlying theme of the price of freedom. In almost every book we read this course, freedom, and the path to the attainment of freedom, played a large role in character and plot development.
In Ms. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Clarissa is burdened by Richard. Richard is suffering from AIDS, and Clarissa is the one person keeping him alive, giving him hope. She goes to visit him almost every day, and she truly devotes herself to this man. A similar situation occurs with Laura, the reader of Ms. Dalloway, as she feels trapped within her own life. She is burdened by normalcy as she fights depression and puts up the facade that she is happy and contempt. However, as a conversation between Clarissa and Laura reveals, Laura eventually ran away from her son and husband, and felt truly free for the first time in years. Virginia Woolf herself is denied freedom as she is holed up in rural England, slowly going mad. She is kept under prisoner-like conditions and is unable to free herself, as the only escape she has from her situation comes from the joy she gets from writing. Suicide features in these women's lives, as it becomes the way for them to experience freedom. Suicide, whether directly or indirectly, gives these troubled women freedom from their lives and responsibilities. For Clarissa, even though it comes as quite a shock and is a truly sad occurrence, Richard's death, in a way, gives Clarissa life. Clarissa is freed from the burden of Richard's caretaker, and she is now able to move on with her life. Virginia Woolf chose to escape her own troubles by drowning herself, death was her freedom, and ending her own life was the price she was willing to pay.
We read another book this year entitled Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee. Freedom in this book was exemplified by the main character changing her name from Jyoti to Jane, and then again to Jasmine. By changing her name, Jasmine was stepping forward into her new identity, but she was also freeing herself from the past. Jasmine wanted to escape the stereotypes or judgments that might come along with the rural Indian name of Jyoti. Freedom came at the price of changing her identity so she could truly start fresh in the United States, in her new life. Another example of the price of freedom comes from Jasmine's relationship with Bud. This relationship is similar to Clarissa's relationship with Richard in Ms. Dalloway. Jasmine functions as Bud's caretaker, and she feels obligated to stay by his side through the good and the bad. When she meets Taylor, however, she realizes that she must leave Bud in order to pursue her dreams and live her own life. At the end of the story, Jasmine leaves Bud and is pictured, "scrambling ahead of Taylor, greedy with wants and reckless from hope" (Mukherjee, 241). It is evident that Jasmine has been trapped for so long that she cannot wait to truly experience freedom, free of all burdens and solely worrying about her own needs and wants.
We also read a book by Naomi Wolf called The Beauty Myth and a book by Eve Ensler entitled The Vagina Monologues. Both of these books dealt with women's issues, freedom from judgments and stereotypes, and elevating the status of women. In The Beauty Myth, Wolf talks about how women are repressed by stereotypes and held prisoner by cultural values that place emphasis on artificial beauty. Women are unable to express themselves as society demands women look and act a specific way. The Beauty Myth promotes freedom, but this freedom comes at the cost of going against popular and mass media, and expressing one's self at the cost of being an individual. In The Vagina Monologues, Ensler talks about women freeing themselves from their own vaginas. She wants women to re-discover, or in some cases, discover for the first time, their sexuality. At the beginning she talks about how even the word vagina is somewhat taboo. She urges women to talk about their vaginas, lifting the burden placed upon women regarding the ability to connect and have a relationship with their own vaginas. The women interviewed feel liberated when talking about their vaginas, it is new to them and feels like a guilty pleasure. The freedom of talking and popularizing vaginas comes at the price of breaking invisible expectations that women's sexuality must be repressed and kept in the dark.
The first book we read this year was The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. In her created society of Gilead, women were stripped of their identities and simply made into objects for the pleasure of man. The women in this book had no freedom, and were forced to do as the men said and live lives dedicated to them. Everything in this society, from social and formal events to everyday tasks such as gardening, was forced. Freedom was nonexistent in Gilead, and at the end, the main character, Offred, finally gained freedom by letting go. She stepped "into the darkness within; or else the light" (Atwood, 307). Offred's freedom came at the price of giving herself to the men who came for her.
Women's Lit as a whole also embodies the theme of the price of freedom. I have read many wonderful female authors this year, and have truly enjoyed this class (I am sad it is coming to an end!). Women's Lit has come a long way over the past few decades. Historically, literature has mostly been dominated by men, however, with the women's rights movement, female authors became inspired and women's literature took flight. The freedom of women's literature means that women are respected as authors just as much as men. I believe we are near this point, as women authors are just as credible and have just as much to say as their male counterparts. I have come to greatly respect women's literature and look forward to using the ideas I have developed over the past months in my future studies.
