Feminine Self Research Articles

Kierkegaard and the Feminine Self

Kierkegaard shows two contrary attitudes to woman and the feminine: misogyny and celebration. The Kierkegaardian structure of selfhood, because combined with a hierarchical assumption about the relative value of certain human characteristics, and their identification as male or female, argues that woman is a lesser self. Consequently, the claim that the Kierkegaardian ideal of selfhood is androgynist is rejected, though it is the latter assumptions alone that force this conclusion.

(Dis)figuration: The Body as Icon in the Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston

The abuse of oppressed bodies within misogynistic patriarchal societies is an important aspect of Maxine Hong Kingston's fiction. This essay addresses the topos of physical disfiguration in her autobiographical works, The Woman Warrior and China Men through analysis of the rhetorical use of the body as a signifying system. Acts of violence committed upon the feminine body work both to punish femininity and also to break the silence imposed upon the feminine body. Woman-hatred, self-loathing, misogyny, are embodied in comprehensible images written on the body and through the power of storytelling are deprived of their power to disable. The breaking of female silence and empowerment through language is acknowledged by Kingston as the most significant feminist issue in The Woman Warrior. Fear and aggression are required for self-assertion: fear of misogynistic abuse and the aggression to claim and celebrate the body. Haunting fears, ghosts, are destroyed by the aggressive embodiment of them in the narrative topos of the body. Distinct from the violence that cripples and disables the feminine self is the violence that works for the self by laying bare the reality of female marginalization and oppression and abuse, making clearly visible the structures of patriarchal power that oppress all women.

The Feminine Self and Body Image

(1993). The Feminine Self and Body Image. The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 47-62.

Virginia Woolf: The feminine self

Virginia Woolf claimed to feel most feminine when writing, which was shakily noted in her diary following a long digression on the aging process. Most characteristically, she equated writing with images of fertility and motherhood, or with what she alluded to as the "pain ''t of childbirth, experiences of which she felt deprived. Corresponding with her sister, Virginia at 26 tells Vanessa Bell, her maternal and ego ideal, that she writes as her nephew Julian "sucks his bottle, ''2 telling us in effect that she autonomously creates her own milk or words; 3 this correspondence alerts us to the oral dimension defining her creative process, as she competes with both mother and child. Showing her deep enmeshment with her sister, Virginia in embarking on her novel Night and Day, 4 wrote Vanessa: "1 greatly envy your brats. I am very much interested in your life which I think of writing another novel about. It's fatal staying with you--you start so many new ideas. ''5 Vanessa as wife, mother, and artist was prototype for a good number of Woolf's fictional women. Many of Woolf's novels might be seen as offerings, or in Greenacre's designation, as "love gifts"; 6 these are dedicated to the recipient with "pride and misgiving, the desire to placate or ingratiate, the need to idealize." Woolf sought to place herself in her sister's skin as it were, to fathom feminine, heterosexual, or maternal emotions. In her diary, Woolf stated that a novel might best be written in "breathless anguish so that for 9 months one is in despair." Then, she reaches the "hatching, the portal, the opening through which [ shall go upon this experience. ''7 Her metaphor is of course a fairly obvious equation of writing with gestating a baby, in addition suggesting a desire for rebirth, or the possibility of giving birth to another self. In contrast to Woolf's groping toward a feminine self, which she predominantly linked to the maternal modality, she frequently sounded an aggressive note concerning her writing, for example, she must make "instant and direct shots ''8 at her object. She aims her "bolts quite free, straight and undeflected," has never lived in "such a race, such a violent impulsion and compulsion ''9 as in writing The Pargiters, her novel about "sex, education, life, ''~° initially