Virginia Woolf & Carol Gilligan

Virginia Woolf & Carol Gilligan on Women as the Deviant Sex: "Shakespeare's Sister" & "Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle" In the texts "Shakespeare's Sister" by Virginia Woolf and "Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle" by Carol Gilligan, the authors provide their own interpretation of women's subjugation at different periods: Woolf had expressed her thoughts on suppression of artistic expression in the early part of the twentieth century, while Gilligan discussed hers in 1982.

Woolf and Gilligan have remarkable differences in discussing the predominant theme of their essays, which centers on the process on how women have continually been subjugated by society throughout the years. Despite the similarity in topic, the authors used different contexts in which this issue was discussed. For Woolf, her focus was on artistic expression; hence her discussion was in the form of fiction, where she artistically involves herself in speculating the state of women in England during the Elizabethan Age.

Gilligan, meanwhile, offered a psychological perspective to the issue of women being considered as the 'deviant' sex. Through classic studies on human development, the author pointed out how normative development was almost always associated with men and not with women. Given these backgrounds on each author's work, this paper posits that Woolf and Gilligan's works are written accounts of their interpretations of women suppression under the feminist framework.

Though not explicitly nor directly addressed, both authors involve themselves in critical thinking about how women have continuously maintained their 'low class statuses in the society, despite the onset of modernization and almost egalitarian nature of 20th century society.

Thus, subsistence to the feminist framework have allowed them to generate conclusions that the proliferation of males in the field of literature and psychology and preponderance of women influenced with these men's ideas, as well as the influence of these men's works, have resulted to the continuous subjugation of women from men in the modern age. In Gilligan's essay centered on the idea that, for many years, classic studies on the psychology of human development had illustrated women as only an 'incidental' part to an individual's development.

This means that women's development does not represent the 'normative' or correct form of development that an individual must undergo in his life. This incidentality, in turn, relegates women as the deviant sex, the member of the society that no one wanted to be because she portrays everything that an individual should not develop to be. In arguing her case, Gilligan cites the works of famous psychologists, such as Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg, whose findings about the psychology of human development had all used the male as the model individual.

In effect, because males became the model subjects for their experiments, male development was considered the normative kind of human development than those of women's.

As the author contends, psychology and empirical studies about humans "have tended to regard male behavior as the 'norm' and female behavior as some kind of deviation from that norm...Thus, when women do not conform to the standards of psychological expectation, the conclusion has generally been that something is wrong with women." Gilligan's arguments were echoed by Woolf's imaginative contemplation of the woman in the Elizabethan Age in "Shakespeare's Sister." Though composed many decades earlier than Gilligan's scientific inquiry into women subjugation, Woolf had provided a fairly accurate description of the life of women during her time in the context of the Shakespeare's society.

Using the character of Judith, whom Woolf purported as the great playwright Shakespeare's sister, the author remarked how women were generally "...insignificant...absent from history...slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger...could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband." Given these conditions, Woolf argues, it is then inevitable that Judith and all women like her would thrive to become successful artists in the Elizabethan Age. The author expresses regret because society has not allowed women to.