My first thought upon reading Jamieson's pieces was "Wait, WHAT?!? Women were thought to be WHAT if they decided to pursue the conception and delivery of ideas?" I was a bit infuriated. It's unfair to call women "manly" if they choose to pursue a life of discourse, and it is unfair to constrain women in such a way. I also cannot believe that gender was once considered a hindrance to a person. As if being a woman was some sort of ailment that needed to be overcome, like you have to be joking me, right? After all of the angry thoughts ran wildly through my mind, I remembered that it was once a common belief that women only belonged in the home and that they had no place to keep other than one in the kitchen. So, then I calmed down and read the piece with some real logic!
It's interesting, to me, to categorize writing as either feminine or masculine. To me, a woman can write in a style that is "impersonal, unemotional, and competitive" as any man can; and any man has the capacity to write in a discourse that "pleases." I can agree that men and women generally conform to certain types of writing styles suiting not only their personalities but also the gender bias that comes with them, but I have a hard time laying a distinct and hard classification on what is considered masculine in writing and what is considered feminine in writing. Anyways, I don't really know what my argument is here, other than that it is hard to place a limit on what a woman can do with writing, or what a man can do with it for that matter. I think that the true artist has the capability of being amorphous. A person who is truly a master of the art of words has the capacity to dive into both the "male" mind as well as the "female" mind, and write from such a perspective. I think of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland here. Eliot has a unique was of creating a voice that is distinctly male or female based on the story he is telling within that part of the poem. To me, one is not a masculine writer or a feminine writer, but has the capacity to write from either style based on his or her needs.
As for the Wysocki piece, I loved the idea that form could quite literally shape the way we read and interpret a piece of writing. If a piece is aesthetically pleasing, we are more inclined to enjoy what's written, Also, a shape can really play a part in the meaning of a piece, which is really quite neat. For example, if someone is writing about the beauty of the female body, and the words are constructed to the shape of a female body there is a beautiful sort of multi-modality there. Or if you are writing about love, and the words are constructed withing a heart. It simple draws more attention to the "point" of the piece, and that's pretty damn cool. Wysocki's article also give importance to placement on a page, which brings be back to basic writing skills. When you are first learning to write essays and papers, you are taught that the main idea of the essay is to be found in the first few sentences of the paper. You are supposed to tell the reader, right off the bat, what the rest of the paper is going to try to demonstrate to them. This article brings me right back to that idea, only it states that the central idea is best placed int he center of the page, because a reader is most likely to see whatever is central on the page as the central point of the argument or essay. It is interesting to think how shape and placement actually make a difference in our writing. Like if I were to put a giant Bobcat logo in the middle of this paragraph, a reader would be lead to believe that the central part of my argument or post was about the Bobcats, when in reality it might only be placed inside the post as a supplement to my argument and not be the central point of it. Interesting, huh?
I also hate being late, so I will apologize for my comment being much later than I intended it. At least we have quite a few days off in November, so hopefully we can both catch up on all of our work! As for your post, after reading Jamieson’s piece I was definitely glad that I’m living in the 21st century. Whether I would have thought about gender equality or not, I don’t think I would have been too happy with the way women were viewed that long ago. Today we still have things that are viewed as either feminine or masculine, like the color pink for girls and blue for boys. This was a problem for me growing up because I hated the color pink and so I never wanted any of the things that were “intended” for girls (I still don’t care much for pink but at least now I can tolerate it). Do the ideas we try to ingrain in little kids involving gender carry over to adult endeavors, such as writing?
ReplyDeleteI was pretty outraged about the ideas of masculine or feminine discourse in the Jameison piece. I mean, it's understandable that they once thought that considering their views of men as the breadwinners and women as the submissive members of society, but it's still pretty sad (and interesting) how that gets translated into language.
ReplyDeleteThe differences in types of writing is really interesting because now, we as writers can play off of those stereotypes in order to subvert them, to comment on them, or even to use them in advertising like the people in the Peek ad did with the woman's body. This post and your comment on my blog post made me really think about that; in a time when the constructed barriers of masculine and feminine are being torn town, it is entirely possible to write a piece in traditionally feminine prose from a male perspective, or vice versa. It's certainly something to consider and something that I feel will make a huge impact on our lives.