Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” is a short story in which human life is glimpsed through snapshots into several characters’ lives. Woolf contrasts these vignette-esque passages with scenes of a snail also living in the garden in order to reveal the dissociation between humans and their...
Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips were women poets in a patriarchal culture who wrote about sapphic relationships in a heteronormative one. Examining Philips’ “Friendship” and Behn’s “To the Fair Clarinda, Who Made Love to Me, Imagined More Than Woman” reveals the two women’s ability to...
Alice Munro’s prose fiction is lucid, conversational, and charged with a sense of unwavering honesty in its refusal to oversimplify or deny the depth of her characters. As a result, Munro eloquently captures the ambiguity of their thoughts and emotions. She is careful to avoid...
Although it may at first appear contradictory to suggest that remembering inherently involves forgetting, upon second consideration this paradoxical statement proves to be legitimate. The quotation, “Only what one has remembered can actively be forgotten” (König), provides a clear premise with which to approach the...
Victorian society was riddled with harsh social constructs that dictated how people interacted and behaved, often exclusively for the sake of achieving or maintaining social status. In particular, romantic interactions were characterized by a consistent prioritization of external appearances and social class over internal qualities...
Christina Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio” (1856) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) each portray a woman perceived through the male gaze, which imposes upon them the impossible expectations of the Victorian woman and dresses them in romanticized idealizations to satisfy a male...