Have a seat and take a moment to review the vocabulary from "My Last Duchess" before the quiz.
After our quiz, we will learn a little bit about our selection from "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf.
Rewrite the sentence with a semicolon in the correct place.
Bonus: If you want good grades, you should study, if you study, you should achieve your goal.
"Here’s an old riddle. If you haven’t heard it, give yourself time to answer before reading past this paragraph: a father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that boy is my son!” Explain. (Cue the final Jeopardy! music.)"
Essential Question:
How do gender roles influence our access to opportunities?
https://www.bu.edu/today/2014/bu-research-riddle-reveals-the-depth-of-gender-bias/Selection from "A Room of One's Own"
I have taken the liberty of breaking the text up into paragraphs of roughly equal size on your handouts and on the board.
First, some basic background on Woolf in the context of this essay:
The School of Life
Virginia Woolf 6:52-8:44 YouTube https://youtu.be/d1W7wqXD_b0?t=6m52s
Next, we will read along to an audiobook version of this section, which I have cued up to begin where our reading does.Virginia Woolf "A Room of One's Own" Section 3 (11:12 - 20:24)
After we read, you will be pairing up and looking at the first three paragraphs below.
Annotate your texts for your own edification!
You can follow the guidelines I've provided you, or you can develop your own system. The suggestions from the guidelines are as follows----
-Draw a box around any unfamiliar words and phrases you
see.
-Put a question mark (?) next to a section you’re
questioning or confused about.
-Put a star (*) by important or repeating ideas.
-Use an exclamation point (!) for connections between
ideas or ideas that strike you or surprise you in some way.
-Remember to write notes in the margin as
you read to record your ideas and thoughts.
How were Shakespeare and his hypothetical sister "Judith" treated differently in the first three paragraphs of this selection?
Shakespeare treated differently We will discuss these differences after a few minutes.
Shakespeare treated differently We will discuss these differences after a few minutes.
-As we read, please underline any unfamiliar words or phrases as we go.
Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably—his mother was an heiress—to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen.
Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter—indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring woolstapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it.
She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-lipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting—no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted—you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last—for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.
-Annotate your text to identify how specific opportunities for Judith and William Shakespeare differed in each paragraph.
Work, Family, Education, Relationships, Entertainment
This may be true or it may be false—who can say?—but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational—for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons—but were none the less inevitable. Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination. And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood.
Identify her argument in the first three paragraphs in your annotations. Number the steps in the argument and label the conclusion "C."
Start with the highlighted selections at the beginning
("It would have been impossible...")
Gender roles can undermine one's access to a variety of opportunities and result in an unjust distribution of the benefits and burdens of social life (and by extension, all other parts of life).
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