Chapter Three Analysis

Still concerned about her disappointing quest for an explanation for gender inequalities, and puzzled by invisibility of women writers in the fruitful literary Elizabethan period in England, she opts to investigate. She not only finds that there is nothing on the middle-class women in the history book (as if they didn’t even exist), but still she cannot answer the question of:

Why are women poorer than men?

[this shockingly still holds true when we see men paid higher salaries than women for doing the same jobs].

Though never translated to paper, the narrator knows that genius thoughts must have ran through many minds of women during these times of even more institutionalized sexism than the narrator’s times. Pondering what a female genius’ life would’ve been like in Shakespeare’s time, her imagination creates a fictionalized sister for him, one with an equally gifted mind. She makes up an entire narrative of what would’ve happened to Judith, the fictional sister of Shakespeare, in comparison to her brother. She concludes that while his genius was aided by attending school, getting married, acting, and working at the theater in London, making money for himself without familial obligations, she, on the other hand, was not allowed to attend school and was discouraged from trying to educate herself, married against her will as a teenager, lacked privacy and employment opportunities in the artistic world, and was burdened with children. Completing her fictional outline of Shakespeare’s sister’s tragic life, Judith is impregnated by a theatrical man, and she commits suicide. The narrator seems saddened by the fact that even if a strong-willed woman of that time prevailed over the obstacles placed in their way by the men in society and wrote something, it would’ve been

anonymous.

These socioeconomic factors affecting the lives of women act as a creative poison inhibiting maximum writing capabilities. Additional obstacles that men aren’t faced with, like discouragement and disdain from the surrounding patriarchal society, in addition to the scarcity of privacy and money, is disadvantageous to the maturing female writer.



Back to the looking-glass comparison of men and women, she goes on to say that this male discouragement is aided by their desire to remain in a superior status. And in order to attain genius like Shakespeare’s there must be no peripheral barriers or personal protests; only then can the mind truly be brilliant or “incandescent.”