The Biography Under The Horizon Of Feminism

This period from the 19^th century to the 20^th century is a period of time during which the feminist literary criticism was coming out and developing rapidly.When the feminist literary criticism has deeply developed to the level of society and culture,as its essential branch, gender study began to go into our fields of vision.From the perspective of feminist's horizon,this paper attempts to make an analysis on the two biographies which are written about women.,then make a further discussion on the difference between males' and females' composing style and gender consciousness.This two biographies are "Manie Antoinette" written by Stefan Zweig and "Charlatte Bronte' s Biography" written by Elizabeth Gaskell.From the feminists' cognitive perspective, the essay reveals the presenting literary appearance of two writers who belong to different genders,the paper can be divided into four chapters altogether.The first chapter talks about that Zweig and Mrs.Gaskell hold different opinions on the problem of males' and female' family roles. Zweig takes the sexual oppression as a base to defend males' leading position,and contributes the females' failure to the accomplishment on their career.Mrs.Gaskell positively advocates that females should enjoy the same rights as males on education,so they can benefit a lot from their career.The second chapter mainly discusses Zweig's and Mrs.Gaskell's controversial views on the problem of experiencing females' emotions,feelings and character psychologies.Zweig can only rely on his guesses and imaginations to estimate the female's mentality,which surely gives rise to the sense of distortion and segregation.Mrs.Gaskell relatively feels the female leading character's feelings,moreover,all of which are similar to the writer's self-recognition.Taking "gender" as an important factor of literature which makes difference,the third chapter generally illustrates over Zweig's biography style and Mrs.Gaskell' biography style. The feminist literary criticism holds that compared to neglect and avoid the differences between females and males,affirming and facing up to these differences is more favorable to the development.This chapter mainly integrates Zweig's and Mrs.Gaskell's literary practices to expound their characteristics from two aspects:literary language and literary thinking.The fourth chapter chiefly makes an analysis on the dividing line between the technique of expression and value cognition, which come into being when Zweig and Mrs.Gaskell tackle with the two biographies.The underlying cause of Zweig's humanitarianism thought origins from human's free development,which has ruled out the ingredient of sexual distinction.Yet Mrs.Gaskell advocates on the basis that females enjoy the same right on males,just in this way females can genuinely realize their self-values,which contains the females group's total interests including the factor of sexual distinction.