On Virginia Woolf’s Theory Of Androgyny Embodied In The Characters In Poppy

Drusilla Modjeska is a very influential feminist writer and editor in Australia, who has accomplished profound success with numerous far-reaching works such as:Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers1925-1945(1981), Inner Cities:Australian Women’s Memory of Place (1989), Sisters, and so on. Among them was Poppy. Modjeska has a great talent for observing and depicting women’s inner world and is considered as a spoke woman for the large number of women in Australia. In the book Poppy, a fictionalized biography of her mother, but in fact as much an autobiography, the author portrays various figures with different characteristics. She weaves the thread of history and memory into imagination and finally expresses her feminist consciousness through the novel.Although the theory of androgyny had its roots in Greek mythology, in psychology and philosophy, it was first posed and elaborated into literature by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, a foremost modernist literary figure and a feminist thinker or activist. Androgyny embodies a combination of male and female psychological features in one person, which helps women to liberate themselves. Each gender has its own outstanding and specific features but androgyny denies gender opposition, and advocates that masculinity and femininity can appear in a single body.The thesis includes introduction, three chapters and conclusion as a whole. The first chapter analyzes two contradictory features:hesitation and struggle. The former one is shown by Poppy’s helplessness to her breakdown, her tolerance of the loss from the family love, as well as Lalage’s blind desire for mother. The feature of struggle can be seen in Madeleine’s objection to the society and Poppy’s resistance to her illness. The second chapter also develops through the opposite characteristics of two sexes. Poppy’s love stories proves that she is both docile and brave facing different men, at the same time, she converts to a working woman from a gentle housewife, and in the end, she eventually finds her own firm faith. Poppy’s friend Gillian is an ideal example of androgynous woman, who provides a lot of consideration and instruction for Poppy. The last chapter is the essential part of the whole thesis which displays the integration of femininity and masculinity in characters. In this chapter two key men—Marcus and Richard—are also analyzed as well as Poppy and Lalage. All of them show a balance in both femininity and masculinity within them and live peacefully in their own way.After a careful analysis of the masculinity and femininity through interpreting diverse characters in Poppy, the thesis eventually arrives a the final conclusion that a harmonious world with the two genders coexisting peacefully can be established, which is the highest end of androgyny put forward by Virginia Woolf.