Final exam on literature

Restriction did, in fact, become one of the most enduring motifs of English fiction dealing with women’s lives, manifesting itself in various disguises as the abduction and incarceration of women characters by male ones in carriages, castles, madhouses, brothels and seemingly comfortable homes. Such motifs run through works as various as Aphra Behn’s  The Unfortunate Happy Lady (1698), Mary Davys’s The Reformed Coquet (1724), Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), or American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1891), and even works by male authors like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) or Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). The effects of the social restrictions were often symbolically represented in fiction as the mental anguish and even madness that many female characters were made to undergo from the heroine of Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782) through the famous ‘madwoman in the attic’ of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) – rewritten as the heroine of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) – to the main character of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963). Women writers of the past three centuries have been at the forefront of trying to remedy the disadvantage of earlier centuries, when, in the words of the heroine of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the pen has been in the hands of men, that is, literature — as most institutionalised aspects of culture — was overwhelmingly under the control of men. By taking the pen in their own hands, increasing numbers of women writers have been