In her brilliant feminist essay, A Room of One’s Own (1928), Virginia Woolf tries to understand why so few women were able to produce creative writing. In her study of English history, she notes that real women were treated as children and/or slaves. In literature written by men, ironically, women were crucial. “Indeed,” she observes, “if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater.”

The same point might be applied to the representation of female figures in the visual arts. In the 19th century, there were very few professional women painters, sculptures, etc. And yet paintings of the time frequently treat female figures as of “utmost importance.”

Through a detailed description of one 19th-century picture at the Tate, discuss how it represents a female figure. Does she fall into one of Woolf’s categories? Is the woman depicted as “heroic” or “sordid” or “beautiful”? Does she seem “as great as a man,” or perhaps more so? Of course, you don’t have to use one of Woolf’s categories. Most of the images are created by male artists, but it would be interesting to think about those created by women artists. The crucial point is to support your perspective with careful description.

Freud’s House is full of objects that he has collected. What kind of images does he seem to prefer? Which one catches your eye in relation to “The Uncanny”?

 

 

 

 

More images of his Study . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Dracula, Stoker does not mention the particular graveyard where Lucy is entombed. Highgate seems a likely candidate because of its proximity to Hampstead Heath.

But I am interested to hear what you think about 19th-century middle-class life — and death — in relation to this site. Find and analyze a text or image that speaks to us about the priorities and values of the time at which Dracula was written.

 

 

 

In De Profundis, which Wilde wrote in jail toward the end of his life, he writes, “the two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.” Presumably the latter was a much different sort of turning point than the former.

Indeed, Wilde generally associated Oxford with beauty and with freedom of thought.  In his essay “The Critic as Artist,” he praises Oxford for its “loveliness of environment”; it is a place where “the dullness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete’s chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the strange snakespotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower’s gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling’s shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud’s building in the College of St. John.”

What is your impression? Are you caught up in the natural beauty of the place? Or arrested by the interest of some work of art or architecture? Or, on the other hand, does some aspect of Oxford annoy you or leave you cold? Discuss in relation to some particular object, view, etc.