January 31, 2022
- Interpret:
In Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, not unlike last week’s reading, I am seeing the significance of the special role women played in the rise of the novel and how literary writings from women offered a critical standpoint rooted in the realization that they were treated inferior because they were women. In other words, novels like Persuasion and Ruth Hall, continue to illustrate Josephine Donovan’s conception of “Querelle des femmes,” the centuries-long debate about a women’s place (xi). In Ruth Hall, the novel’s elaborate detail and specific perspective provoke a sentimental vibe and highlight feminine treatments/ideological formation that put women in stereotypical roles or otherwise commodified them as objects. I find this incredibly important because through this the audience gets a fuller understanding of Ruth’s situation, allowing her story, told from the women’s viewpoint, to be heard. Throughout the novel, the society that encompasses Ruth Hall’s life continuously regard her as “useless”, just as many women were defined as of that time. By using descriptive and strong language, Fanny Fern solidifies her own voice alongside her construction of Ruth Hall’s character and further declares her feminine voice in the novel.
2. Critically Evaluate:
I particularly liked each Warhol segment to go along with Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. It’s important to take into consideration each of these implications, whether it be historical or ideological, of women’s lives in the nineteenth century and how these factors could impact not only the author’s life and viewpoints, but furthermore, how these could also be relayed into their novel.
I would like to highlight Warhol’s theory of time and plot in relation to the novel and the significance of Ruth Hall’s age after her husband’s death. She is still in a position to marry and still in a position to bear children. Ruth is confined to a selective period of life (that eligible for marriage) even after her husband’s death, it is made a primary point of the novel because of social class issues and through the pressing of the parental, and step-parental figures, of the novel to have Ruth be supported. I could go on forever regarding the presentation of female and male figures in the novel, specifically how it relates to the supplementary Warhol readings, but mainly wanted to point out this dramatization in relation to the heroine.
3. Points of discussion for class:
The extent to which women writers establish themselves as an author and affirm their narrative – are they using the novel as a site of resistance to societal/patriarchal norms?
Connections of irony and political standpoints/social norms of appropriate conduct in Ruth Hall – how do these notions along with the realism of the text allow Fern to foster an ethical understanding of Ruth’s individual plight? Prompting the audience to feel sympathy for her? And also, what does this prompt in regards to the other characters? Should they have more moral responsibility?
