Frith’s Feminist Façade
Considered an epic feminist text, Melika Burke pierces through the illusion of female freedom underpinning Year of Wonders to reveal its underlying paradox.
Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders (2001) is one of the most grievously misinterpreted and misunderstood texts of the twenty first century. Brooks’s (2009), who proudly identities as a “modern western feminists”, intertwines her experience as a Middle Eastern war correspondent where she observed the emancipatory potential of women with the historical scaffold of the 1665 Bubonic Plague to create a feminist utopian heroine: Anna. This rich exploration of the female identity has elevated the novel to an erroneously distinguished position by depicting the text as quintessentially feminist. Cultural Critic Lee (2012) encapsulates this prevailing interpretation by praising the “[s]trong feminist consciousness operating through Year of Wonders”. However, this analysis is shrouded in historical, and most unfortunately, feminist fallacies. A critical lens reveals the underlying problem with asserting that Year of Wonders belongs in the feminist canon through identifying the unintended depiction of power, which reifies, rather than challenges, the dominant discourse surrounding female empowerment. Therefore, an alternative and even resistant reading of Year of Wonders is …show more content…
Through this, Anna clearly begins to identify a problem within the dichotomisation of gender, which foregrounds the dominant interpretation of the text as challenging the notion of essentialism, the view that there is some natural, given essence of the feminine that is universal and immutable (Barry, 2009, pp. 220). Furthermore, the quintessential force of Anna’s empowerment is epitomised through her refusal to defend her abusive father at his
Considered an epic feminist text, Melika Burke pierces through the illusion of female freedom underpinning Year of Wonders to reveal its underlying paradox.
Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders (2001) is one of the most grievously misinterpreted and misunderstood texts of the twenty first century. Brooks’s (2009), who proudly identities as a “modern western feminists”, intertwines her experience as a Middle Eastern war correspondent where she observed the emancipatory potential of women with the historical scaffold of the 1665 Bubonic Plague to create a feminist utopian heroine: Anna. This rich exploration of the female identity has elevated the novel to an erroneously distinguished position by depicting the text as quintessentially feminist. Cultural Critic Lee (2012) encapsulates this prevailing interpretation by praising the “[s]trong feminist consciousness operating through Year of Wonders”. However, this analysis is shrouded in historical, and most unfortunately, feminist fallacies. A critical lens reveals the underlying problem with asserting that Year of Wonders belongs in the feminist canon through identifying the unintended depiction of power, which reifies, rather than challenges, the dominant discourse surrounding female empowerment. Therefore, an alternative and even resistant reading of Year of Wonders is …show more content…
Through this, Anna clearly begins to identify a problem within the dichotomisation of gender, which foregrounds the dominant interpretation of the text as challenging the notion of essentialism, the view that there is some natural, given essence of the feminine that is universal and immutable (Barry, 2009, pp. 220). Furthermore, the quintessential force of Anna’s empowerment is epitomised through her refusal to defend her abusive father at his