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I am interested in the offer you have posted. I am including a written sample of an academic paper that I had written in university so that you can see my competency in the English language as well as my ability to write in an engaging manner. I hope you like what you read. Please feel free to contact me if you like my style.
"The image of the woman as a housewife is the single most dominant representation of womanhood in most cultures compared to the variety of images that are in circulation when it comes to men. Alongside possibly being the husband of a woman, a man exists with a separate identity which is complete in itself where he is himself as well while the image of the woman is negotiated primarily through her relationship with men. It is my aim in this paper to investigate the representation of the role of the woman by examining Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf in conjunction with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
The very first line of Mrs Dalloway establishes the role that Clarissa Dalloway has chosen for herself by her decision to marry a man and thereby be transported into a life where she has nothing else to do but to declare that “she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her.” in the preparation for the party. Betty Friedan quotes women in The Feminine Mystique who constantly engage themselves in activities that are believed to be the sort of things that all housewives do when they are ‘being housewives’ like hobbies, gardening, planning a party etc.
The image of the woman as a housewife is the single most dominant representation of womanhood in most cultures compared to the variety of images that are in circulation when it comes to men. Alongside possibly being the husband of a woman, a man exists with a separate identity which is complete in itself where he is himself as well while the image of the woman is negotiated primarily through her relationship with men. It is my aim in this paper to investigate the representation of the role of the woman by examining Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf in conjunction with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
Not only has the idea of the married woman been constructed as one who engages in housewifery, but she is also rendered even more unheard and unseen than what she was before marriage. She has lost even her name that was given her when she lived under her father’s roof. Her identity is subsumed within that of her husband so that she is identified through him by the addition of a prefix to his name. Her identity is always informed by her marital status. This goes as far as to indicate that Richard’s life is her life just like the way his name is now her name. Clarissa is very aware of the loss of identity that has taken place through marriage where she is not even ‘Clarissa’ anymore. Her identity is constituted and shaped by that of her husband’s.
She is no longer the girl that she was before she met Richard Dalloway or even when she married him. However, the marriage with Richard over Peter is a choice motivated by Clarissa’s will to self-preservation. “For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house which Richard gave her, and she him.” Interestingly, it is while she is going about her daily activities as a housewife that she feels the need to probe and affirm this calculated selection that she had made approximately twenty years ago. It is possible that she takes up this topic in an attempt to assure herself that her judgment was right despite that fact that it was Peter that she had loved, Peter being the one with whom she could engage with in arguments that were intellectually stimulating. However, “[Peter’s] demands upon Clarissa ... were absurd. He asked impossible things. He made terrible scenes.” Thus, it is a paradox that it is in her best interest to marry Richard Dalloway. Clarissa ascribes her motive to the question of space, an issue that Virginia Woolf herself deals with in her A Room of One’s Own. The room that Woolf writes about is a mental space that she feels is necessary not just for uninhibited self-expression, but also for co-existence or rather existence itself.. This kind of freedom in the relation between the sexes is possible only when it is backed up by financial independence where the woman does not need to depend on a man for her upkeep, but is free to do whatever she desires through the stability that economics allows her. It is only when the woman is unbound in this manner that she can even try to achieve a room for herself that is not merely material in nature but psychological as well. In fact the room is of value only when it has its basis in the psychology."
