Assignment task: You are asked to consider the following editorial statements from The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English:
Indeed, the traditional polarities of angel and monster, virgin and whore, lady and madwoman were constantly eroticized in [the later-twentieth-century]. The nineteenth century had praised women for purity and decorum while blaming them for passion and desire, but the second half of the twentieth century virtually reversed those moral priorities; contemporary writers usually blamed women for frigidity and praised them for sexiness. (Gilbert and Gubar, 566)
AND
Whether they wrote for themselves as feminists or not, women writers after 1940 wrote out of a double-consciousness: on the one hand, a newly intense awareness of their role as female artists who had inherited an increasingly strong tradition and, on the other hand, a newly protective sense of their vulnerability as women who inhabited a culture hostile to female ambition and haunted by eroticized images of women. (Gilbert and Gubar, 577)