Изучение семантических особенностей медиа-текстов с тематической доминантой «Искусство» при обучении письменной речи на уроках английск

for "female values", who could say what they are? If, as Woolf claims, the values of literature are at any given moment the reflection of the values of life, then we are living in an era in which the female is once more devalued and the male pre-eminent.

Recently, reading Chekhov's Three Sisters, it struck me that the question of female self-expression – let's call it "women's writing" – becomes confused precisely where the attempt is made to concretise it. Chekhov's play is based on aspects of the lives of the Brontë sisters; the three women, Olga, Irina and Masha, suffer not only from the confinement and tedium of provincial life but from something antithetical in their relationship to reality. What they feel is

not embodied by what they are. They look back to childhood as a time of edenic simplicity and happiness – as children they did not recognise gender as destiny and limitation – but now all their hopes for accomplishment, for "becoming", have transferred themselves to their brother Andrey. The sisters ponder marriage, love, motherhood, paid work, and yet can find no answer in any of  them. It isn't just female powerlessness that causes the difficulty: it is something more, a force that bears a special hostility to the actual. There is nothing they can be or become that will discharge it. This force might be called creativity; what is interesting is Chekhov's decision to omit writing from his representation of the situation, and indeed he is careful to maintain only the lightest connection in the play with the extremity of the Brontës' world. Both the suffering and the writing are transposed into something less tangible and more generalised, something that touches on the nature of woman herself. Woman is filled with visions and yearnings that are never matched by reality; she has a power of visualisation, of imagination, that her lack of worldly power forever frustrates. Yes, she might produce literature out of this conflict in her being. But she is more likely to produce silence. And in Chekhov's version, the conflict between being and becoming grows more severe as life advances, because the space for intangibility shrinks. Irina and Olga are made to share a room because their sister-in-law wants Irina's room for her new baby. Thus the woman who has embraced what Woolf calls the "masculine values", who agrees to exist as woman on male terms, gains a territorial advantage over the woman who

has not. Moreover, the two types of woman have become mutually hostile. The woman who has her being in marriage and motherhood has become part of antithetical reality, revoking property from the woman who remains in a condition of intangible femininity.

It may be, then, that the room of one's own does not have quite the straightforward relationship to female creativity that Woolf imagined. She, after all, had by dint of circumstance always had a room and money of her own, and perhaps being the eternal conditions of her own writing they seemed to her indispensable. Yet she admits that the two female writers she unequivocally

admired – Jane Austen and Emily Brontë – wrote in shared domestic space. The room, or the lack of it, doesn't necessarily have anything to do with writing at all. It could be said that every woman should have a room of her own. But it may equally be the case that a room of her own enables the woman writer to shed her links with femininity and commit herself to the reiteration of "masculine values". The room itself may be the embodiment of those values, a conception of

"property" that is at base unrelated to female nature.Woolf confesses that she does not know what women are: they have left so little trace behind them, she says, have observed such a profound silence over the centuries that they are virtually unhistoried. The woman artist must grasp the scanty threads of her forebears – Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës. She must

cling on to what representation there is. Yet Chekhov is perhaps the more perceptive on this point. The representation inspired him to consider the silence, not the other way around. It is the silence itself which interests him, and it interests him not as an absence but as a presence. Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, sees that presence in terms of Shakespeare's imaginary sister Judith:

a person she describes as being like her brother William in every respect except that of sex, who is frustrated and silenced and abused at every turn where he is recognised and advanced and congratulated. But Chekhov does not consider the female in terms of the male. He sees her as thwarted in her own being, as fundamentally unknown even to herself. In Three Sisters, Irina expresses this concept of silence as arising from a lack of connection between emotion and

actuality: "Oh, I used to think so much of love," she says. "I have been thinking about it for so long by day and by night, but my soul is like a costly piano which is locked and the key lost." She does not say who locked the piano, nor who lost the key; just that it was costly, and is silent.

Doris Lessing enlarges on these themes in her story "To Room Nineteen", where a conventionally – if not happily – married mother of four children begins to experience the desire to have a room of her own. The desire is a kind of plague: she doesn't know why she wants the room, nor what she will use it for. But she has to have it. She does feel a strong urge to free herself from the impingement of other people: this is the only explanation she can offer, that she wants to be where no one can get at her. First she designates an unused room in the family home as "hers", but this doesn't satisfy her. People can still find her there; the children come in and leave their toys on the floor. But more than that, she doesn't actually want to be in this room. It becomes clear that what she wants is to sever her ties with existence itself. She rents a room in a

seedy hotel in an unpleasant part of town, and every afternoon she goes there and lies on the bed. This room, room number 19, she identifies as "hers": she is upset when she arrives one afternoon to discover that it isn't free (it's a hotel, after all). To explain her disappearances, she tells her husband she is having an affair. He is pleased: he himself has affairs, and now he feels exonerated. One afternoon, in room 19, she kills herself. In Lessing's story, as in Three Sisters, writing is "silent". We know that Lessing, a woman, wrote it, as we know that the Brontës wrote. But in both cases, the self-expressive space of the actual drama remains unfilled: Lessing's

character does not go to room 19 to write bestselling novels, any more than Olga and Irina channel their frustrations into the production of literary works. Writing, "women's writing", thus comes to mean something else, something new: it describes what it is not, it defines its opposite, silence; it puts itself at the service of what negates it. In Lessing's story the room – the room of one's own – is death, death of female reality, death as an alternative to compromise. The author acknowledges that her writing is the kin of death and silence, that her "room" is a place menaced by compromise. And better death than the furtherance of "masculine values".

Woolf concedes that the woman writer might have to break everything – the sentence, the sequence, the novel form itself – to create her own literature. And she wonders, too, whether a situational link between women's lives and their work, far from impeding their writing, might actually be necessary to it; whether, in other words, it was because Austen wrote behind the door in the shared sitting room that Pride and Prejudice is the flawless novel it is. It is a requirement of art that the artist be unified with his or her own material. Stumblingly, Woolf hazards the guess that a "female" literature will be shorter, more fragmentary, interrupted, "for interruptions there will always be". And her own Mrs Dalloway might be read as a novel about its author's fear of her own ordinariness and triviality, her dread sexual ancestry with its silence and

compromise and mediocrity, the awful frailty of her expressive gift, without which, as she wrote in her diary, she believed she would be nothing at all. It may be that today's woman writer doesn't have much to do with the concept of  "women's writing". Feminism as a cultural and political crisis is seen to have passed. Marriage, motherhood and domesticity are regarded as so many choices, about which there is a limited entitlement to complain. If a woman feels

suffocated and grounded and bewildered by her womanhood, she feels these things alone, as an individual: there is currently no public unity among women, because since the peak of feminism the task of woman has been to assimilate herself with man. She is, therefore, occluded, scattered, disguised. Were a woman writer to address her sex, she would not know who or what she was addressing.

Superficially this situation resembles equality, except that it occurs within the domination of "masculine values". What today's woman has gained in personal freedom she has lost in political caste. Hers is still the second sex, but she has earned the right to dissociate herself from it.

In this context Simone de Beauvoir's assertion that one is not born a woman but becomes one gains a new kind of potency. If modern woman has no identity, her "becoming" is both more random and more mysterious. The danger, surely, is that she will "become" – violently – in those parts of life where her sex can be experienced as unitary. In other words, if the difference of gender goes unexamined – is made to seem as though it doesn't exist – the girl will be more,

not less, magnetised and fascinated by that difference. And she will look around her and see that the politicians, the captains of industry, the bankers and the power-brokers and the commentators are mostly men. This may be the reason – if there can be a reason – for the woman writer to risk taking femaleness and female values as her subject. "The fact is that the traditional woman is a

mystified consciousness and an instrument of mystification," De Beauvoir writes. "She tries to conceal her dependence from herself, which is a way of consenting to it." Some of the most passionate writing in The Second Sex concerns the ways in which women seek to protect their privileges and property under patriarchy by condemning or ridiculing the honesty of other women. This remains true today: woman continues to act as an "instrument of mystification" precisely where she fears and denies her own dependence. For the woman writer this is a scarifying prospect. She can find herself disowned in the very act of invoking the deepest roots of shared experience. Having taken the trouble to write honestly, she can find herself being read dishonestly. And in my own experience as a writer, it is in the places where honesty is most required – because it is here that compromise and false consciousness and "mystification" continue to endanger the integrity of a woman's life – that it is most vehemently rejected. I am talking, of course, about the book of repetition, about fiction that concerns itself with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life. The sheer intolerance, in 2009, for these subjects is the unarguable proof that woman is on the verge of surrendering important aspects of her modern identity. So the woman writer looking for work will still find plenty in the task of demystification, of breaking the silence that forms like fog around iterative

female experience. She won't win the Man Booker prize for writing the book of repetition: she will, as De Beauvoir perceived, irritate and antagonise rather than please. What's worse, she may have to give back some of her privileges to write it. She may have to come out of her room, and take up her old place behind the sitting room door.