Women as Other: A Comparative Study of A Room of One’s Own and The Grass is Singing

Abstract

The contention of this research is to prove the hypothesis that considering woman as other, man has enslaved her in the panoptic power of patriarchy because of the interpellations of culture and society. The reason of becoming a woman as other is the interpellation of different ideological state apparatuses which teach that man is always dominant, governing, commanding and supreme and woman is always inferior, subservient and a menial being. My research adopts a qualitative approach and it uses comparative method of research. This research will be the comparison of a prose A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf which is a shrewd, sophisticated and influential text against the intellectual subjugation of women writers and a novel The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing which is a story of an independent, self-assured and a friendly woman who became a victim of marriage and her husband who was following traditional gender roles set by society to act as powerful, dominant and oppressive to his wife. Both the texts will be explicating the concept of other, the former describing how does a woman become other in the light of Michael Foucault’s concept of panopticism and the later delineating why does a woman become other in the light of Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology.