Silence, Powerless in Writing

According to Jane Austen's Henry Tilney - "a woman's only power is the power of refusal" (Gilbert and Gubar, 458). If so, how does the women writer ever accomplish? The literary women of the 18th and 19th centuries were at a constant struggle, Gilbert and Gubar's "anxiety of authorship. If the author exemplifies the historical context of which s/he is in then how can women authors ever have been expected to break free from the oppressive patriarchal society of social prescriptions in which she lived? Not solely through refusal.

Women like Austen and the Bronte sisters suffered the costs of the expansion and publication of female creativity. They were tired of simply refusing patriarchal remedies (anorexia and such mental starvation), tired of simply keeping silent. They acted, "held mirrors up to the discomforts of their own nature", "refused the poisoned apples their culture offered them" by creating characters that embodies this same suffering (458). Austen's novel contained "foolish" women characters not because Austen was "foolish" herself but because it was necessary in order to act, to overcome the patriarchal prescriptions claiming female literacy as lunacy. If all Austen and Bronte did were refuse, women's literature would be nowhere near where it is today.

Todays women writer "feels that she is helping to create a viable tradition", but without the tenacity of the 18th and 19th century women, who truly worked from scratch, today's women would be just as oppressed(452). Today's women can find authority, though they are only able to do so "because their foremothers struggled in isolation that felt like illness...to overcome the anxiety of authorship that was endemic to their literary subculture" (453). These "foremothers" broke through the cast of this subculture and not by simply refusing. They were not silent, not in the least. They suffered the upmost "anxiety of authorship", the extreme "dis-ease", to create a present where today's women have literary predecessors they can be proud of. Women's only power is refusal? Bullshit.