Question

"The emancipation of women", James Joyce told one of his friends, "has caused the greatest revolution in our time."

Other modernists agree: Virginia Woolf, claiming that in about 1910 "human character changed" and illustrating the new balance between the sexes, urged, "Read the 'Agamemnon' and see whether your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra". D.H. Lawrence wrote "perhaps the deepest fight for 200 years and more has been the fight for women's independence".

But if modernist writers considered women's revolt against men's domination as one of their "greatest" and "deepest" themes, only recently, perhaps in the past 15 years has literary criticism begun to catch up with it. Not that the images of sexual antagonism that abound in modern literature have gone unremarked - far from it. We are able to see in literary works the perspective we bring to them and now that women are enough to make a difference in reforming canons and interpreting literature, the landscapes of literary history and the features of individual books have begun to change.

The author quotes James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence primarily in order to show that:

• A. These were feminist writers
• B. Although well-meaning, they were ineffectual
• C. Before the twentieth century, there was little interest in women's literature
• D. None of the above

Hint:

Notice the gap between what the writers said and when criticism caught up.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is C

The author opens the passage with quotations from James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, three of the most important modernist writers, each calling attention to women's independence as one of the defining struggles of their era. Joyce calls it the greatest revolution, Woolf points to a change in human character around 1910, and Lawrence calls it the deepest fight for 200 years and more. These are strong, deliberate statements from major literary figures.

The passage then makes its real point: despite these writers flagging the theme as central, formal literary criticism did not seriously engage with it until fairly recently, perhaps in the past 15 years. This gap between what the writers themselves were saying and what critics were actually studying is the reason the author brings in these three names. It shows that sustained critical attention to women's place in literature is a recent development, and that for a long stretch of time before this such interest was thin even though the writers themselves had already pointed the way.

Option 1 fails because the author never claims Joyce, Woolf or Lawrence were feminist writers, only that they noticed the theme. Option 2 fails because nothing in the passage suggests they were ineffectual, if anything their observations are treated as ahead of their time. Option 4 is unnecessary once a specific reason fits. The quotations exist to demonstrate that critical interest in women's literature was scarce until quite recently, which is option 3.