| In some of the most influential women's literature from the past two hundred years, female characters have evolved into fully empowered beings fighting to achieve a balance in their relationships with men. Representative works such as Jane Austen's Persuasion, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Virginia Woolf s A Room of One's Own, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, and Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman help explain the gender roles that exist and conceive of alternatives to these prescriptions. Using psychoanalytic theory and feminist criticism of scholars such as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, one can examine each writer's use of mirror imagery as an indication of her conception of the construction and maintenance of self, both within and outside of marriage. |
