From Feminization of Fiction to Feminine Metafiction in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters and Woolf’s Orlando

Abstract

Feminism developed and widened its scope to different disciplines such as literature, history, and sociology. It is associated with various other schools and theories like Marxism and poststructuralism, as well. In the field of literature, feminist literary criticism managed to throw away the dust that cumulated on women’s writing and succeeded in raising interest in those forgotten female artists. Some critics in the field of feminism claim that there are no separate spheres, masculine and feminine, whereas others have opted for post-feminist thinking. Some women writers used metafiction to write literary criticism. Therefore, how do Gaskell and Woolf implement metafiction in their stories? Accordingly, this work aims at shedding light on Wives and Daughters by Gaskell and Orlando by Woolf to tackle metafiction from a feminist perspective. Examples from both novels about intertextuality, narration, and other aspects, that are part of metafiction, will be provided to illustrate how and where metafiction is used.