Reflection: On Being a Woman in the Western Literary Tradition in Recognition of My White Privilege
As an English literature major in college, I spent nearly half a decade of my life studying literature of the English language written primarily by white, educated, wealthy, British or American men. I was required to take a 300 level class on the works of Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer in order to graduate, but I had to fight tooth and nail to take 200 level survey courses on gender and literature and ethnicity and literature despite my personal passion for and intellectual interests in these areas. As a woman, I have often felt inadequate, mutilated, and silenced in my dealings with the English education system of the United States because the experiences and the perspectives of people like me have been methodically undervalued and underrepresented by the academy and by our culture. It is difficult to be a female literary student because I am confronted daily by the reality that I cannot escape the shadow of thousands of years of patriarchy despite the most ardent efforts of contemporary artists, theorists, educators, and activists. And yet, despite the fact that I have experienced real pain and alienation due to the oppression of my identity as a woman, my language as a white speaker and writer of Standard English affords me mobility within the American English education system and status within the Western literary tradition that is largely unavailable to speakers and writers of nonstandard dialects. Although my perspective and my experiences are underrepresented, my language, the medium through which I communicate my identity and personhood, is privileged in the American academic system—an enterprise that has systematically distorted, compromised, silenced, and erased the voices of marginalized people throughout its history.