Breaking through the Female “Fortress Besieged”: An Analysis of Su Wenwan’s Subjectivity Crisis in Fortress Besieged, Based on Woolf’s Economic Criticism of A Room of One’s Own

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-400-6_63How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Comparative literature; Modernism; Chinese literature; Literary studies; Gender studies; Cross-cultural analysis; Feminist literature

Abstract

Through a comparative lens, this paper explores how two literary works - Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” and Qian Zhongshu’s “Fortress Besieged” - illuminate the complex relationship between women’s independence and societal constraints. By examining Woolf’s imagined “Shakespeare’s sister” alongside the character of Su Wenwan, the study reveals striking parallels in how talented women were historically denied their creative and personal freedom. Despite their different cultural backgrounds, both characters embody the broader struggle of women against patriarchal systems that limited their access to education, economic independence, and artistic expression. The research particularly focuses on Woolf’s groundbreaking argument that women’s creativity is inseparable from their financial autonomy, while also investigating how male authors’ portrayal of female characters often failed to capture authentic female experiences. This comparative analysis offers fresh insights into the historical suppression of women’s voices in literature and society.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Junqing Zhou
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/05/15
TI  - Breaking through the Female “Fortress Besieged”: An Analysis of Su Wenwan’s Subjectivity Crisis in Fortress Besieged, Based on Woolf’s Economic Criticism of A Room of One’s Own
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Educational Development and Social Sciences (EDSS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 528
EP  - 536
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-400-6_63
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-400-6_63
ID  - Zhou2025
ER  -