RC for the day, a little late though! @Highway66 @jay3421 @prate3k @sav-9 @pulkit_malik @Master-Yoda
In the hope of settling this dispute, I ask you to consider the history of literary women. It turns out, oddly,
to be also a prolific history of "men," among whom the most celebrated are Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell
(Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë), George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), George Sand (Amandine Aurore Lucie
Dupin), Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Vernon Lee (Violet Paget).
The motive behind these necessary masquerades is hardly an urge to hide. Instead, it is a cry for recognition
and a means of evading belittlement, or worse yet, the curse of not being noticed at all. The most pointed
symptom and symbol of this pervasive fear is the poignant exchange between the 20-year-old Charlotte
Brontë and Robert Southey, England's poet laureate. Humbly and diffidently, she had sent him a sampling
of her poems, trusting that he might acknowledge the worth of what she knew to be her "single, absorbing,
exquisite gratification."
His notorious reply, while conceding her "faculty of verse," is nearly all that remains of his once powerful
fame. "Literature," he chided, "cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more
she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a
recreation." If such condescending sentiments leave a contemporary writer feeling sick at heart, Brontë
thought the letter "kind and admirable; a little stringent, but it did me good."
The Orange Prize, then, was not born into an innocent republic of letters. Nor need we thumb through past
centuries to discover the laureate's enduring principle. After gaining a modicum of notice following an
eclipse lasting years, I was once praised, as a kind of apology, by a prominent editor with these surprising
words: "I used to think of you as a lady writer" - an inborn condition understood to be frivolous and slight,
and from which recovery is almost always anomalous.
So much for the defense of a reparative award dedicated solely to writers who are women. Advocacy of this
sort, vigorously grounded as it is in a darker chamber of the literary continuum, is not the Orange's only
defense. We are reminded that there are, abundantly, prizes for regional writers, for black writers, for
Christian writers, for Jewish writers, for prison writers, for teenage writers, for science writers, and on and
on. Why must a prize for women's writing be the single object of contention?
Yet this argument will not hold water. Each such category signals a particular affinity, or call it, more
precisely, a culture (and in the case of Jews and Christians, a deeper and broader civilization), and women
are integral to all of them. To argue for femaleness-as-culture is to condemn imaginative and intellectual
freedom and to revert to the despised old anatomy-is-destiny.
Question
. The author is likely to agree with which of the following?
(a) Women writers look for recognition from their male counterparts and this has led to their
subservience in the field of literature.
(b) Orange prize is another form of the old condescending attitudes of the literary establishment
towards women.
(c) The prizes given exclusively to cultural groups are justified but the same cannot be said for
prizes exclusive to women.
(d) Women writers have had to face much derision in the past and the Orange Prize has come as
a form of reprieve.
Question
. Why does the author bring up the instance where she was called a 'lady writer' in paragraph 4?
(a) The author wishes to demonstrate the prejudiced views of an important individual.
(b) The author wants to prove that women writers are inherently different.
(c) The author wants to argue that there is a genuine case for the Orange prize being a reparative
measure.
(d) The author wants to demonstrate that opinions regarding women writers have not changed since
the time of Robert Southey.
Question. Why does the author ultimately concede 'this argument will not hold water'?
1. There are no awards that women writers are barred from competing for.
2. The award categorizes women writers as a separate culture.
3. The award works against the principles of intellectual freedom.
(a) 1 and 3
(b) 1 and 2
(c) 2 and 3
(d) Only 3