Female Economic Exploitation: A Marxist Feminist Analysis of Woolf’s ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller’

Abstract

This study aims to demystify the underneath realities of the social structure in the context of Marxist feminism. Although the world has gone modern, and one observes the modernization in almost every field of life yet when we observe through our experiential actualities around the existing world, we realize that women have always been a victim of capital under the control of men. Ehrenreich (1976) relates that we find Marxist feminism as a kind of theory that emerges as a reunion of Marxism and Feminism. These two theories Marxism and Feminism particularly focus on all the possible forms and types of structured and well-planned inequalities which lead one to the episodic happening of ordeals of disadvantaged and disempowered individuals. In this research, the writer has tried to unravel woman’s exploitation through class stratification; social and emotional oppression using Marxist feminism as a literary vista. This research takes Woolf’s short story ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller’ in the context of Engel’s book (1902). The study of the selected short story concludes that Marxist feminism states that capitalism is the only reason for the woman’s oppression and subjugation and second-class status in society which can only be possible by bringing change in social structure.