Underpinning Weldon Letters To Alice

Module A: Comparative Study of Texts and Context
Elective 1: Exploring connections

Connections between texts open up new meanings of texts. What is your view?
Context changes due to audience, writers and time; though it still has the effect of influencing perspectives and creating/ reshaping meaning. Through the context, us as readers are able to establish an understanding of the time period, the writer and the purpose of the text. Through the exploration of both contexts relationships are established to enrich and illuminate connections on the unchanging nature and universality of certain values, ideas and language forms, also highlighting through implicit or explicit means relationships, writing and societal changes. Connections are
Underpinning Weldon’s stance on her values is her feminist attitude as a post 1970s feminist writer. The authorial intrusion and didacticism she manipulates through Aunt Fay demonstrates her belief in female equality and independence. Although Weldon shares this value with Austen, Weldon believes that marriage is not only way to power. She draws a parallel with unsatisfactory marriages that Austen revealed and modern day marriages of ‘bought Asian brides,’ that marriage ‘in order to survive’ is considered no better than slavery. Weldon downgrades the role Austen places on wealth in relationships, with less emphasis on income compatibility as a critical factor to marriage, but supports the notion of marriage for love and relationships based on
Throughout letter six “letter to a sister” the use of ‘a’ instead of ‘my’ in the title indicates that they are sisters though, this is not recognised or addressed; also the formal tone in which Fay addresses Enid , creates another disconnected feeling for the audience, we acknowledge that Fay wishes to repair the relationship “It is time we patch up this quarrel” the reinforcing impersonal, formal tone emphasises that this is truth the line being very direct and informative showing that Fay intends the argument to be predetermined. The push to reconnect with Fay’s sister gives a sense of the context; showing that Fay does not gain wealth or satisfaction in a man but through her relationships with family and her own independence this in itself shows the different context though still the importance of relationship in any time period. In both texts we are able to see the different characteristics of characters through relationships that they establish. We also see a connection between the character Fay Weldon and Elizabeth Bennet; both determined people who hold value in own independence and relationships for