Struggling, Stupendous Female Artistic Aspirations

Women’s struggles to express themselves artistically, whether in the visual arts or in literature, has never been easy. This writing evaluates women’s creative efforts, from Virginia Woolf’s fictional Judith Shakespeare, to the playwrights Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Inchbald, whose plays scarcely outlived their own era. In the twentieth century, Woolf shows Lily Briscoe painting despite discouragement, and Margaret Atwood and A.S. Byatt’s female characters describe similar artistic struggles to achieve success. The real-life efforts of Sylvia Plath show her creating through the traumas of her life, while Frida Kahlo undertakes a parallel struggle to create her amazing paintings through dreadful pain. These two consummate artists, Plath and Kahlo, immortalize woman’s agonizing self-expression in their verbal and visual portraits, overcoming considerable obstacles. This work presents the historical toils and fictional accounts of women artists in their attempts at artistic self-expression, proving that such efforts come at a high cost to the artist even to this day.