Engaging with Shakespeare: responses of George Eliot and other women novelists

Abstract

In Engaging with Marianne Novy considers the contributions of women novelists in shaping and responding to Shakespeare's cultural presence. Paying particular attention to issues related to gender or to ideologies of gender - especially the ways in which women writers use Shakespeare's plots of marriage and romantic love, his female characters, and the gender-crossing aspects of his male characters and his image - Novy traces a history of women trying to create a Shakespeare of their own. Charting an alternative course to the one emphasised by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic, which portrays the male-authored canon as alienating to women, Novy contends that the responses of women writers to Shakespeare often involve an appropriate creativity, a tradition of reading and rewriting male-authored texts to find their own concerns. After showing that women's fictional experiments as early as the 18th century and Jane Austen enter into dialogue with Shakespeare, Novy considers the engagements of women novelists with Shakespeare over the more than 250 years up to the 1990s. She discusses some women novelists' identification with his female characters, and the more surprising occasional identification with his status as an outsider, as well as the many different novelistic transformations of his plots. She also shows that for many women novelists, beginning with Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, the wide-ranging sympathy associated with Shakespeare could be a congenial ideal - up to a point. Novy demonstrates how Eliot's novels Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, especially, take on new meanings when seen as in dialogue with Shakespeare. She explores the changes between Eliot's responses and those of early 20th century modernists - Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, and Iris Murdoch - and then marks the emergence of more explicit feminist protest in the works of such novelists as Margaret Drabble and Margaret Atwood. Finally, she discusses recent works by Angela Carter, Nadine Gordimer, Gloria Naylor, and Jane Smiley, as well as Drabble, that engage with Shakespeare and contemporary cultural hybridity, thereby repositioning Shakespeare as part of a global multiculturalism. My hope in this book, writes Novy, not only to give women novelists a larger place in Shakespearean cultural studies but also to contribute to a feminist criticism that does not perceive men's writing as monolithic. I am trying to combine two different modes of feminist criticism - the kind that is interested in texts by women as a group, contrasting them with texts by men, and the kind that is interested in breaking down dichotomies between texts by women and texts by men.