Rule-guided Expression: Gender Dissent across Mediated Literary Works

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the examination of rule-guided cultural and thematic battles enacted by women writers in two historical moments—the late nineteenth- and early twenty-first centuries—against the dominant cultural institutions of their time. Such battles, evaluated in the Anglophone world of letters at large, bring to light women’s often inconspicuous strategies for legislating new mechanisms of written expression within the established authoring and reading practices of their times. The recurring patterns we detect in these strategies offer a point of departure to explore continuities connecting the woman’s right to productive labor movement in the nineteenth-century with woman’s right to control their own digital labor in the twenty-first century—two moments in time when varying feminist discourses were converging around the conceptualization of “new woman.”[1] Both the mobility-limited late nineteenth century society and the apparently digitally-democratized twenty-first century seem to call for female writing subjects, who are often seen at the margins of the “social factory,”[2] to intervene through specific literary acts of disturbance. Such acts of disturbance, when closely analyzed, can be seen as both exposing and altering the rule-based systems in which these authors are confrontationally embedded. In assessing how the tensions generated by an increasingly mechanized, industrialized, electronic, and software-automated trajectory over the last centuries are reflected in literary expression by select female writers, we discovered that the acts of literary subversions enacted by these women share many a commonality when it comes to their basic operative functioning. First, they usually unfold by means of a three-piece set of features that we illustrate in our close readings of the specific works we discuss. Second, they seem to occur in historical periods characterized by rapid modernizing changes marked by the appearance of technological networks. Third, these acts can be most clearly seen as similar once we look at them from, as it were, a typological perspective:[3] what nineteenth-century print authors envisioned for the heroines and female characters of their novels seems to be eventually re-enacted and transposed into concrete authorial practices by female writers operating in born-digital environments. Without claiming such a tendency to work as a fundamental prerogative of all women’s writing or without contending that it constitutes an ongoing inclination reaching well beyond the epochs we are considering, the mere existence of the recurring structures we uncover in this paper proves both intriguingly meaningful and undoubtedly promising in terms of further scholarly interrogation on the issue of gender-based forms of expression in the literary field