What Comes after the Ideology of Separate Spheres? Women Writers and Modernism

Abstract

One purpose of this book is to reveal some connections between nineteenth-century domestic and sentimental writing, feminist versions of modernism, and postmodern theories of social space, in which clear boundaries and oppositions give way to a network metaphor. As Donna Haraway suggests, this postmodern redefinition of space poses a major challenge to the opposition between public and private spheres that structures modern concepts of gender, an opposition usually referred to as the ‘ideology of separate spheres’. My argument, however, is that it is inaccurate to call this shift in concepts of space ‘postmodern’, since the oppositions between public and private, outside and inside, masculine and feminine begin to be unraveled at the beginning of this century. My focus will be on the ways in which modernist women writers reimagined domesticity in order to reject its positioning within the binary framework of the ideology of separate spheres. One result of this focus is to problematize some dominant periodizing concepts in both literary history and feminist historiography.1 KeywordsFeminist PoliticsDomestic EconomyModernist PeriodPrivate HomeWoman WriterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.