Women, Space and Utopia, 1600–1800 by Nicole Pohl

Abstract

87 asymmetry of power between men and women does not change the fact that male prerogative was confronted by a number of challenges, not least the example of women’s political activism during the Civil War years, a legacy to which Restoration authors frequently returned . Women writers make only brief appearances in this study, which hardly registers their contributions to the period ’s debates. Did Restoration men project fears about their own authenticity and legibility onto women? Did they take up contradictory positions on the subject of women’s outward appearances? Did they acknowledge that they were not always objective in their assessments? The answer to all of these questions, as Outward Appearances amply demonstrates , is, ‘‘Yes.’’ But there seem to be larger questions raised by the book’s fascinating material. Alison Conway University of Western Ontario NICOLE POHL. Women, Space and Utopia , 1600–1800. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. 208. $110. How does a text come about in a specific context? How is it fashioned with specific words and ideas? And how, ultimately , does it change, if at all, the reality it is conceived in? Ms. Pohl wishes to show how women’s utopias between 1600 and 1800 were not only pictures of the ideal, but were intended to bring about changes. Her feminine utopia is not, to use John Austin’s words, a ‘‘constative utterance’’ that describes a situation or an event, but ‘‘performative’’: it adopts, interacts with, and changes contemporary reality. The utopian space conceived by early modern women writers is not isolated—imposed by men and accepted by women, a metaphysical haven, or an ideological prison—but aggressively public. To the modern reader, texts and utopian schemes belong to the metaphysical realm of ideas and not to the sphere of action, of things that happen and matter in public reality. Ms. Pohl wishes to address the distancing of the feminine ‘‘individual’’ from her ‘‘socio-political space’’ and to question this narrative of irreconcilable dualism. Overcoming the traditional presentation of feminine utopias as the supine outcome of maleconceived ideals of ‘‘domesticity, intimacy and retirement,’’ she reveals the utopian femininity of authors such as Wroth, Cavendish, Astell, and others as the product of their active ‘‘engagement with . . . contemporary debates.’’ In texts with clear ‘‘emancipatory strategies,’’ ‘‘women’s utopian thought’’ symbolically propounded the ‘‘recoding of representational spaces,’’ and occasionally led to the ‘‘invention of an innovative architectural space.’’ Ms. Pohl’s ultimate goal is to re-present traditionally accepted architectural and utopian spaces of feminine restriction, like the harem, the country house, the palace, and the convent, as ‘‘spaces of resistance.’’ Her compelling reconception of utopia grows out of Frederic Jameson’s argument that the textual conception of an ideal social space pushes its ‘‘transformative power . . . beyond its mere ideological imprisonment.’’ His utopianism is, in other words, a set of textual ‘‘tactics of resistance that deconstruct, resist or avoid . . . dominant ideology.’’ Despite the fact that in ‘‘traditional country house literature’’ women were represented as ‘‘domesticated into a onedimensional existence,’’ these and other utopian spaces paradoxically released 88 women from the material and textual ‘‘confinement within home/place.’’ It was in this spatial reconception that Ms. Pohl sees the preparation of the ‘‘feminocentric . . . culture’’ developed in ‘‘eighteenth-century women’s novels.’’ Illogically adopting the gendered space of social imprisonment as the fulcrum of their intellectual and utopian activities, the works by early modern women writers chosen by Ms. Pohl performed an appropriation of this ‘‘metonymic space,’’ at once ‘‘demystify[ing] and remistify [ing]’’ it in order to ‘‘make it their own space.’’ Rather than being a merely ideological reelaboration of the feminine space within the walls of a country house, a convent, an academy, or a harem, in the eighteenth century this genre became ‘‘fundamentally public ,’’ reflecting the formation of a literary genre ‘‘concerned with social transformation and change.’’ Ms. Pohl’s compelling reading of early modern literary appropriations of convents and religious academies exemplifies one of the textual loci of feminine utopias, where space was reconceived as entirely female, and associated with ‘‘visions of freedom, intellectual perfectibility and sensual pleasures.’’ These female communities were not fashioned as ‘‘fraught retreat[s] into exile ,’’ but as loci of friendship, of ‘‘intellectual , sensual...