Contemporary Feminist Criticism Research Articles

Elegant Economy in Elizabeth Gaskells Cranford: A Socialist Feminist Study

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was a Victorian writer who had to undergo various kinds of condescension for her writings. After bearing the stigma of being conformist, conventional, and meek as ascribed to her by the contemporary feminist critics, Gaskell’s writings are being revisited with a new feminist perspective in recent years. The present paper is also a humble attempt to rediscover the feminist dimension of her writings by exploring one of her novels, Cranford (1853), through a socialist feminist lens. Cranford presents such a social structure that is devoid of a Class system and constructed by women in a matrilineal society as against the capitalist patriarchal society of Drumble. This Matriarchal socialist social structure is based on the values of cooperation, humanity, and motherly care characteristic to the differently developed gendered subjectivity of women. The social change through the agency of woman foreshadows Gaskell’s far-sighted feminist views of the 1970s.

The Woman Who Hated Sex: Undine Spragg and the Trouble with “Bother”

Abstract Edith Wharton has long been associated with misogyny and prudishness, both by scholars and by popular critics. This article examines Wharton's 1913 novel The Custom of the Country alongside contemporary feminist criticism such as Ariel Levy's 2005Female Chauvinist Pigs to argue that Wharton's acid-tongued portrayal of The Custom of the Country's antiheroine Undine Spragg is evidence of her forward-thinking critique of the replacement of authentic female sexual experience with the consumer-driven publicity. In Zibrak's reading, The Custom of the Country emerges as a prescient portrait of a culture saturated in sexual imagery but devoid of sexual pleasure.

The Woman Who Hated Sex: Undine Spragg and the Trouble with “Bother”

Abstract Edith Wharton has long been associated with misogyny and prudishness, both by scholars and by popular critics. This article examines Wharton's 1913 novel The Custom of the Country alongside contemporary feminist criticism such as Ariel Levy's 2005 Female Chauvinist Pigs to argue that Wharton's acid-tongued portrayal of The Custom of the Country's antiheroine Undine Spragg is evidence of her forward-thinking critique of the replacement of authentic female sexual experience with the consumer-driven publicity. In Zibrak's reading, The Custom of the Country emerges as a prescient portrait of a culture saturated in sexual imagery but devoid of sexual pleasure.

“Something like mine”: Catherine Hutton, Jane Austen, and Feminist Recovery Work

Despite her output and connection to several well-known early nineteenth-century writers, Catherine Hutton has remained almost completely absent from the historical record. This essay begins some recovery work on Hutton, focusing on the ways in which she styled herself as a woman novelist and depicted women’s reading within her texts. In addressing the question of authorial self-fashioning, I also examine the comparisons Hutton made between herself and Jane Austen and build on the work of contemporary feminist critics to consider the benefits and drawbacks to reading understudied women writers in relation to Austen.

Transnational Complications: Reimagining Oroonoko and Women’s Collective Politics in the Empire

Transnational ComplicationsReimagining Oroonoko and Women’s Collective Politics in the Empire Basuli Deb (bio) introduction New dialogic spaces of transhistorical feminist rethinking emerge when women writers from earlier colonial eras are brought into conversations with contemporary feminist critics, especially those with transnational and common-front visions around issues of social justice. Engaging Aphra Behn in conversation with Gayatri Spivak, Lata Mani, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Chandra Mohanty, Jenny Sharpe, Avery Gordon, and Stephanie Camp, this essay makes an argument for a more nuanced account of colonial power relations by reopening the question of women’s solidarity across political and cultural boundaries in Aphra Behn’s novella Oroonoko. It challenges a host of criticism invested in focusing on the differences between Behn’s female narrator and her female protagonist, Imoinda. Instead this essay recognizes the different social locations of the two and yet examines how a desire for a protofeminist transnational politics between the imperial woman writer-narrator and the colonial subject in the seventeenth century had the potential to rupture the narrative of slavery. Thus, the term protofeminist is used in this essay as aspirational to define a historical desire for a cross-racial feminist politics of the “trans” within the empire—of the transnational, the transgressive, and the transformative whose praxis cannot be realized within the precincts of seventeenth-century plantation slavery. Its praxis is merely discursive and representational since it deploys the aspirations of the protofeminist within a presentist and praxis-driven frame of the transnational—a post-1990 paradigm attentive to inequalities and differences across national boundaries as well as alliances across national boundaries. Such a reading reimagines women’s collective politics within the empire when the fictional narrator is an alter ego of the author Behn—both mediating the life history of Imoinda, who, in addition to being a fictional character, also stands for the millions of slave [End Page 33] women whose lives were unrecorded and banished out of existence. Such a critical move of cross-racial politics contests the essentialist spaces that much of postcolonial and ethnic studies have fallen into in the name of resistance to traveling theory and an insistence on an airtight internal logic of social, historical, and theoretical locations. Moreover, this move underlines the ability of border crossing trans work to reflect on specificities of oppression as well as connected centers of violence against women. It also enables an examination of cross-border solidarities across history in unlikely places to generate long-overdue dialogues. Such unbound feminism reimagines more empowered and dialogic feminist futures in the twenty-first century through the transgressive possibilities of transnational feminist work that brings a seventeenth-century canonical text into conversation with the engaged political criticism of contemporary thinkers. Oroonoko, published in 1688, is one of the earliest literary works in English on the transnational slave trade. The “triangular trade” connecting the three corners of the Atlantic—Europe, Africa, and the New World of the Americas—constitutes the narrative scaffolding of the text.1 The novel recounts the story of a West African prince from Coramantien (contemporary Ghana) called Oroonoko and his beloved, Imoinda, who become slaves in the early 1660s on the Parham sugar plantation in Surinam on the northern coast of South America. The British founded the colony of Surinam in 1650 in a region whose indigenous inhabitants were the Arawak Indians and lost the colony to the Dutch in 1667. The novel is largely an eyewitness account by an English narrator on the Parham plantation about the lives of Oroonoko and Imoinda in Surinam. The narrator is the daughter of the newly appointed governor of Surinam, who died during the family’s voyage to the colony for his new position. However, the narrator also shares with the reader the lives of Oroonoko and Imoinda in Coramantien, before they arrived in Surinam as slaves. Oroonoko is the grandson of the hundred-year-old king of Coramantien, and Imoinda is the daughter of the Coramantien general and Oroonoko’s mentor, who died saving Oroonoko’s life in a battle. Imoinda is sold into slavery by the Coramantien king after Oroonoko breaks into the king’s harem on hearing that his grandfather has claimed Oroonoko...

Beyond Viagra: Sex Therapy in Poland

In the 1970s and 1980s, Poland, like most other countries in the region, provided not only unlimited access to abortion and contraceptives, but also a liberal sex education. This period moreover constituted a golden age in sexology in the country. Sexual science developed as a holistic discipline, embracing achievements in medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, and religious studies, providing recourses for sex education and therapy. Sexuality was perceived as multidimensional and embedded in relationships, culture, economy, and society at large. This approach was fundamentally different from the biomedical model, which started to develop rapidly in the United States after Masters and Johnson's publication of Human Sexual Response in 1966. Contemporary feminist critics like Leonore Tiefer point out that Masters and Johnson's approach initiated the process of biomedicalisation and commodification of sexuality and led to the domination of pharmaceutical industries in sex therapy. Meanwhile, owing to the given political and economic context, socialist sexual science was not tied to the market and remained holistic until the advent of capitalism in the 1990s. Along with the invention of Viagra, the free market significantly reshaped the field of sex therapy, giving priority to pharmacotherapy, promoting new sexual dysfunctions, and marginalising other forms of treatment. Nevertheless, Polish sexology was not fully transformed. It proved surprisingly resilient to the influence of pharmaceutical industries and the holistic approach to sex therapy remains highly valued and often practised; pharmacotherapy is perceived as insufficient and sexual dysfunctions, including erectile dysfunctions, are frequently treated using psychotherapy, which takes into account not only psychological but also social, economic and cultural issues. This article is based on the author's ethnographic and archival research on the development of Polish sexology since the 1970s. She focuses on the relationship between sexuality, socialism, and capitalism and shows that an analysis of socialist sexology sheds light on the nature of the contemporary hegemonic understating of sexuality and sex therapy.

Kristeva before Kristeva: Gender and Creativity in Russian Symbolism

In this article I will look at Julia Kristeva's theory of subjectivity and creativity in the context of early Russian modernism, that is, Russian symbolism. My anachronistic way of with is based on my argument that comparing Kristeva and early modernist culture and its gendered aspects will provide a deeper understanding of Kristeva's theoretical background and of how Kristeva's concepts and theoretical thinking help analyze the gendered aspects of the aesthetics and literary practices of Russian symbolism. Moreover, Kristeva's thinking enables us to distinguish the specific circumstances these practices create for women writers. Kristeva's theoretical thinking (along with that of her contemporary feminist critics) provides analytical tools and new viewpoints for reading women writers' strategies in the gendered and androcentric aesthetical discourse of Russian symbolism. I will begin by discussing Kristeva's thoughts on subject and creativity from the point of view of gender and some feminist responses to those thoughts. After that I will show the (Russian) fin-de-siecle roots of her thinking. Feminist responses to Kristeva and her theoretical background in fin-de-siecle culture lead me to the women writers of Russian symbolism. I will look at their reactions to contemporary aesthetical discourse, and, as a case study, I will analyze the strategies of two women poets, Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) and Liudmila Vilkina (1873-1920). They developed special strategies for constructing female creative subjectivity within androcentric symbolist discourse, and, as I will show in the last part of this article, these strategies resonate with Kristeva and her feminist critics. CREATIVITY AND GENDER IN KRISTEVA Kristeva builds her understanding of creativity and the creative process by using the central concepts of the semiotic and the symbolic. In general, these concepts refer to the two orders that participate in the constitution of the subject, production of discourse, and regulation of social relations, as Elizabeth Grosz summarizes (49). In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva uses the concepts of the semiotic and the symbolic to explain the creative process and especially modernist artistic practices and their political significance. The symbolic process refers to the establishment of sign and syntax and to grammatical and social constraints. The semiotic process can also be understood as a kind of pre-verbal energy at work in the text, the source of inspiration. In Kristeva's thinking, the semiotic is related to the child's pre-oedipal relationship with the mother, the mother's body, and, therefore, the feminine. In contrast, the symbolic process refers to the paternal, masculine function. While the symbolic maintains order, the semiotic includes revolutionary aspirations, which threaten order. Kristeva introduces into the formulation of the semiotic the concept of chora: a non-expressive (in the sense of non-verbal) totality underlying language, a non-spatial, non-temporal receptacle of energy and drives. Kristeva borrows the term chora from Plato, who describes it as an invasive and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible (Plato qtd. in Roudiez 6). The uncertain and undetermined chora lacks thesis or position, unity or identity. Like the semiotic, the chora is qualified as feminine in the sense that it precedes any formations of subjectivity and phallic identity (Smith 21). Although Kristeva was a central thinker in the feminist discussions of the 1980s, her ideas about female subjectivity and women's creativity were controversial. Because the semiotic and the symbolic orders are so strongly marked by gender difference, Kristeva's thought has evoked many questions about the differences between the creativity and subjectivity of men and women. However, to this most important question, her theory does not give any clear answer. …

“Andrea Dworkin was probably turning in her grave”: Pornography, (Post)Feminist Backlash and Contemporary Women's Memoirs

Summary In a comment that is perhaps representative of new voices in contemporary feminist criticism, Natasha Walter states that in the 1970s “[a]ll treatments of sexuality in culture were forced to reveal the imprint of sexism”. She concludes that a minority of feminists perceived “any hint of sexuality in culture” as “proof of sexism” (Walter 1999: 112). Now, in the 21st century, the representation of dominant female sexuality, across all mediums of visual and textual expression, predominantly avoids the usual cultural trap of promiscuity; the image of the uncontrolled nymphomaniac, and it is this climate of active female sexual expression and a more inclusive (post)feminist discourse that has seen recent erotic non-fiction memoirs thrive. In this article, I will discuss three recent erotic memoirs: Melissa P.'s One Hundred Strokes of the Brush before Bed (2004), Toni Bentley's The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2006) and Catherine Townsend's Breaking the Rules: Confessions of a Bad Girl (2008). In the context of these memoirs, I will discuss the manner in which the texts celebrate, rather than contest, the eroticisation of male power and sexual values ascribed by the mainstreaming of the sex industry, and demonstrate how, in the context of postfeminist rhetoric and second-wave feminist backlash, this eroticisation of male power is represented, contentiously and divisively, as ostensibly liberating to women.

Rebel Citizenship and the Cunning of the Liberal Imaginary in Thelma & Louise

Through a reading of the critical reception of Thelma & Louise, this essay argues that contemporary feminist criticism would benefit by taking into account its often tacit presupposition of a liberal model of citizenship. Critics praise the film for challenging the normative masculinity of film genres or for subverting the phallocentrism of the symbolic order, failing to note that the women's gender rebellion serves to support liberal principles. Yet the variants of feminist theory the film supposedly stages understand these principles as alibis for phallocentrism. Such analyses of the film thus contradict the premises on which their authorizing theories depend.

Honoring Our Mothers: The Legacy and Life of Mitzi Myers

Culturing the Child 1690–1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers. Ed. Donelle Ruwe. Lanham, MD: Children's Literature Association and Scarecrow P, 2005. Mitzi Myers was unquestionably the founding mother of eighteenth-century children's literature criticism, and her untimely death was a great loss to the scholarship of that important period. Myers's readings challenged and routed the ad feminam attacks on women writers for children by Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Dickens, attacks that influenced children's literature criticism and history for many generations afterward. Because of Myers we admire rather than vilify the accomplishments of those redoubtable women who challenged their periods' assumptions about women and children. At the same time she disputed and revised past assessments, Myers inspired contemporary feminist critics to evaluate women writers not only as feminists but also as writers and thinkers, placing them in context and not succumbing to what C. S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery," the "presentist" assumption that we always know better than persons in the past. Myers's work taught us that we should not uncritically repeat past truisms without considering their source; as well, she showed us that no critical theory, however vast its claims, can replace careful reading and consideration of the cultural and historical contexts in which a text was produced. The essays in Culturing the Child 1690–1914 provide a fitting tribute to Mitzi Myers in their variety, their range, and their methodology. Culturing the Child is divided into four parts, each of which highlights a different aspect of Myers's legacy. The first, "Creating the Contexts of Children's Literature," focuses upon the eighteenth-century writers and publishers of children's books who laid the groundwork for later developments in children's literature. Chapter one, an essay by Ruth Bottigheimer on the usually yawn-inducing topic of bibliography, ought to be required reading in any graduate class in children's literature for the valuable overview she gives of what is and is not known about early children's books, publishers, and popularity. [End Page 218] Bottigheimer not only convinces readers of the rewards of more systematic study of books as objects rather than as simple containers of text (retrievable through microfilms and reproductions), she also provides the conceptual tools needed to perform such study. Next, Karen E. Rowe's article relates a useful history of the discourse and debates surrounding the eighteenth-century fairy tale, its production, and its suitability for children. Contemporary histories of children's literature are well versed in the debates between realism and romance; however, discussions about the role of the imagination, morality, and narrative within the fantasy tradition are not so widely known. Rowe's article provides important background on that debate, beginning with Charles Perrault and culminating in Mrs. Trimmer's repudiation of the form. Last in this section, Julia Briggs's enjoyable and illuminating essay on women, children, and reading in the eighteenth century demonstrates the extent to which the educational theories of John Locke and others were being debated in children's and adult literature of the time, from Samuel Richardson's Pamela to John Newbery's Goody Two Shoes and Sarah Fielding's Little Female Academy. This essay, too, will be valuable reading for any student of the eighteenth century interested in adult-child cross-writing, another important thematic strand in Mitzi Myers's critical oeuvre. Part two of Culturing the Child focuses on the "Rational Dames" so central to Myers's criticism. These chapters build upon her foundation and develop new avenues for further study. William McCarthy's fascinating study of the pedagogy behind Anna Barbauld's Lessons for Children helps us to appreciate the loving sensitivity she had for children's educational needs and does a great deal to recuperate her work for further study. Marjean Purinton's essay on Hannah More is informative and historically situated, albeit too prone to finding More's work insufficiently feminist and therefore wanting. M...

Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Modern conceptions of literature and of industrial capitalism emerged during the 18th century. Laura Mandell suggests that only an analysis of sexism can demonstrate how these concepts became linked. Offering a previously unexplored view of derogatory representations of women, this text demonstrates the ways in which a range of authors used misogyny to promote, resist and critique new capitalist forms. The book also reveals how contemporary feminist critics have misunderstood misogyny's function. Arguing that the oppression of women may not have been the primary goal, Mandell shows that passionate feelings about socioeconomic changes were displaced onto representations that inspired hatred of women and disgust with the female body. Such displacements also played a role in canon formation, which Mandell sees as the result of practices designed to stimulate readers' desires to identify with male poets.

Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery

Why do physicians who've taken the Hippocratic Oath willingly cut into seemingly healthy patients? How do you measure the success of surgery aimed at making someone happier by altering his or her body? Sander L. Gilman explores such questions in Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, a cultural history of the connections between beauty of body and happiness of mind. Following these themes through an impressive range of historical moments and players, Gilman traces how aesthetic alterations of the body have been used to cure dissatisfied states of mind. In his exploration of the striking parallels between the development of cosmetic surgery and the field of psychiatry, Gilman entertains an array of philosophical and psychological questions that underlie the more practical decisions routinely made by doctors and potential patients considering these types of surgery. While surveying and incorporating the relevant theories of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Karl Menninger, Paul Schilder, contemporary feminist critics, and others, Gilman considers the highly unstable nature of cultural notions of health, happiness, and beauty. He reveals how ideas of race and gender structured early understandings of aesthetic surgery in discussions of both the abnormality of the Jewish nose and the historical requirement that healthy and virtuous females look normal, thereby enabling them to achieve invisibility. Reflecting upon historically widespread prejudices, Gilman describes the persecutions, harassment, attacks, and even murders that continue to result from bodily difference and he encourages readers to question the cultural assumptions that underlie the increasing acceptability of this surgical form of psychotherapy. Synthesising a vast body of related literature and containing a comprehensive bibliography, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul will appeal to a broad audience, including those interested in the histories of medicine and psychiatry, and in philosophy, cultural studies, Jewish cultural studies, and race and ethnicity.

10.1023/A:1006149922635

Standards of reasonability play an important role in some of the most difficult cases of rape. In recent years, the notion of the "reasonable person" has supplanted the historical concept of the "reasonable man "a s the test of reasonability. Contemporary feminist critics like Catharine MacKinnon and Kim Lane Scheppele have challenged the notion of the reasonable person on the grounds that reasonability standards are "gendered to the ground" and so, in prac- tice, the reasonable person is just the reasonable man in a gender neutral guise. These critics call for the explicit employment of a "reasonable woman" standard for application to the actions of female victims of rape. But the arguments for abandoning a gender-neutral standard are double-edged and the employment of gendered standards of reasonability is likely to have implications that are neither foreseen by, nor acceptable to, advocates of such standards. Reasonable agent standards can be dropped, in favor of appeals to the notion of a "reasonable demand (or expectation)" by the law. However, if reasonable agent standards are to be retained, gendered versions of such standards are not preferable to gender-neutral ones.

Dostoevsky's "The Idiot": A Critical Companion

This book is designed to guide readers through Dostoevsky's The Idiot, first published in 1869 and generally considered to be his most mysterious and confusing work. The volume begins with an introductory section comprising two essays: the first looks at where, when, and how The Idiot was written; the second introduces the major characters. The essays in the second section guide the reader through the plans and notebooks out of which the novel evolved; use contemporary feminist criticism to shed light on how this novel explores alternatives to traditional roles; examine the ways in which the novel reflects Dostoevsky's concern with apocalypse, modernity, and time; and address the ways in which the novel's hero, Prince Myshkin, can be compared to Christ. The final section offers an exceptionally rich collection of primary sources, including letters by Dostoevsky concerning The Idiot, and an annotated bibliography.

Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism

Contemporary feminist critics have often described Surrealism as a misogynist movement. In Woman, Katharine Conley addresses this issue, confirming some feminist allegations while qualifying and overturning others. Through insightful analyses of works by a range of writers and artists, Conley develops a complex view of Surrealist portrayals of Woman. Conley begins with a discussion of the composite image of Woman developed by such early male Surrealists as Andre Breton, Francis Picabia, and Paul Eluard. She labels that image Automatic Woman-a term that comprises views of Woman as provocative and revolutionary but also as a depersonalized object largely devoid of individuality and volition. This analysis largely confirms feminist critiques of Surrealism. The heart of the book, however, examines the writings of Leonora Carrington and Unica Zurn, two women in the Surrealist movement whose works, Conley argues, anticipate much contemporary feminist art and theory. In concluding, Conley shows how Breton's own views on women evolved in the course of his long career, arriving at last at a position far more congenial to contemporary feminists. Woman is distinguished by Katharine Conley's judicious understanding of how women-and the image of Woman-figured in Surrealism. The book is an important contemporary account of a cultural movement that continues to fascinate, influence, and provoke us.

Thomas Hardy and paradoxes of love

H.M. Daleski re-examines Thomas Hardy's novels, emphasizing the love triangles that populate his work. He also rebuts contemporary feminist criticism of Hardy by showing that Hardy actually was sympathetic to his female characters. Through careful study of these novels, Daleski refutes the generally accepted reason for Hardy's abandonment of fiction at the height of his success. The book is accessible to readers with an interest in Hardy and his novels, as well as in the study of gender in English literature.

Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism

Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism. Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, editors. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. vii + 326 pages. As Hedges and Fishkin write in their introduction to Listening to Silences, the volume intended both to trace a genealogy and to offer a spectrum of the ways in which contemporary feminist criticism continues to respond to Tillie discoveries. This new volume, in effect, listens to the work begun in groundbreaking 1978 volume Silences. According to Hedges and Fishkin, text initiated a new discourse in feminist thought and, based on the continued reaction to Olsen, clearly continues to matter. Listening to Silences not only responds to, but extends examination of the unnatural external silencing of women's literary voices through its use of the current contexts of postmodern feminist thought and American cultural In the same manner that Olsen integrated the personal and the political (as Fishkin notes), so Listening to Silences illustrates the connections between personal expression and the more public conditions of that Hedges and Fishkin have arranged Listening to Silences in three parts, each demonstrating examination of silence in a different arena of cultural The first section includes four essays focusing on work, ranging from personal accounts of the effect of life and work on scholars, writers, and theorists to critical considerations of short story collection Tell Me a Riddle. These two critical articles, by Deborah Silverton Rosenfeldt and Constance Coiner, demonstrate how the various ideologies identifiable in text weave a complex dynamic of complicity and resistance to the dominant culture. The anthology's second section contains six readings of women's fictions; as Hedges and Fishkin write, these are postmodernist critical approaches to silences, as well as other [approaches] that demonstrate the continuing applicability and relevance of many of the approaches Olsen pioneered. This section is notable both for the quality of the essays included, as well as the diversity both of the subject matter and of the readings of speech/silence. The various cultures represented in the texts critically examined include African American, Asian, Chicana, Native American, working class, and white European and American. Several of the articles present silence not as it is traditionally understood--a dehumanized condition--but as an empowering act in specific social/historical situations. For example, the self-silencing of Linda Brent, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl can be read in the context of slavery as empowering, as withholding information was one method a slave had of asserting autonomy, according to Joanne M. Braxton and Sharon Zuber. In the editors's desire not to create a hagiography of Olsen, they point to Carla Kaplan's essay, noting that it presents a major challenge to work. Kaplan rejects reading strategy based on an identification with the heroine, stating that this approach denies difference between reader and heroine. The seven essays of the third section move into the arena of the cultural production of criticism and intellectual knowledge, reflecting, as the editors note, Olsen's own insistence in Silences on the importance of the material conditions of cultural production. Various academic activities--teaching, criticism, activism--are engaged in these essays. A second essay by Constance Coiner analyzes the challenges of parenting in the academy, which she claims have their source in an institutional neglect of the family. …

George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: feminism, evolutionism, and the reconstruction of gender

analysis of the writings of two major Victorian intellectuals examines the crucial place of gender in the larger Victorian debate about nature, religion, and evolutionary theory. Demonstrating the primacy of Herbert Spencer's influence on George Eliot's thought, Nancy Paxton discloses the continuous dialogue between this profoundly learned novelist and one of the most formidable and influential scientific authorities of her time. Using rarely cited first editions of Spencer's published works, Paxton reveals that Eliot and Spencer initially agreed in supporting several of the goals of early Victorian feminism when they met in 1851. Paxton surveys all of Spencer's writing to show when and why he repudiated his early feminism and demonstrates Eliot's determined resistance to the most conservative tendencies of evolutionary theory in her representation of female sexuality, motherhood, feminist ambition, and desire. In comparing Eliot's and Spencer's evolutionary reconstruction of gender, the book draws on a wide variety of biographical, literary, and critical texts and on interdisciplinary scholarship about the relation between scientific and literary discourse in the nineteenth century. By thus reassessing Eliot's contribution to feminist thought, it presents a revolutionary reading of her novels which is informed by contemporary feminist criticism and the new historicism. This is an important book because of the questions it raises, the issues it covers, and the illumination it brings to Eliot and Spencer and to crucial problems in the nineteenth century: Paxton looks at the ways scientific data get turned into arguments about the nature of women in society, about women andeducation, about women and sexuality. work shows how truly current Eliot's novels are, no matter what their setting.--Barry Qualls, Rutgers University

The Spectacle of Absent Costume: Nudity on the Victorian Stage

The recent revaluation and exploration of ninetenth-century theatre has gone almost in parallel with the development of contemporary feminist criticism: yet the one approach has all too rarely meshed with the other. Here, Tracy C. Davis attempts a feminist critique of that distinctively Victorian phenomenon, the display of naked and near-naked female flesh in the theatre – at a time when even the legs of pianos were discreetly veiled in respectable drawing-rooms. She questions how the conventions of stage costume were able to defy conventional proprieties, how that defiance ‘served the heterosexual male hegemonic aesthetic’, and how it related to ways of ‘seeing’ nudity during the nineteenth century. Presently teaching in the Drama Department of the University of Calgary, Tracy C. Davis has contributed widely to theatrical journals, and her study of ‘The Employment of Children in the Victorian Theatre’ was included in NTQ6 (1986).

Feminist Perspectives on Science Studies

I want to suggest that what is distinctive about contemporary feminist criticism of science begins with the identification of gender as an analytic tool in the study of science. Roughly ten years ago, studies of women per se, or of sexual difference, gave rise (with the kind of inexorable logic of feminist inquiry that has been exhibited in other fields) to the study of the more global symbolic and structural work of gender labels. Our purpose in this move was not to privilege gender as a social marker, conspicuous though it may be, but rather to underscore and respond to the de facto privileging of gender that is already in evidence, and that has indeed been evident throughout the history of scientific discourse. We have argued that the language of gender has been employed, at least since the origins of modern science, as a persistent and privileged marker of precisely those distinctions that have been most central to the cognitive and social politics of scientific growth. From the seventeenth century on, particular ideals of masculine and feminine have been persistently called upon to delineate and order the domains of mind and nature, reason and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. Only a virile mind, properly cleansed of all traces of femininity, could effectively consummate Bacon's ideal of a chaste and lawful marriage between Mind and Nature-a sacred contract for leading Nature with all her children to bind her to [man's] service and make her [his] slave. Our intent in signaling the role of gender in scientific rhetoric was not to reinforce but to defuse the force of this rhetoric. To this end, it was necessary first to uncover the uses of gender in science that were already in existence, to expose the presence (and force) of gender imagery that was so familiar it had become almost invisible. In other words, our