Didactic Fiction Research Articles

“’Tis yourself is a skeleton”: deathbed scenes and ethnic identity in Irish-American short fiction, 1895–1910

ABSTRACT Given the putatively axiomatic connection between Irishness and Catholicism, it is not surprising that the ubiquitous deathbed scene in Irish-American fiction is imbricated with the issue of ethnic identity. In romantic didactic fiction, deathbed scenes are not just religiously coded, but also consolidate diasporic figurations of Irishness. However, this article argues that this tradition is not the only guise in which deathbed scenes feature in Irish-American fiction. As we show, some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers of urban realist fiction criticise or satirise the convention to disrupt the dour moralism and ethnic essentialism of writers such as Mary Anne Sadlier and Hugh Quigley. Exploring the dynamics of diasporic memory in fiction by Clara E. Laughlin, James W. Sullivan, Harvey J. O’Higgins, and Kate M. Cleary, this article demonstrates that the deathbed scene is not just used to structure ethno-religious identities, but also to question and subvert such constructions.

Margaret Fuller, Faithful Female Sceptic: The Politics of (Not) Publishing the 1842 "A Credo"

Margaret Fuller, Faithful Female Sceptic:The Politics of (Not) Publishing the 1842 "A Credo" Caitlin Smith (bio) In 1842, Margaret Fuller sent William Channing a text nine years in the making: her personal formulation of belief, "A Credo."1 Building on Fuller's investigation of biblical authority during her 1833–34 Groton retreat, as well as her 1840–41 intensive reading period in Romantic religion, "A Credo" articulates Fuller's own religious beliefs. Fuller explains how she arrived at the "I believe" statements that structure "A Credo." She defines what she is not (a Christian, an irreligious infidel), and embraces an idiomatic definition of religion shaped by Romantic idealism. "A Credo" concludes by staking out a new religious identity for its author. Margaret Fuller would henceforth be a "faithful skeptic."2 But Fuller never publicized either her rejection of institutional Christianity, her self-created Romantic religion (which anticipates the cosmology of American spiritualism), or her new identity as a "faithful sceptic."3 Religious skepticism had been a blurrily defined but much-invoked bugbear in early American political rhetoric since the 1780s.4 Public concern over religious skepticism only increased in the 1810s–40s. Early nineteenth-century print culture documents a consistent anxiety about a vast amount of ambient infidelity. If not properly managed by religious [End Page 383] authorities, this imagined reservoir of doubt could erode shared religious values, thereby destroying the sociable bonds of trust between individual citizens and between citizens and institutions.5 In fact, religious institutions were undergoing significant reorganization in this period, as America's religious marketplace diversified and radically pluralized.6 And political distrust was on the rise, thanks to growing polarization over the morality of the South's "peculiar institution," visible tensions between state and federal orders of governance, and anxiety about economic volatility following the Panics of 1819–21 and 1837. For polemically minded ministers and partisan politicians alike, ambient infidelity provided a powerful rhetorical figure to focus and direct national anxieties. Discussions about skepticism and faith, unbelief and belief, went beyond baldly opportunistic attacks on imagined skepticism. They appeared in published journal debates between opponents termed Christians and Skeptics; theological treatises on the future of specific Christian traditions; new explorations of comparative religion; arguments between moderate, enlightened Deists and reform-minded atheists; and didactic fiction that staged dramatic conversions or deconversions to articulate what true religion meant.7 Transcendentalism emerged from and through these intellectual debates about religion and its future in American life. Though notoriously diverse in terms of philosophy and activism, American Transcendentalism was largely held together by an attempt to reconstitute essential religious sensibilities outside the calcified forms of outmoded creedal Christianity.8 Many of Fuller's male Transcendentalist peers argued that faith and skepticism (or belief and unbelief) were incorrectly construed as opposites and actually worked together to keep religion dynamic and alive. These arguments furnished ammunition to their critics, who (in)famously identified Transcendentalism as "the latest form of infidelity."9 Though Transcendentalist [End Page 384] thinkers disagreed considerably about what was meant by faith and by skepticism, and about the specifics of the merging process, they advanced structurally similar arguments about the nonoppositional nature of faith and skepticism. Given her male Transcendentalist peers' open advocacy of a faith-doubt synthesis, Fuller's decision to keep private her solution to the conflict is telling. "A Credo" embraces elements of the same German Romantic tradition that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker found attractive. Emerson saw skepticism as a temporary obstruction of both individual and universal-historical growth, and argued that overcoming doubt through action could help young men develop courage, valor, and conviction. Fuller's statement elevated obstructive skepticism to half of a mutually constitutive, dialectical dualism. And "A Credo" was not incidental to Fuller's developing thought. As she embraced and redefined gendered antiskepticism, she invented the figure of dynamic polar dualism that would later structure her idea of gender in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Finally, "A Credo" creates a feminine solution to obstructive skepticism. Fuller advocates an inward turn and mystical awakening over the heroic leap into world action advised by Goethe, Carlyle, and Emerson.10 Though Fuller's private writings record a consistent...

‘Horror and disgust’: Reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

This article started out as a keynote lecture at the ‘Coarseness of the Brontës: A Reappraisal’ conference in Durham on 10–11 August 2017. It raises issues in which the ‘coarseness’ of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) — its most striking characteristic, according to censorious 1848 reviewers — is a central element. These issues include the violent Hattersley marriage, the manifestations of physical desire (especially in women), profane language and the assault perpetrated by the book’s ‘hero’. Arguing that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a mature work of art and no moralizing tract, the article looks at the novel’s relationship with contemporaneous didactic fiction, especially temperance fiction. In addition to examining factors that appalled mid-nineteenth-century readers, it suggests reasons why modern readers may be shocked by aspects of this powerful novel which are not on record as upsetting people in 1848.

Knowing an Arab: Yasmina Khadra and the aesthetics of didactic fiction

ABSTRACTIn his trilogy of novels on contemporary misunderstandings between East and West, originally published in French between 2002 and 2006, Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra came across as an educational interpreter of Middle Eastern culture, Islamism, and self-sacrificing terrorism. The critics described Khadra as a messenger capable of representing the Eastern world in a way that made Westerners feel that they were getting to know it firsthand. However, Khadra had not visited the countries he depicted, and his representations were at times historically inaccurate. This article discusses the aesthetics of knowledge transfer through fiction, suggesting that the impression of learning from Khadra’s novels depends on the acceptance of the writer as an authority on the East. The neologism didafiction is proposed for this kind of realistic fiction in which polarizing rhetoric is integrated into a didactic aesthetics.

Assimilation and Indeterminacy: Moral Tales for Young People, Belinda, and Edgeworth’s Destabilizing Fictions of Maturity

Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) assimilates the philosophies and formal structures of the novel and the moral tale in order to de stabilize the representations of femininity in both forms. Scholars argue that the eponymous heroine models a form of rational, domestic femininity and functions as the work’s moral centre. By examining Belinda’s use of two competing narrative forms, this article finds that Edgeworth debunks the feminine models epitopemized in sentimental novels and didactic fiction by showing the flaws in both philosophies. This viewpoint reveals Belinda not as the novel’s moral centre but as a young woman experimenting with different modes of conduct (troped through narrative form) in order to find her own identity. This essay also reveals a connection between Belinda and Moral Tales for Young People (1801), Edgeworth’s first collection of adolescent novellas, and argues that Edgeworth’s novels should be studied in relation to her children’s fiction and educational manuals.

Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice by Sarah Raff (review)

Reviewed by: Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice by Sarah Raff James P. Carson Sarah Raff, Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Pp. v + 201. $29.95. Ever since the publication of Deidre Lynch’s collection Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (2000), Austen criticism has turned away from interpretations of the novels, celebrations of style, and commentary on such literary techniques and forms as free indirect discourse and the courtship novel. While biographical research remains central, the critical focus has shifted to fan culture, film and digital media, Austen’s influence on so-called chick-lit, and her position in the English heritage industry and the global marketing of romance. The importance of Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice, a work of literary criticism cannily titled as a self-help book, derives from Sarah Raff’s linking of stylistic, formal, and literary historical considerations, with a focus on Austen’s letters and a reconceiving of her fandom. Raff argues that Austen herself created the phenomenon of “Janeism,” an “exorbitant devotion” for the author that goes beyond what is normal in literary reception (1), precisely because “the author’s godlike care” extends to the reader’s love life (121). Austen establishes the position of readerly submission to authorial will through the speech-act of the “generalization” (1). In an account that elaborates on Geoffrey Bennington’s theorization of sententiousness, Raff terms generalizations “portals from the fictional world into the real world” (6). Generalizations resist fictionality, since they are subject “to the true/false distinction” (15). The reader’s acceptance of a generalization serves to eroticize her relationship to Austen, in the manner of the “‘pedagogical love’” in the plots of the novels (7). Like some of her heroes in relation to her heroines, Austen becomes Pygmalion to the reader’s Galatea. The didactic novel form that Austen inherits is simultaneously an erotic form, “for didacticism . . . is a mode of seduction” (7–8). Even while Austen critiques didactic fiction, her “works bring to extravagant culmination . . . the eighteenth-century ambition to intervene in the reader’s world” (164). Raff provides a psychoanalytic explanation for the operation of the generalization: the seductive power of the novel depends on transference from the love of knowledge or, in Lacanian terms, from love of the “subject supposed to know” (Lacan, qtd. in Raff, 17). [End Page 251] Raff’s focus on Austen’s construction of the author as both “cupid and lover” to the reader (132) results in a different grouping from the conventional Steventon/Chawton division of the novels based on the dates of the original drafts. Raff argues instead for the importance of publication date, so that Mansfield Park now goes with Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, while Northanger Abbey fits in with Emma and Persuasion (2–3). In support of this new grouping, she provides strong evidence that Northanger Abbey was heavily revised after Henry Austen repurchased the copyright from Crosby & Co. in 1816. Raff claims that “Only in the three last-published novels does the reader’s relation with Austen’s authorial persona retain primary importance” (8). She attributes Austen’s “mid-career shift” to the 1814 letters of marriage advice written to her niece Fanny Knight (3), in which Austen adopts an “oracular tone” (67) in writing “as if she were the author to Fanny’s character” (4). The “Janeite” is in many respects the heir of the eighteenth-century female Quixote. Quixotic narratives rely on the generalization, the speech-act that imposes fiction on life, to the confusion of a character who fails to grasp generality. Despite the didactic novelist’s claim to avoid, through recourse to instructive generalizations, the dangerous effects of fiction, “generalizations in fact encourage the confusion between fiction and reality that plagues the quixote” (119). The female Quixote, along with the Janeite and the tutorial subject of matchmaking, is reduced to “the condition of erotic impressionability that antinovel discourse deplored” (98). Raff demonstrates that the matchmaking scenario in Austen’s life and works has a literary source in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, in which the eponymous hero transfers the love of his ward, Emily Jervois, from himself to his virtuous...

“Oh, what beautiful books!” Captivated Reading in an Early Victorian Prison

Despite growing interest in reading experience, most studies examine avid and accomplished readers. We know little of the responses of working-class readers targeted by the Religious Tract Society and other evangelical publishers in their crusade to purify popular literature. Focusing on five barely literate boys taught at Yarmouth Gaol in 1840 by the Christian prison visitor Sarah Martin, this article considers the experience of occasional, easily distracted, or reluctant readers. Examining the titles they read and their behavior inside and outside lessons, it explores the boys' reactions to didactic fiction and illustration. For these prison readers, the pleasures of reading lay as much in the social and affective relationships surrounding the reading experience as in the meanings of particular texts.

The Matter of Moral Education: Locke, Newbery, and the Didactic Book–Toy Hybrid

Innovative entrepreneur and publisher John Newbery couples Lockean pedagogy and epistemology through the incorporation of physical objects in his didactic children's books. Newbery, like Locke, identifies interactivity as a key feature of "reading for understanding" and enables this kind of literary performance by engaging readers not just with language, but with things. This article argues that Newbery's attempt to promote moral behavior in his readers becomes radically efficacious through the "thereness" of the instructional object with the text, underscoring the complexity of the eighteenth-century reading act and its centrality to the critical interpretation of didactic fiction.

General Happiness or Human Bliss: Jane Marcet's Political Economy in James Morier's Persia

General Happiness or Human Bliss: Jane Marcet's Political Economy in James Morier's Persia

Dutiful Daughters and Colonial Discourse in Jane West's A Gossip's Story

In A Gossip's Story and a Legendary Tale (1796), Jane West engages with both the contemporary ideology and the political reality of the British empire by explicitly supporting British overseas trade while acknowledging the precarious nature of a transatlantic empire. For West, the female body is a potent site through which to explore colonialist ideologies. The fates of various female characters reinforce ideas about feminine virtue and sexual regulation shaped by British contact with the Atlantic world, thus promoting a moral code that would come to define the empire. If young women do represent the British subject in didactic fiction of this period, with the father figure representing state authority, West's portrayal of these characters in A Gossip's Story against the backdrop of British Caribbean colonies alters our understanding of the national culture she promotes. A Gossip's Story's overt message —the importance of filial duty—urges its female readers not just to be good daughters, but to be good daughters of the British empire.

Dutiful Daughters and Colonial Discourse in Jane West's <i>A Gossip's Story</i>

In A Gossip's Story and a Legendary Tale (1796), Jane West engages with both the contemporary ideology and the political reality of the British empire by explicitly supporting British overseas trade while acknowledging the precarious nature of a transatlantic empire. For West, the female body is a potent site through which to explore colonialist ideologies. The fates of various female characters reinforce ideas about feminine virtue and sexual regulation shaped by British contact with the Atlantic world, thus promoting a moral code that would come to define the empire. If young women do represent the British subject in didactic fiction of this period, with the father figure representing state authority, West's portrayal of these characters in A Gossip's Story against the backdrop of British Caribbean colonies alters our understanding of the national culture she promotes. A Gossip's Story's overt message —the importance of filial duty—urges its female readers not just to be good daughters, but to be good d...

Harriet Martineau, Victorian imperialism, and the civilizing mission

In her in-depth study of Harriet Martineau's writings on the evolution of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, Deborah A. Logan elaborates the ways in which Martineau's works reflect Victorian concerns about radically shifting social ideologies. To understand Martineau's interventions into the Empire Question, Logan argues, is to recognize her authority as an insightful political commentator, historian, economist, and sociologist whose eclectic studies and intellectual curiosity positioned her as a shrewd observer and recorder of the imperial enterprise. Logan's primary sources are Martineau's nonfiction works, particularly those published in periodicals, complemented by telling references from Martineau's didactic fiction, correspondence, and autobiography. Key texts include History of The Peace; Letters from Ireland and Endowed Schools of Ireland; Illustrations of Political Economy; Eastern Life, Present and Past; and History of British Rule in India and Suggestions for the Future Rule of India. Logan shows Martineau negotiating the inevitable conflict that arises when the practices of Victorian imperialism are measured against its own stated principles, and especially against Martineau's idea of both the Civilizing Mission and the indigenous cultural integrity often compromised in the process. The picture of Martineau that emerges is complex and fascinating. Both an advocate and a critic of British imperialism, Martineau was a persistent champion of the Civilizing Mission. Written with an awareness that she was recording contemporary history for future generations, Martineau’s commentary on this perpetually fascinating, often tragic, and always instructive chapter in British and world history offers important insights that enhance and complicate our understanding of imperialism and globalization.

“Wholesome Nutriment” for the Rising Generation: Food, Nationalism, and Didactic Fiction at the End of the Eighteenth Century

“Wholesome Nutriment” for the Rising Generation: Food, Nationalism, and Didactic Fiction at the End of the Eighteenth Century

“Wholesome Nutriment” for the Rising Generation: Food, Nationalism, and Didactic Fiction at the End of the Eighteenth Century

the role of food in culture has become a fertile scholarly field during the past two decades. Building on the earlier structuralist works of Claude Levi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, and Roland Barthes, recent critics suggest that food, its production, and its con sumption form a set of practices that can be read as signifying systems with meanings that are determined primarily by the cultural context in which they are practised. As the anthropologist Carole M. Counihan points out, “in every culture, foodways con stitute an organized system, a language that—through its structure and components—conveys meaning and con tributes to the organization of the natural and social world.”1 This system works to produce and solidify group identity, and to mark the boun daries between social groups. In general, “people who eat strikingly different foods or similar foods in different ways are thought to be strikingly different, sometimes even less human.”2 This essay takes up and literalizes Counihan’s notion of food as “language,” by examining the uses of food as image and metaphor in writing of the late eighteenth century. Writers at the end of the eighteenth century in Britain used food figuratively as a way of negotiating a number of cultural

"Art Is a Reconciliation with Life": Gogolian Paradox and Aesthetic Credo

L his discussion of Tolstoy and poetics of didactic Gary Saul Morson notes that from certain theoretical perspectives, absolute gulf separates from reality and text from reader.'1 For Morson, Russian literature as whole, poised between metafiction and didactic fiction, is the literature of frame-breaking. It is, in fact, not so much literature as counter-literature, governed by an anti-aesthetic.2 Consistent with this assessment, Nikolai Gogol is one of many writers who refuse to acknowledge strict divisions between and life, aesthetics and ethics, and he is particularly persistent in stressing permeability of any perceived boundaries between these spheres. In wake of disappointing reception of Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, Gogol wrote to Vasilii Zhukovskii on January 10, 1848 to reaffirm primacy of in his life. In grappling with question as to what constitutes essence of art, he suggested that a genuine creation of contains within itself something soothing and conciliatory. A work lacking this quality may represent an artist's noble, impassioned impulse and may even be a remarkable phenomenon, but it cannot be called work of art. Gogol concludes that art is reconciliation with life.3 The intent of this article is to examine intriguing relationship that Gogol posits between and life. Gogol's formula regarding reconciling influence of with life has received relatively little comment in critical literature, and reasons are manifold.4 In Vladimir Nabokov's fairly representative critique of this functional approach to art, for

The Transatlantic Mysteries of Paris: Chester Himes, Surrealism, and the Série noire

This essay examines Chester Himes's transformation, in 1957, from a writer of African American social protest fiction into a “French” writer of Harlem crime thrillers. Instead of representing the exhaustion of his political commitment, Himes's transformation from a “serious” writer of didactic fiction into an exiled crime novelist represents a radical change in political and literary tactics. In dialogue with the editor and former surrealist Marcel Duhamel, Himes's crime fiction, beginning withLa reine des pommes(nowA Rage in Harlem), invents a darkly comic fictional universe that shares an affinity with the surrealist notion of black humor in its vehement denial of epistemological and ethical certainty. Rejecting the efforts of Richard Wright and the existentialists to adopt an engaged form of political writing, Himes's crime fiction instead forges a kind of vernacular surrealism, one independent of the surrealist movement but nevertheless sharing surrealism's insistence on the volatility of written and political expression.

Panic Fiction: Women's Responses to Antebellum Economic Crisis

Panic Fiction:Women's Responses to Antebellum Economic Crisis Mary Templin In December 1836, a Massachusetts widow named Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee published a short novel entitled Three Experiments of Living, with subtitles defining the "three experiments" as "Living Within the Means," "Living up to the Means," and "Living Beyond the Means." The novel tells the story of Frank and Jane Fulton, a young Boston physician and his wife who start out poor, become prosperous, then are ruined by commercial and domestic debts. Many of the elements of Lee's narrative are familiar to readers of nineteenth-century domestic fiction. The young protagonists, virtuous in their early poverty, become corrupted by their exposure to the world of fashion, tempted away from their industry and benevolence by greed and social ambition. Their ever-increasing extravagance—financed by speculation and borrowed money—proves their downfall, as a "sudden change" in the financial markets brings bankruptcy and a return to relative poverty. Like countless characters in antebellum didactic fiction, Frank and Jane learn that gradual ascension is better than rapid gain and that a simple domestic life is more virtuous than participation in fashionable society. What is less familiar, even surprising, about this tale is Lee's focus on speculation as a cause of financial failure and her fairly explicit economic commentary on the dangers of debt. While the Fultons' downfall is clearly rooted in moral failings, it plays out as the result of a series of reckless and unwise financial decisions. Lee structures the novel around Frank's increasingly risky financial ventures, from his investment of their life savings in an interest-bearing enterprise, to his purchase of an expensive house on credit, to his final abandonment of medicine in order to speculate full time. At a time when domestic authors were helping to construct the notion of the home as isolated and protected from market forces, Lee unexpectedly brings the two together, illustrating both the impact of economic behavior on domestic life and the influence (for good or ill) of private character on financial decisions. In short, she undermines the developing ideology of separate spheres, using the conventions of domestic fiction to engage in economic discourse.1 The timing of Lee's novel helps to explain her anxious concern about speculation and spending on credit. During the spring of 1836, new access to western lands had sparked an unprecedented economic boom throughout the nation, fueled by plentiful bank credit and rising prices. By the end of the year, however, as Lee was writing Three Experiments of Living, the boom was [End Page 1] already showing signs of weakening and the frenzied speculation in western lands and stocks made many observers uneasy. Just a few months later, in March 1837, pressure from foreign creditors and new governmental monetary policies created a shortage of specie, forcing many banks to contract credit and plunging dozens of credit-dependent enterprises into bankruptcy; hundreds more were to follow in the next few months. By May, a full-scale panic ensued. Banks across the nation stopped cashing their own notes, prompting further bankruptcies and massive unemployment. For a full year, banks remained suspended, during which time the panic evolved into a devastating depression that lasted well into the 1840s.2 Opponents of outgoing President Andrew Jackson blamed the panic on Jackson's "misrule" in removing federal deposits from the United States Bank and attempting to regulate paper money. Jackson's Democratic supporters, on the other hand, attributed the crisis to a combination of excessive credit, a bloated paper currency, and villainous bankers who, in recalling loans and suspending payment, "suck[ed] out the profits of the merchants, and squeez[ed] the last drop of blood out of the mechanic."3 Debate in the nation's newspapers centered on the very issues Lee addressed in her novel—the risks of a speculative economy, sustained by credit and paper money rather than by hard currency. Lee was not alone in responding to the Panic of 1837 through fiction; indeed, Three Experiments was only one of the earliest of an entire genre of such texts that I have termed "panic fiction."4 Between 1836 and 1840, an outpouring of dozens...

Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women's Magazines as Engineers of Female Identity, 1922-53 by Lynne s> Attwood (review)

REVIEWS 363 Attwood, Lynne. Creating theNewSovietWoman.Women's Magazines asEngineers ofFemale Identity, I922-53. Studiesin Russianand EastEuropeanHistory and Society. Macmillan in association with the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, Basingstoke and London, I999. V+ 2I3 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. [42.50. FOLLOWINGher books on women in Soviet cinema and the Soviet socialization of sex roles, Lynne Attwood has written the firstfull-lengthstudyof women's magazines and their role in the creation of gender identity during the Soviet period. She setsout 'to explore the ways in which this new [Soviet] woman, in her various incarnations,was presented to female citizens in the pages of the women's magazines Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker) and Krest'ianka (The PeasantWoman)'and how this influenced readers'views and practices(p. 2). Though she offers the disclaimer that this book is not a history of Soviet women, she does draw on a great deal of historical material throughout her analysis. Attwood situatesthe role of the magazines in a comparativecontext (thatof similarmagazines in the West)and identifiesthe Soviet idea of'print media as a vital agent of socialisation'(p. 14). Rabotnitsa and Krest'ianka shaped female identity through feature articles, short stories, and readers' letters. Attwood draws most heavily on the fiction presented on the pages of these magazines, and she repeatedly mentions the frequency of didactic fiction in both publications:perhaps a more substantialinitial acknowledgementof fiction's role in her analysiswould have been appropriate. The book isdividedinto two parts:the firstconcentrateson the I920S,while the nmore extensive second section focuses on the Stalin era. Attwood notes that from the beginning, both magazines aimed to influence women through both images and words, also involving women directly whenipossible as worker or peasant correspondents. She astutely states that these magazines combined the wvestern notion of women's magazines with a consciousnessraising element, and she also notes the bewilderinglyhigh number of males involved in runningeach magazine. The firstchapterpresentsthe dichotomy of workand family,examining the shiftingperceptions of the 'double burden'women faced, while the following chapter focuses on marriage, divorce and unwanitedpregnancy. The magazines did acknowledgethe new domestic problemswhile also keeping readers abreastof new legal developments. At this point, Attwood discussesreaders' opinions, though it is worth noting that this probablyrevealed identityrather than formed it. She continues by contrastinigthe Soviet position on gender relationswith reality. A chapter is devoted to beauty, fashion, and femininity, noting the conitradictions between the unadorned'socialistwomen' on Rabotnlitsa's covers anidthe advertisementsfor fashion and beauty productswithin the magazine; there is a subsequentexploration of 'variations on the new woman'. Though periodicals of the 1920S implied that a single ideal of Sov7ietwomanhood existed,severalpossibilitieswere actuallypresented.Here Attwood alsobriefly describes the 'liberation' of Central Asian women. There is a curious lack of focus oi N womeni in other minority groups in the Soviet Union, but this may be 364 SEER, 79, 2, 2001 due to a comparable lack of reportageon other groups (entirelylikely, given the effortto create a relativelyuniformfemale Soviet identity). Parttwo centres around the Stalin era. By this time, the 'woman question' had already(falsely)been declaredresolved,and the magazines had ceased to serveas sourcesof genuine information,insteadespousinga SocialistRealism of sortsin their reporting.At this point the magazinesbegan to define female identityandwere prescriptivein theirtreatmentof rolesandpersonalitytraits. The subsequentchapter focuses on industrializationand collectivizationas it related to women, and Attwood notes that the magazines were instrumental in influencingworkerproductivityand glorifyingfemale Stakhanovites. In a later section, the concept of mandatorymotherhood is linkedwith the abortion law. Readers were told that the law served to protect women's physical and mental health. In the event of a conflict between work and motherhood, the lattershould come first.Emergingfrom thisjuxtaposition is a discussionof gender confusionin the Stalin era. Contradictoryimages were presentedin the magazines of the I930s. Femininitywas to be preservedat all costs, but 'the "new Soviet woman" was defined as much by her feminine appearanceas by hercapacityto workand fightlikea man' (p. I34). Attwood continues with a chapter which discusses women in the Great Patriotic War, noting the personification of the motherland on magazine covers in order to inspire patriotism. Women partisans and women on the home front were extolled. When in Rabotnitsa women were urged to take the place of men at work...

Gender and writing instruction in early America: Lessons from didactic fiction1

Gender and writing instruction in early America: Lessons from didactic fiction¹

Portraits of the Lady: Imagining Women in Nineteenth-Century America

Harvard University Press, 1989 The three books under review here deal with images generated by the idea of woman from the mid-nineteenth century into the early years of the twentieth century, not only in literature, but within the wider popular imagination and the scientific community. Martha Banta looks at all levels of the visual representation of women, from elite portraiture through popular magazine illustrations to cartoons and advertisements. Cynthia Eagle Russett investigates scientific accounts of women's physiological and intellectual nature. And Frances B. Cogan looks at didactic literature and popular fiction. These studies deal variously with the idea of woman as distinguished from the fact of woman. Although the investigations are disparate, one note sounds through all three: those who define the nature and role of women in our culture represent them prescriptively rather than descriptively. To this end, images of women in the predominating discourse present themselves in distinct and purposeful imaginative constellations, rather than as the variegated tapestry one would find in mimetic representation. These texts taken together provide fascinating evidence--across the social and intellectual spectrum--of the intersections of cultural politics and the American dream-life.