Female Sensibility Research Articles

Feminism, Aesthetics, and Art Education

Aesthetic issues and arguments raised by feminists are presented as foundation for structuring philosophical dialogue in the classroom. Both the foundation section and the classroom section of this paper are organized around three issues: female sensibility and feminist aesthetics, criteria for evaluation of art, and viewer responses to art. The paper concludes with implications for the goals and curricula of art education and for research undertaken in the field.

A "Sweet Face as White as Death": Jane Austen and the Politics of Female Sensibility

The subject of this essay is dead women, and how dead women serve the community that gathers around to encourage them while they dwindle away slowly or pop off (as Tom Bertram might say) with precipitous finality.1 For Janeites, who celebrate Austen as the arbitress of good breeding, no topic could appear less suitable than dying women. Or dying anything. If unpleasantnesssuch as poverty, alcoholism, politics-finds no haven in Austen's prim parlors, how much less welcome death itself? Considered in this light, Austen's reputed unwillingness to depict death is not a failure of ambition or imagination, but rather a triumph of decorum. But to readers of the subversive school, who regard Austen as an arch-ironist, the case stands differently. As they see it, far from maintaining a ladylike reticence about subjects as deep or discomforting as death, Austen if anything talks about the subject too often and with a shockingly unladylike failure of feeling. Marvin Mudrick-who still sets the terms of so much Austen commentary-roots out the references to death in Austen's Letters and novels and takes her to task for what he calls the offhand

That cunny Jamma oman: female sensibility in the poetry of Louise Bennett

That cunny Jamma oman: female sensibility in the poetry of Louise Bennett

An Interview with Chaim Potok

The interview took place over brunch at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan, which, as Chaim Potok remarked, was the New York thing to do. That sense of the fashionable in contemporary urban life is characteristic of the complexity of Potok's personal stance. Philosopher, rabbi, historian, and novelist Potok has chosen his imaginative materials from the generation immediately preceding our own, and his novels provide access to a past that enables us to deepen our understanding of the present. It was an especially propitious time to have this interview, for Potok's most recent novel, Davita's Harp, has established a new direction for the writer. The conflicts and rewards inherent in religious belief are central to all of his novels from The Chosen to The Book of Lights, yet none of those novels has a woman as its central character. In Davita, Potok has created a sensitive young girl who is drawn to Orthodox Judaism despite the fact that her mother has turned away from it. Through Davita's eyes, the reader witnesses the dilemmas now facing contemporary Judaism and indeed all religions within which women are struggling in their desires to play active and meaningful roles. Beginning in the thirties, Davita's Harp brings together the religious and artistic themes in Potok's earlier novels. The first of a planned trilogy, it examines issues at the core of American Jewish life, and through Potok's creation of a central female sensibility, his concerns are given wider significance and an entirely new dimension. The moment in his career when an artist changes his direction is always exciting. As he moves toward the realization of his plans, the critical reader follows, questioning and discovering. Chaim Potok's discussion of these matters produces a literary as well as a philosophical event.

Reason and Sensibility in Mary Wollstonecraft's "The Wrongs of Woman"

In 1791 Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of Rights of Woman, stating that first duty of women was to cultivate and urging them to avoid excessive sensibility. While declaring these sentiments, she knew full well she was opposing a long-established tradition: that belonged to dominant men and sensibility to irrational and subordinate women. As Wollstonecraft uses it in The Rights of Woman, sensibility can be defined as cultivated emotion or capacity for it; it includes spontaneous sympathy and exquisitely polished instinct. Reason is the simple power of improvement; or, more properly speaking, of discerning truth; it is associated with self-restraint and judiciousness.1 In The Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft argued that whole person requires strengthening of both and sensibility, so that sensibility might be moderated by reason and be sustained by sensibility; an excess of either relaxes other powers of mind.2 In terms of psychology of day, then, her idea was androgynous, a judicious mingling of male and female sensibility. In Wollstonecraft's view, women pursued sensibility because they had been taught to do so. Female education emphasized nurturing of emotion, so that women would be distorted into sexual and passionate beings and grow subordinate to men (reason must control or moderate sensibility). In The Rights of Woman, term used for a woman successfully educated in this mode is romantic.