Female Virtue Research Articles

Keen and Violent Remedies: Social Satire and the Grotesque in Masuccio Salernitano's 'Novellino' by Michael Papio (review)

214 Reviews Keen and Violent Remedies: Social Satire and the Grotesque in Masuccio Salernitano's 'Novellino'. By Michael Papio. New York: Peter Lang. 2000. 192 pp. ?34. ISBN 0-8204-4405-7. Michael Papio's avowed task in this volume is to bring together the 'disparate threads' of Masuccio's Novellino and display the work's 'underlying congruous whole'. Given that we are looking at a critical study informed by considerable complexity of detail and analysis regarding both Masuccio's text and the historical and cultural context from which it emerged, we can do little more than outline the author's fundamental thesis, attempt a brief assessment of it, and glance at the work's other major features. The thesis is that the short stories in question, written by a figure best known to many for his oft-quoted dependence on the Boccaccian model, represent a conscious reflection and defence ofthe fifteenth-centuryNeapolitan aristocratic milieu he lived in and depended on. Such an overarching ethic, according to Papio, explains the fre? quently cited 'inconsistencies' in the attitude found in his stories towards ecclesiastics and the female sex. To the frequently asked question of why Masuccio often causes his stories to pass damning judgements on clerics and women and yet sometimes admires and praises them, the answer, according to this volume, is to be found in the writer's concern to uphold the established aristocratic order. The Novellino is described as 'a work that encapsulates, even codifies, the experiences of the upper classes, their attitudes, values and taboos'. So rather than a satire of female defects at large we have a parading of lower-class female vices and upper-class female virtues. Rather than a criticism of clergy or religion in toto we have a carefully structured, targeted attack on the mores of the rising mendicant orders and other purveyors of popular religion who seem to threaten the feudal power structure of the Kingdom of Naples. This 'key' to Masuccio's seeming contradictions does at times seem to fita tad too snugly to be entirely convincing. Most such schemes do. At times, moreover, the author himself, despite consistent reiteration of his thesis, lowers his guard and suggests that the Novellino would have had an appeal and a relevance that reached down into the social classes. In the chapter entitled 'Narrative Choices and Authorial Voices' he also argues, in a way that sits uncomfortably with his overarching thesis, that we can identify subtle intentional distinctions in Masuccio's narrative style be? tween the novelliere's own convictionsand those he does not mean his audience to take at face value. Nevertheless, the wealth of evidence he brings to bear from reference to the novelle themselves and to the life and times of the novelliere constitutes an undoubtedly powerful case for an interpretation based on socio-political anthropology. Though Papio's attempted identification of differentnarrative levels in the Novel? lino is one of his less convincing lines of argument, it does form part of an attempt by the critic to locate and analyse the aesthetic as well as the socio-political dimensions of Masuccio's work. Masuccio's main claim to artistic merit, Papio argues, lies in his ability to create an aesthetic experience fromuse of the satiric grotesque. Successfully rescuing his man from the frequent simplistic comparison with Boccaccio, Papio il? lustrates how Masuccio's 'absurd realities' subvert the comic genre made art by his Florentine predecessor. His point is that rather than 'disarming the terrible' through comedy, the novella's stock-in-trade, Masuccio succeeds in 'arming the comic' via the grotesque, i.e. via an 'estrangement of reality' whereby summary justice, violent revenge, or murder are the usual outcome. Horror and humour are reconciled and all within the profoundly conservative mental framework of an upholding of authority,a defence against unpredictable transgression, a condemnation of any form of anarchic evil that may threaten the status quo. Other satirists and novellierioi the time portray treachery and sexually illicit conduct but never in a way 'comparable in gravity and vehemence to the grotesque found in Masuccio'. This analysis qualifies as an interest? ing and persuasive new twist on the much-debated question of...

The Novel as Teacher: Learning to be Female in the Early American South

BEGAN A VERY CLEVER NOVEL--EVELINA IT WAS CALL'D, FRANCES Baylor Hill recorded on late October day in 1797. She had spent most of the previous week looking after household of sick children, interspersing her nursing chores with sewing projects. She was ready the diversion of good read and more than willing to slight her needlework. [K]nit short piece, she explained, for was reading the best part of the Evelina had claimed her; she finished the first volume in three days. In mid-November she picked up volume two, finished it in four days, and immediately began volume three. Her perpetual sewing duties, company, and funeral slowed her reading of the last volume, however. Still, she stole time almost every day week until November 28, when she noted triumphantly, I finish'd reading Evelina it is very good Novel and very entertaining. (1) By the end of the eighteenth century, the novel as genre was firmly planted on American soil. William Hill Brown had published The Power of Sympathy, generally regarded as the first American novel, in 1789, but English novels had permeated the colonial literary scene decades earlier. (2) Frances Baylor Hill's absorption in Evelina was characteristic of female readers, whether they read in England, New England, or the eighteenth-century South. Featuring women at the center of dramatic plots that turned upon disguise and deceit, seduction and betrayal, rebellion and reconciliation, the novel delivered moral lessons in style unmatched by traditional advice literature. Frances Baylor Hill dutifully read James Blair's Sermons when she could not get to church; regarded Dr. John Gregory's Legacy to His Daughters a very good Book; and regularly read letters on (3) But none of them captivated her as her novels did. Her reading exemplified the coexistence and persistence of devotional, traditional, and educational works as the canon of female education late in the century. The addition of novels, however, was telling portent of the change, seen in Virginian Lady Jean Skipwith's library by 1826, in which novels would supplant traditional advice literature. (4) Novels never dominated eighteenth-century southern reading, but their presence in southern libraries merits attention, their influence can be detected in the ways that women thought about female virtue, friendship, and identity. In our own century we tend to think of novels as recreational reading, and undoubtedly they served that function in the eighteenth century as well. But novels were more than diversions: they contained moral lessons, crucial in the education of southern women, both maid and matron; and this literature comprised the core readings of their education. While there was little formal education available to females, through this reading, white southern women participated actively in the life of the mind of the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world. Indeed, education of any kind was rather haphazard affair in the eighteenth-century South, even boys. Yet, regardless of rank, girls' education differed substantially from that of boys. For girls, learning consisted mostly of those housewifery skills they would need in marriage, reading, and perhaps writing. Even in gentry families, private tutors hired to teach both boys and girls divided the curriculum along gender lines, as the 1773-74 diary of Philip Vickers Fithian reveals: Latin and Greek the boys, and beginning arithmetic, writing, and reading the girls. Mrs. Neill's exclusive boarding school girls in Williamsburg, Virginia, offered the typical female ornamental education of needlework, music, dancing, as well as reading and writing. Even eleven-year-old Virginian Betty Pratt recognized the discrepancies in male and female education. She wrote in 1732 to her brother, who was in school in England, that write better already than can expect to do as long as live; and you are got as far as the Rule of three in Arithmetick, but can't cast up sum in addition cleverly, but am striving to do better every day. …

The Mother as Bawd in The Revenger's Tragedy and A Mad World, My Masters

The Revenger's Tragedy and A Mad World, My Masters reveal how the motif of the mother as bawd taps into early modern anxieties about maternal authority. In Gratiana's attempted prostitution of her virgin daughter, The Revenger's Tragedy plays disturbingly upon the paradox of a woman's inherent moral weakness being scripturally sanctioned to command her children's obedience. The Revenger's Tragedy thus illuminates Mad World's unexpectedly subversive use of the same motif. The commodification of virginity, Mad World implies, has little to do with untrustworthy mothers; rather, it is inextricable from a patriarchal society's definition of chastity as the supreme female virtue.

VIRTUE AND TALENT: WOMEN AND FUSHI IN EARLY CHINA

AbstractA study of two early historical records shows that women had a share in fushi (presenting the Odes), a social ritual and high art that is otherwise known as a preserve of the male elite. The paper retrieves the context of women's participation and analyzes the Confucian morality underlying the portrayals of the two female practitioners, both in light of the principle of sexual separation. The formulation of the relationship between female virtue and talent in these early records exemplifies the parameters of the later development of the dichotomy, and the metamorphosis of the images of the two female fushi practitioners in the first-century-BCE Lienü zhuan represents the first definitive version of the orthodox Confucian position on that issue.

Managing and Marketing Virtue in Sarah Fielding's History of the Countess of Dellwyn

Managing and Marketing Virtue in Sarah Fielding's History ofthe Countess ofDellwyn Sara Gadeken In her penultimate novel, The History of the Countess of Delluryn (1759), Sarah Fielding explores the power that accrues to women in the newly developing commercial culture. In contrast to her first novel, David Simple (1744) , and its sequel, Volume theLast (1753) , Delluryn emphasizes women's responses to victimization rather than the suffering occasioned by it, and Fielding stresses their limited but real power as managers and marketers of consumer goods. In Delluryn, virtue is not figured sexually but economically, as the familiar dichotomy ofwoman as virgin or whore is replaced by another dichotomy ofwoman as lavish consumer or prudent domestic manager. The two figures, Fielding demonstrates, are dependent on each other; the luxury-loving aristocrat is necessary to establish the industrious and frugal domestic paragon, just as the sexually transgressive female is necessary to establish that of the chaste woman. By casting female virtue in an economic mode, Fielding is able to manipulate the contradictions of eighteenth-century attitudes towards consumer consumption, which condemn increased consumption of goods because it contributes to morally dangerous luxury, and, at the same time, admire the industriousness of those who produce such goods and the prudence of those who manage them well. Linda Bree notes these contradictions in Delluryn, but dismisses their importance: "it is an ironic touch that honest livings can be made by EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 1, October 2002 20EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION providing the commodities that the rich ... so recklessly consume."1 However, Gillian Skinner criticizes Delluryn for ignoring the inherent contradictions ofthese ideas, objecting that Fielding disapproves "strongly of luxury in the civic humanist manner in one breath, while lauding it in another."2 In this essay I hope to show that, in Dellwyn, Sarah Fielding, far from ignoring these contradictions, deliberately manipulates diem in order to create a new and uneasy space of female empowerment. She finds in these conflicting ideas an opportunity for impoverished gentlewomen to achieve economic security. One of the ideas to which she appeals is that of civic humanism, an important segment of eighteenth-century political thought that derives from the Renaissance political ideology that posits man as a political animal who most fully realizes himselfby participating in government. In contrast to the changing class relations and complex commodity exchanges that mark the commercial society, civic humanism posits a hierarchical society offixed and unchanging status, with a clear economic function separate from the market, embedding all social relations within a self-regulating system. Frugality, as opposed to luxury, is essential to this paradigm, for it guarantees the economic and moral health of the nation. According to such moralists as George Berkeley, "Frugality of Manners is the Nourishment and Strength of Bodies politic. It is that by which they grow and subsist, until they are corrupted by Luxury."3 Benevolence towards the needy is also an essential part ofcivic humanism, in which ownership of property carries social obligations and in which owners and workers are mutually dependent. Frugality makes benevolence possible, as Wetenhall Wilkes explains: "Frugality is the support of generosity. Constant inquietudes ... prevent a profuse person to do many noble and generous things."4 Frugality enables benevolence, luxury prevents it. 1 Linda Bree, Sarah Fielding (London: Twayne, 1996), p. 129. 2 Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1 740-1800: The Price ofa Tear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 32. 3 George Berkeley, An Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721), cited in Stephen Copely, Literatureand theSocial Orderin Eighteenth-CenturyEngland (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 90-91. 4 Wetenhall Wilkes, A Utter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young ¡Mdy (London: Hawes, 1766), p. 201. SARAH FIELDING'S HISTORY OF THECOUNTESS OF DELLWYN 21 In contrast to civic humanism's association of virtue with moral autonomy, constancy, and a fixed and constant value, the commercial notion ofvirtue is fluid, its value depending on serial exchanges in the marketplace. Liz Bellamy calls it "a tradition of economic thought which was based on the assessment of the economic consequence of individual actions [which assume that] the maximisation of material wealth was the primary function...

Subversive Didacticism in Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless

'The Story of Eliza Haywood, her shift from slyly subversive novels of amorous intrigue to market acceptable novels of female virtue and obedience, clouds most readings of The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751).2 Lady Trusty's patriarchal conductbook advice to Betsy is often read literally as Haywood's new advice for her female audience. However, Haywood's audience consisted of both men and women, and Lady Trusty's bridal admonitions, the most conservative and patriarchal words of advice in the novel, are contradictory and impossible for any woman to execute completely. Few doubt Jane Austen's satiric voice and sarcastic didacticism and all embrace Henry Fielding's, yet 'The Story seems to prevent this type of reading of Haywood. Always a social critic and sometimes a political writer, Haywood seems to have held a contract theory partnership with her readers: she attempts to educate her audience through her novels, not in the didactic sense of the way the world should be, but in the sense of the way the world is. Though Betsy Thoughtless seems a story of a reformed coquette complete with marital advice, Haywood dem-

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Christian Feminism in The Minister's Wooing: A Precedent for Emily Dickinson

Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you kingdom. --Luke 12:32 God will not let us have heaven here below, but only such glimpses and faint showings as parents sometimes give to children, when they show them beforehand jewelry and pictures and stores of rare and curious treasures which they hold for possession of their riper years. --Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing The Love a Life can show Below Is but a filament, I know, Of that diviner thing That faints upon face of Noon-- And smites Tinder in Sun-- And hinders Gabriel's Wing-- --Emily Dickinson, Fr285/J673 As Thomas Wentworth Higginson maintains in his 1867 essay Plea for Culture, great minds who are best remembered by posterity are rarely isolated mountain-peaks but rather the summits of ranges (18). The same argument has been brilliantly expanded by critic David S. Reynolds, who concludes that great writers of nineteenth century memorably reconstructed popular subversive imagination and that Emily Dickinson was highest product of a rebellious American sisterhood (567, 413). Many of these rebellious sisters were revisionists rather than radicals. Amid social constraints and political inequalities they endured, they sought and found liberating principles within their cultural traditions. By privately and sometimes publicly appropriating for themselves ideals of equality and individualism professed within Christianity, Romanticism, and American democracy, many nineteenth-century women contrived to maintain their sanity and inspire their contemporaries and descendants. From reading Scripture and other literature, they were increasingly empowered to challenge very institutions that had taught them how and what to read. A striking expression of that challenge is The Minister's Wooing (1859) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In this novel Stowe balances her themes celebrating romance and domesticity with a good admixture of comedy and satire, all expressed in a remarkably descriptive and leisurely style. Certainly The Minister's Wooing is no action-packed adventure story, but it is a shrewd psychological study, a feast for visual imagination, and a compassionate critique of New England Puritan tradition. Christianity, Romanticism, and feminism are blended in portraits of Mary Scudder and several other admirable female characters. Mary is courageous, unselfish, and unconventional, expanding traditional definitions of female virtue. She upholds yet transforms rigorous Puritan belief system, establishing through her example possibility of a new community founded upon love rather than fear. It seems likely that Dickinson may have read and enjoyed The Minister's Wooing, inasmuch as it was originally serialized in early issues of Atlantic Monthly, shortly before peak of Dickinson's creative productivity. As Beth Maclay Doriani has pointed out, Stowe would have provided Dickinson with at least one literary model of an assertive female voice speaking prophetically while not seeming to transgress cultural boundaries (149-50). Doriani's Emily Dickinson, Daughter of Prophecy provides a wide-ranging examination of Dickinson's prophetic vocation in context of her religious and intellectual milieu. The present discussion complements this invaluable study by focusing on a single literary contemporary of poet in detail, partially to establish Stowe as a precedent and potential resource not only for Dickinson but also for other readers (past and present) familiar with same theological and cultural heritage. (1) Both Stowe and Dickinson merit attention of anyone interested in interdisciplinary women's studies, perhaps especially those who continue to grow up, as did these writers, in an evangelical tradition that impresses upon them concept of divine presence as unquestionably there, no matter how alarming or indifferent that presence might seem. …

Gender and Morals in Spanish Catholic Youth Culture: A Case Study of the Marian Congregations 1930–1936

Jesuit-run Marian Congregations proliferated in 1930s Spain. Drawing on literature produced for their members, this article demonstrates how gendered understandings were fundamental to the congregations' symbolic delineation of an uncontaminated Catholic space. Visions of an incorrupt male elite abound, reinforcing the Jesuits' educational mission among future leaders and opinion-formers. In contrast, the purity of women and children was seen as a sign of society's moral health. Modesty was the quintessential female virtue. Yet, the cult of the Virgin Mary suggested that the virginal female body was both tool and symbol in the struggle against a fallen world. Girls were, therefore, charged with the task of moral guardianship. Such campaigns were emblematic of Spanish Catholicism's tendency to proffer religious solutions to social problems.

Good Wives and Unfaithful Men: Gender Negotiations and Sexual Conflicts in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1964 –1973

Good Wives and Unfaithful Men: Gender Negotiations and Sexual Conflicts in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1964 –1973

Civilization and the rights of woman: liberty and captivity in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft

Recent scholarship has shown how, in her political writing, Mary Wollstonecraft developed a troubling evaluation of femininity – one that ironically brought her sexual politics into line with those she attacked in Edmund Burke's account of the French Revolution. This article identifies a different contradiction in her feminism. It argues that her challenge to the lingering conservatism in Enlightenment philosophy relied on a model of social history that put reasoning women at the center of a “civilized” culture threatened by a “savage” periphery. It suggests that Wollstonecraft's strong critique of the contradiction in Enlightenment political thought, which saw women as lacking in civic character, is organized rhetorically around the contrast between polished civil subject and violent savage. Because this distinction rests to a large extent on the assumption that domestic virtue is a central feature of more advanced societies, her argument finally locates women in a morally invigorated domestic sphere rather than in public life. In the second half of the article, the author examines how Wollstonecraft's fiction shows her political philosophy depending, to a large extent, on the logic of the captivity narrative – a logic according to which female virtue must be protected against the horrors of a savage wilderness. By reading both the Vindications side by side with Maria, we can see how Wollstonecraft's political arguments are tied to the domestic plot of conjectural history and how, as a result, she is unable to free women entirely from the sentimental narrative of captivity that defines and limits their civic lives.

RAPE AND THE GENDERED GAZE: SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS IN EARLY MODERN BOLOGNA

AbstractIn the course of its long history, pictorial representations of Susanna changed dramatically, ranging from her characterization as a model of female virtue and chastity to her portrayal as a nude and eroticized temptress. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, the Bolognese painter Ludovico Carracci rejected the eroticism of contemporary depictions, reviving the theme of Susanna's virtue and turning to the patristic literature for an understanding of the moral issues raised by the Susanna text.

Chaste, Obedient and Devout: Biblical Women as Patterns of Female Virtue in Netherlandish and German Graphic Art, ca. 1500-1750

Chaste, Obedient and Devout: Biblical Women as Patterns of Female Virtue in Netherlandish and German Graphic Art, ca. 1500-1750

Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer (review)

Reviewed by: Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer Ellen Dwyer Thomas J. Brown. Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer. Harvard Historical Studies, no. 127. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xiii + 422 pp. Ill. $35.00. For many years, there was no scholarly biography of Dorothea Dix. Now there are two: David Gollaher’s Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix (1995), and Thomas J. Brown’s Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer (1998). Although both books rely heavily upon the Houghton Library’s large collection of Dix’s personal papers, they complement, rather than duplicate, one another. Reading Brown sent me back to Gollaher and forward again to Brown. The experience deepened my understanding of Dix; it also raised fascinating questions about the complex relationship between subject and biographer. Gollaher situates Dix’s asylum work in its larger historiographic context, drawing on Grob, Scull, and Foucault. Brown describes himself as interested in Dix “as a participant in American politics rather than as a humanitarian visionary” (p. xii). Like Gollaher, he expresses awe at her commitment, but overall he is more critical of her. Both are fascinated by the political energy and skills of this nineteenth-century female reformer who, despite her disdain for the female suffrage movement, became a familiar and enormously influential figure in state legislatures and Washington, D.C. The first historian to use the diaries of Dix’s close friend, Anne Heath, and her family, Brown describes the young Dix as an awkward, lonely woman whose emotional demands eventually led Heath and others to distance themselves. Like Gollaher, Brown is sometimes frustrated by Dix’s guarded prose, which reveals [End Page 714] little of her inner life beyond the intensity of her commitment to reform. For the most part, he responds in kind, producing a careful, somewhat severe portrait. For example, he notes that a harsh New England childhood and adolescence made Dix very demanding of herself (and others)—at times excessively so. Her high self-expectations, however, served her well once she became involved in asylum work. Despite bouts of ill health (triggered as often by personal disappointments and stress as by physical frailty), she traveled ceaselessly across the country, lobbying for the construction of state mental hospitals. Critical of her hostility to the suffrage and antislavery movements, Brown argues that Dix “lived at the center of both the so-called separate spheres of female virtue and public affairs” (p. xii). Over time, this location became increasingly uncomfortable. In 1857, after years of effort, Dix’s bill for federal land-grant monies for mental hospitals was defeated. Then, in the 1860s, as general superintendent of nurses for the Northern Army, she found herself unable to maintain, let alone build, administrative power. As a young Louisa May Alcott noted, by 1862 Dix’s nurses viewed her as “‘a kind old soul, but very queer, fussy, and arbitrary; not one likes her and I don’t wonder’” (quoted on p. 313). Because Dix revealed so little of the personal in her voluminous correspondence, the colorful, albeit harsh, characterizations of her by Alcott and others have a perhaps disproportionate impact on this biography. Equally powerful, however, is Brown’s chronicling of Dix’s extraordinary public career; in the United States of the nineteenth century (as well as into the twentieth), strong, uncompromising (and hence often discomfiting) personalities helped women like Dix sustain themselves in their arduous, often lonely, political work. A minor, but powerful, example of hardship is Dix’s lack of a permanent home: she spent much of her life moving between boarding houses, the homes of wealthy friends and relatives, and hotels; once, in Texas, after her stagecoach became mired in mud, she even spent the night in the bottom of a gully. In old age, having survived most of her family and friends, she stayed in a suite at the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum in Trenton, where she died in 1887. Brown ends the book by bringing us back to Boston for Dix’s burial in Mount Auburn Cemetery, near her longtime mentor William Ellery Channing, where, says Brown, she was “at home at last” (p. 344). Ellen Dwyer Indiana University Copyright © 1999 The...

Virtue, gender, and the authentic self in eighteenth-century fiction: Richardson, Rousseau, and Laclos

This text analyzes the ways in which female virtue was tied to a new concept of authenticity in 18th-century sentimental fiction, producing a redefinition of gender relations on the one hand and re-examination of the value and place of fictional narrative on the other. As the old values of the aristocracy were being overturned and it was no longer possible simply to equate personal worth with rank or title, a new narrative protagonist was born - someone who was authentic, virtuous and usually female. New questions arose at the same time: what kind of language could represent this authentic self?; how far should the virtuous subject be tested?; and what is the role of the reader in the process?

Manchu Widows and Ethnicity in Qing China

Like women in many parts of the world whose husbands predeceased them, widows in China were free electrons, unbound elements in the social chemistry. Economically vulnerable, ritually superfluous, and at the same time socially destabilizing and sexually threatening, they were archetypal liminal figures—marginalized, caricatured, and feared. This has made the widow a good subject for literary critics, anthropologists, and historians interested in the way that societies treat women and in the way that treatment of widows in particular is intended to ward off or contain potential disturbance to the status quo. For China, as pioneering work by Mark Elvin and Susan Mann has shown, examining changing attitudes toward widows can illuminate larger social, political, and economic shifts in the late imperial period, roughly the thirteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Mark Elvin, “Female Virtue and the State,” Past and Present 104, 111–52; and Susan Mann, “Widows in the Kinship, Class, and Community Structures of Qing Dynasty China,” Journal of Asian Studies, 46:1 (February 1987), 37–56. Among newer work, see the excellent discussion in Bettine Birge, “Levirate Marriage and the Revival of Widow Chastity in Yuan China,” Asia Major, 8:2 (Fall 1995), 107–46. By focusing on Manchu widows, the present essay attempts to improve our understanding of widowhood in late imperial China and at the same time shed light on the role of widows, and women generally, in the construction of ethnicity in the Qing period (1644–1911), when the alien Manchu dynasty ruled the country.

Place and the Politics of Virtue: Clerical work, corporate anxiety, and changing meanings of public womanhood in early twentieth-century Montreal

Women's entrance into corporate offices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provided a focus for debate about changing meanings of public womanhood in the 'Modern' city. Working in the financial district, in the heart of downtown, women in clerical professions challenged formulations of respectability which posited public, urban space as threatening to female virtue. Yet the corporations for which these women worked traded quite literally on their reputations, and as such had a great need that their employees of both sexes be understood as respectable and upstanding citizens. Drawing on the popular press and employee files from a selection of key corporations in early twentieth-century Montreal, I examine how women's presence in, and use of urban space was mediated through ideas about 'respectability'. I submit that both corporations and women seeking clerical employment drew on ideas about respectable womanhood based in expectations of corporeal control and sexual restraint, even as these ideas were changing.

The politics of motherhood: British writing and culture, 1680-1760

Introduction: historicising motherhood Part I. Royal Motherhood: Queen Anne and the Politics of Maternal Representation: 1. 'The teeming Princess of Denmark': Anne as mother, 1684-1700 2. 'Thy nursing mother': symbolic maternity and royal authority at the coronation of Queen Anne 3. Symbolic maternity and practical politics in Queen Anne's England Part II. Monstrous Motherhood: Violence, Difference, and the Subversion of Maternal Ideals: 4. 'Unnatural' motherhood in two novels by Daniel Defoe 5. Dreams of maternal autonomy: scandalous motherhood in three tales by Eliza Haywood 6. Maternal failure and socio-economic difference: the unnatural mother Part III. Domestic Motherhood: Constraint, Complicity, and the Failure of Maternal Authority: 7. Female virtue and maternal authority in Pamela, Part 2 8. Maternal virtue and maternal failure in Clarissa Conclusion: going public: the case of Lady Sarah Pennington Appendix.

Gender, Loyalty, and the Reproduction of the Wang Zhaojun Legend: Some Social Ramifications of Drama in the Late Ming

AbstractScholars have long noted a heightened concern over female virtue in late Ming literati society; more recently, this social trend has been connected with the boom in print production of drama, and many other types of popular and elite texts, which occurred during the Jiajing through Wanli periods. Ming print circulation of the legend of Wang Zhaojun, a palace woman of the Han dynasty who was given in marriage to a northern leader, further illuminates these connections. Through detailed analysis of the text, and its reproduction during the late Ming, and through comparison with other versions of the story also in circulation during this period, this essay argues that the zaju play, Autumn in the Han Palace, was at the center of a significant reconfiguration of the Wang Zhaojun legend — one in which both the exquisitely tragic beauty of her departure across the Han border, and her loyalty to the emperor are foregrounded. Further, this reconfiguration was conditioned by, and in turn conditioned, late Ming social constructions of woman as both cultural and commercial commodity.

Albrecht Altdorfer's Susanna and the Elders: Female Virtues, Male Politics

Cet article propose une analyse de la signification symbolique et du contexte historique de la peinture d’Albert Altdorfer, Suzanne et les vieillards (1526). Deux parties s’opposent dans la composition : l’architecture évoque la culture, la justice temporelle et la masculinité pendant que le jardin, avec sa symbolique mariale inhérente, signifie la nature, la religion et la féminité. À la lumière d’un scandale judiciaire de l’époque (Argula von Grumbach et l’affaire Seehofer), on découvre les mobiles du mécène, le duc Guillaume IV de Bavière, l’un des « leaders » de la Contre-Réforme. En effet, on peut interpréter la figure de la vertueuse Suzanne et l’insistance sur sa virginité comme une réaction contre le nouveau concept luthérien du mariage. Dès lors, la représentation d’une conception très conventionnelle de la femme qui promeut l’idée d’un souverain catholique, juste et humaniste.

Sexual Intercourse in Pre-literate societies

Pre-literate societies include pre-colonial and sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, the Pacific and Australia. We have the most detailed knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa, especially as many of its characteristics have survived to the present day. In terms of sexually there was a broad similarity between these societies. In most of Eurasia there has been over the last five millenia an association between the use of the plough on good soils, a concern for the identity of descendants, the control of premarital and extramarital sexuality, and the identification of female sexual virtue as being at the heart of mortality. The paper describes the situation in sub-Saharan Africa, especially West Africa, where the complex of shifting cultivation with hoe tillage, communal land and lack of family land inheritance has meant that female virtue is associated with high fertility rather than the restriction of sexuality to marriage. Traditional society was characterized by the punishment of infertile women, considerable se...