Feminine Desire Research Articles

Ena kašlja, druga pleše: Freud, Strauss in sprevrženost sodobnega življenja

Navkljub znani ravnodušnosti do glasbe jo Freud včasih prav poznavalsko omenja. Ta sestavek napeljuje na misel, da se je freudovska podzavest deloma oblikovala po glasbi pozne romantike v povezavi z opisi ženskega poželenja. Freudov primer Dore in Richarda Straussa opera Saloma se stekata v findesièclovskem konceptu glasbene podzavesti.

Frigidity, Gender and Power in French Cultural History

This paper interrogates the commonplace view of frigidity as a notion always founded upon the misogynist failure to understand female sexual specificity. As an historical explanation, this view fails to take into account the contextual parameters of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about female desire within which the notion of la femme frigide emerged and developed. This paper discusses the work of a range of French medical and psychoanalytic thinkers across the turn of the twentieth century and through the interwar period, showing how ‘frigidity’ was developed at this time by those who saw themselves precisely as contesting prevailing notions of normative feminine desire, or as defending the rights of women to maximum pleasure. But the inventors of frigidity were no feminist avengers either. Their demands for female pleasure assumed a delicate axis between the avoidance of excess, on the one hand, and the dangers of perversion that would result from any attempt to deny sexuality generally, on the other. Viewed within the context of early twentieth-century French gender anxieties, thinkers like Fauconney and Marie Bonaparte are ambivalent exemplars of the ‘management’ of sexuality referred to by Michel Foucault.

Paraíso terrenal, mujeres bellas, gente cordial: Gender Performances and Narratives of Modernity in La Sierra

La Sierra (Martínez and Dalton, 2005), a portrait of a paramilitary‐run community on Medellín’s eastern edge, is both anthropological study and self‐conscious creator of narratives. The documentary is both globally and locally inserted, and straddles both generic and public/private boundaries. The article discusses the film’s self‐conscious examination of gender performances, describing the way it plays out the conflicting demands of masculinity on the male body. It argues that the responses of feminine desire and identity to the various masculine models may subvert dominant codes through (re) citation and failed interpellation. Central to the article’s argument is the notion that through female desire, the film performs Colombian undecidability surrounding masculine violence.

Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvère Song. (Gallica, 10) by Helen Dell

1136 Reviews main alteration is to adopt modern paragraphing, which facilitates easy reading, especially of the epic Gui, which runs to 12,920 lines. Weiss's translation is flowing and colourful, and supported by comprehensive footnotes which defend her choice ofwords, draw attention to previous editorial corrections, and point out manuscript variants. She takes pains to avoid any am biguity ofmeaning, as in her translation of Ta mer de Bretaine' in line 750 as 'the Breton coast\ combining both nuances of the original phrase. In sum, this is an excellent scholarly edition of both texts,which it is to be hoped will contribute to a renewed critical interest in insular romance. Queen's University Belfast Mariana Neilly Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvere Song. By Helen Dell. (Gallica, 10) Cambridge: Brewer. 2008. x+227 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-1-84384-164-7. Helen Dell's study focuses on issues thathave been explored indepth in troubadour scholarship but, as of yet,mostly neglected with regard to theNorthern French lyric tradition. Her work aims in part, therefore, to counteract criticism which has privileged not only the Southern poetry, but also the 'high-style' chanson over the pastourelle and the chanson defemme. Dell adopts a psychoanalytic line of enquiry to support her argument, a primarily Lacanian reading of how genre affects the expression of desire by both masculine- and feminine-voiced poets. Dell begins by setting out her 'kaleidoscopic methodology' (p. 20), consisting of three sets of paired chapters that 'follow each other on the basis of difference' (ibid.). Thus her firstchapter on masculinity in trouvere lyric is followed by one on femininity in the system, her third chapter on masculine desire followed by one on feminine desire, and her fifthchapter on 'chronotopic' relations to feminine desire followed by an investigation of itsapplication tomasculine desire. The layout seeks to enable 'a turning of the kaleidoscope for each chapter so that the relations between the terms shake down into a different pattern with different differences emerging (ibid.). The first two chapters on the song system successfully introduce the complex ities of categorizing the feminine voice in trouvere lyric, showing how genre and gender are irrefutably linked, the subjugated feminine position being associated with the low-register chanson defemme. Dell's decision to focus solely on feminite textuelle rather than attempting to establish the identity of the 'female' poet, as some trobairitz scholarship has done, shows her dedication to an essentially the oretical approach. In certain places, however, it is hard for her to strike the right balance between psychoanalytic interpretation and close reading. Her analysis of themutable feminine voice is, for example, accompanied by a rather protracted discussion ofAristotle, Lacan, and JudithButler,which somewhat overshadows her generally perceptive interpretation of the trouverematerial. The subsequent chapters on desire centre on the dichotomy between the high style chanson and the low-style pastourelle, and on feminine desire as expressed in the chanson d'ami. Dell's treatment of the latter is instructive, challenging critical MLR, 104.4, 2009 1137 neglect of the feminine expression of reciprocal desire in trouvere lyric.However, the resulting equality between desirer and desired that this exposes simultaneously manages tounravel her Lacanian methodology. Dell struggles tofit thisdiscrepancy into her overall argument, describing reciprocal desire as a bland, vanilla configu ration' (p. 99) that devalorizes the chanson cVami through lack of conflict, a theme which ostensibly now enters the discussion in order to provide an answer to the difficultquestion Dell has posed herself. It is inher study of the chronotopes' of desire?a termborrowed fromBakhtin? thatDell's line of enquiry becomes harder to follow. The last of the paired chapters explore masculine and feminine relations to space and time and how these affect and inform expressions of desire. Her analysis of the feminine-voiced poetry in cludes a lengthydiscussion of Freud's case studyDora, in an attempt to provide a comparison with the position of the female trouvere. In Chapter 6Dell's treatment of 'masculine space-times' inexplicably includes a scientific formula to calculate speed in the poetry (given as time divided by distance travelled), describing the male-voiced poet as one whose 'temporal versatility ismirrored in his spatial mo bility (emblematized...

THE DISTURBED DOMESTIC: SUPERNATURAL SPACES IN ELLEN WOOD'S FICTION

This article explores the operations of the supernatural in two of Wood's novels: The Shadow of Ashlydyat (1863) and Dene Hollow (1871). In these texts, uncanny shadows, hauntings and prophecies are inextricably linked to the domestic sphere, ensuring that the supernatural is brought into close contact with the lives of women. As these novels reflect, Wood's supernaturalism often becomes an alternative discourse with which to express feminine desires and fears that are otherwise marginalized by rationalist discourses.

Mujer, historia y sociedad: La dramaturgia española contemporánea de autoría femenina (review)

Reviewed by: Mujer, historia y sociedad: La dramaturgia española contemporánea de autoría femenina Matthew I. Feinberg Mujer, historia y sociedad: La dramaturgia española contemporánea de autoría femenina. Reichenberger, 2007. By Wendy-Llyn Zaza. Grappling with some thirty-six works by seventeen different women, this comprehensive study of plays by Spanish women since just before the death of Franco and through 1990s has two purposes. First, it shows how women writers of this period have participated in a "revisionismo crítico" [critical revisionism] that rearticulates a Spanish historiography outside of dominant ideologies. Secondly, it highlights the ways that the theater of Spanish women has participated in the construction of a new autonomous political identity. In both cases, the experience of women living under a patriarchal system becomes an allegory for the Spanish republic's confrontation with a paternalistic and oppressive dictatorship. Despite beginning her chronological study with María Zambrano's 1967 play La tumba de Antígona and ending with Miauless by Itziar Pascual [1999], Zaza contextualizes all of the works she studies by connecting the changes identity experienced by the female characters in these texts with the profound changes occurring just prior to, during, and after the Transition. Zaza organize the chapters of the book thematically. In Chapter One, Zaza looks to the treatment of Antígona and Eva by Zambrano and Carmen Conde respectively, to demonstrate how these writers have appropriated classical texts to refute "el concepto de la 'mujer pecadora' " [the concept of the sinful woman](35). According to Zaza, it is through this mujer pecadora that these texts construct an allegorical " 'antes,' dentro un sistema 'natural' matrilineal" [a before aligned with a system of matriarchy] and " 'después,' tras la instauración de la ley patriarcal" [after, following the installation of the patriarchal law] (35). Importantly though, by demonstrating the erroneous nature of the foundational myth of the mujer pecadora these texts undermine the legitimacy of the patriarchy which follows. Zaza takes this allegorical significance to its logical conclusion when she links these myths to the "before" and "after" of the Spanish Civil War. For it is within this "after" that the patriarachal myths of the Falange are employed as the historical basis for Spanish history. This reappropriation of mythological characters is echoed in Chapter Two where treatments of Isabel la Católica, Juana la Loca and even Enrique IV by Concha Romero, Diosdado, and Resino demonstrate the pervasive power of this patriarchal after in which "pese a que la figura monárquica encarna el poder, el 'ser reina' no difiere sustancialmente del 'ser esposa': ambas condiciones requieren la sumisión femenina y una negación del 'ser mujer' " [despite the fact that the figure monarchical is the incarnate of power, the queen-being doesn't differ substantially from the wife-being: both conditions require feminine submission and a negation of the woman-being] (54). The representations of mythology and history are key tools for representing the historical circumstance of women throughout Spanish history. The usefulness of these early chapters becomes apparent later in the book as Zaza demonstrates how the mujer pecadora [sinful woman] and the condition of ser mujer [woman-being] are challenged by the later trends in female drama production and result in the articulation of a strong female autonomous subject. Not coincidently this ability to project a dramatic representation of women as autonomous subject becomes possible when the political rights and influence of women enters into the after of the post-Franco years. Here Zaza looks to María Manuela Reina's La cinta dorada (1990) and Reflejos con cenizas (1992) to illustrate the ways that dramatic writing of Spanish women has helped to rearticulate the before and after of the [End Page 272] Civil War as the transformation during the Transition from the umwelt of a patriarchal system of values to the expression of innewelt, the world of independent feminine desires. For Zaza, this movement towards a liberal autonomous subject represents not only the experience of women in Spain, but of Spain itself. As a result, the last two chapters, "Teatro de la transición" and "Más allá de la modernidad," emphasize the correlation...

Transaxillary endoscopic excision of benign breast lumps: a new technique

Benign breast lumps affect 10% of women in their lifetimes. Despite a favorable natural history enabling surveillance as an option, surgical excision continues to be popular. Avoiding a scar on the breast is an inherent feminine desire. Because the breast is a part with a high charge in the culture, women seek to keep it away from the surgical knife. Numerous minimally invasive approaches have evolved as a result of this psychology. These leave much to be desired. Circumareolar incision at best camouflages the scar, which still is sited on the breast. This scar is subject to the same sequelae as any other breast scar. The axilla, an anatomically contiguous space, provides easy access for endoscopic breast surgery. The authors used this access to excise benign breast lumps endoscopically. This spared the breast from a scar. Between January 2002 and March 2005, 14 women with benign breast lumps underwent surgery. Transaxillary endoscopic excision of 18 such lumps was performed. A total of 14 women with 18 benign breast lumps underwent surgery. The mean operative time per patient was 66.78 min (range, 40-110 min). No axillary injury, bleeding, technical difficulty, surgical emphysema, conversion, hematoma, or rehospitalization occurred. All the women expressed their satisfaction and happiness with the operation. Endoscopic excision of benign breast lumps is a safe and patient-friendly procedure.

Rethinking Tableaux Vivants and Triviality in the Writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johanna Schopenhauer, and Fanny Lewald

This article rethinks the trivial status of tableaux vivants to generate insights into notions of femininity, aesthetics, identity, and high and low culture between 1780 and 1850. Arguing that a gendered, high/low cultural divide has obscured the complexity originally attributed to tableaux, the essay excavates the Goethezeit thinking that accompanied tableaux. In spite of not conforming to classical aesthetic categories, tableaux were deemed capable of rendering feminine desire visible and symbolically containable in the speechless female body. With this understanding, the essay illuminates both how tableaux construct Ottilie as a figure of renunciation in Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) and how Johanna Schopenhauer's Gabriele (1819) and Fanny Lewald's Jenny (1843) interrogate feminine renunciation by varying Goethe's device. Read in this manner, Gabriele reveals contradictions in Goethe's notions of femininity, while Jenny's performance as Ivanhoe's Rebecca (1819) articulates an alternative femininity to Goethean renunciation at the same time as it mobilizes Ivanhoe's critique of Jewish conversion and national identity for Lewald's German cultural context. (PMM)

Femininity and Assimilatory Desire in Joseph Roth

The article examines Joseph Roth's ambivalent attitude toward Jewish assimilation in Hiob and related works. In Hiob, the motor behind Jewish assimilation is figured as both an inexplicable Jewish Wandertrieb and an excessive attraction of Jewish women to Gentile men. Drawing on post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories and sociocultural studies, including Daniel Boyarin's Unheroic Conduct, I explore the implications of this eroticization of a social process. While Roth tends to blame the destruction of Jewish tradition on Jewish women, his notion of an "assimilatory drive" also allows for a productive reengagement with the concept of assimilation.

Present Absence: Memory and Narrative in Los recuerdos del porvenir

Elena Garro's Los recuerdos del porvenir (Recollections of Things to Come, 1963) describes a world in which memory is at once paramount and unreliable. The novel's collective narrator (the town of Ixtepec) recalls the past while perched on a "seeming stone" that is, in fact, the petrified body of Isabel Moncada, one of the novel's two female protagonists. Garro's novel offers a powerful evocation of both the attraction and the difficulty of memory as that which is past and at the same time present. Although it contains concrete references to the violence of Mexico's Cristero Revolt of the 1920s, Garro's novel also presents a mythical time of long horizons and uncertain duration. The novel closes with the inscription, in stone, of an explanation of Isabel's betrayal of her family and community. The inscribed stone makes the female body legible and this readable body, in turn, makes memory possible. Yet Isabel's body is at the same time a monument to forgetting, to absence. The crucial link between body and memory becomes evident in the stone monument that preserves the body without its contents, an empty figure of unresolved loss. The voice behind the inscription, moreover, is that of a marginalized woman whose "definitive" version of events is unreliable. At once visible and invisible, the stone body of Isabel becomes a double figure of presence and absence that situates memory at the juncture of embodiment and disembodiment. The unresolved tension between presence and absence shapes the novel's approach to memory.

The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary by Michèle Praeger (review)

138Women in French Studies Praeger, Michèle. The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Pp 211. ISBN 0-8032-3739-1. $45.00. In this engaging exploration ofthe complex question ofCaribbean identity , Praeger makes a persuasive argument for rethinking the relationship between the "imaginary" and the "real." She aptly maintains that the dichotomy between Imaginary and Symbolic that is a feature ofmany Western discourses perpetuates the erasure of those whose "reality" has long been defined for them through the lens of externally imposed ideologies. Praeger grounds her project on the idea ofa diverse and fluid Caribbean Imaginary that challenges the binaries of past/present, history/fiction, real/possible. Furthermore, this Imaginary may be inventing (realizing) what it imagines: "The 'true' people of the Caribbean are yet to come, and they will be, and perhaps already are, the figments ofa Caribbean Imaginary that is still in a state offormative flux" (2). Praeger's very topic thus challenges any metadiscursive attempt to contain it, and she does an admirable job of negotiating the complexities of her own critical position. Taking a fluid, multi-faceted and imaginative approach to her material, she avoids claiming authority to speak for and in the place of the Caribbean subject(s) ofher study. Instead she facilitates encounters among some of the most important francophone Caribbean writers of the twentieth century and lets them speak for and among themselves. She also scrutinizes many of the prevailing psychoanalytic, historiographie and anthropological discourses that have claimed to define and explain Caribbean identity. By bringing these discourses into "dialogic confrontations" with the works of selected Caribbean writers, she exposes their blind spots and biases and suggests how they might engage more productively with their Caribbean subjects . This dialogic approach is characteristic of the book as a whole, with each chapter constructed as a kind of "oblique and complex answer" to the one before. Praeger'sjudicious adaptation ofcritical discourses is noteworthy. Bringing psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives into dialogue with literary texts, she opens up these approaches to challenges and revisions and at the same time uses them to tease out and draw attention to "textual perplexities" which, for her, in turn suggest different ways of interpreting Caribbean identity. Praeger also makes a compelling argument for giving literature a privileged role in the work of understanding how cultural identities are imagined and constructed. Her readings and analyses clearly illustrate the value of using both literary and theoretical texts to explore interactions between the self and the world. The most clearly focused chapters are the two addressing the theories of créolité and creolization in the works of Chamoiseau, Confiant, Condé and Glissant. Praeger's detailed account ofthe changing contours ofthese movements is nuanced and informative. She also quite appropriately gives Glissant— and his vast, variable, rhizomatic Caribbean—privilege of place. In fact, Book Reviews139 Praeger's appreciation for the difficulty of Glissant's thought and for its dynamic potential to keep transcending its own conceptual borders reveals her sensitivity to the dangers of theoretical insularity and reductiveness. Among this book's other strengths I would include its attention to questions of gender . Cogent analyses of works by Condé and Lacrosil reveal how sexuality and feminine desire have gone unrecognized and unarticulated in accounts of Caribbean history and cultures. Praeger usefully highlights the complex interrelationships ofgender, race and class. Finally, a substantive bibliography, a functional index, and the inclusion of the original French for key citations all add to the usefulness of this volume. If I have one quibble with Praeger it is that her broadly defined conceptual framework does not accurately correspond to what she does in the book, and this lack of clarity makes the book's introduction somewhat fragmented and impressionistic. The title and some generalizing language in the early chapters foster an expectation of a more inclusive and exhaustive exploration , perhaps more fully engaged with anglophone and hispanophone Caribbean thinkers like Anderson, Walcott, Bénitez-Rojo, Gilroy, Brathwaite, and James. Certainly the broad influence of Fanon, Césaire, the créolistes and Glissantjustifies Praeger's regional focus, but she might have acknowledged that her venture into the Caribbean Imaginary and her engagement with...

‘Behind the Poetic Fiction’: Freud, Schnitzler and Feminine Subjectivity

In 1922 Sigmund Freud wrote to fellow Viennese author and dramatist Arthur Schnitzler: "I believe I have avoided you out of a sort of fear of my double." Through a series of reflections on this imagined doubling and its reception, this paper demonstrates that the ambivalent desire for his literary other attested by Freud's confession goes to the heart of both theoretical and historical questions regarding the nature of psychoanalysis. Bringing Schnitzler's resistance to Freud into conversation with attempts by psychoanalytically oriented literary scholars to affirm the "Doppengängertum" of the two men, it argues that not only psychoanalytic theories and modernist literature but also the tendency to identify the two must be treated as historical phenomena. Furthermore, the paper contends, Schnitzler's work stands in a more critical relationship to its Viennese milieu than Freud's: his examination of the vicissitudes of feminine desire in "Fräulein Else" underlines the importance of what lies outside the oedipal narrative through which the case study of "Dora" comes to be centered on the uncanny nexus of identification with and anxious flight from the other.

A Feminist Search for Love

This article explores the life and work of Emma Goldman to formulate a radical critique of intimacy. Goldman’s theory of sexual freedom and revolutionary love offers a feminist vision that challenges contemporary debates concerning uses of the language of feminine desire. Goldman appealed to ideals of feminine instinct and feminine desire in order to challenge the conventional meanings attached to femininity in her day. Her views on marriage, love, sexuality and the feminine are analysed alongside her writings on her own personal experience, in order to illuminate the continuing paradoxes feminists face in regard to definitions and experiencesof femininity.

Camphor Laurel: A Re-vision of Desire

Sarah Walker's 'Camphor Laurel' demonstrates that the text is one of a few Young Adult fictions which destabilise cultural assumptions concerning a normative heterosexuality, as it engages with male-centred discourses that have attempted to reconcile feminine desire with sexual orientation and categorisation. The novel's representation of same-sex desire by young female characters moves beyond the models of maturational development and identity politics, which inform most mainstream fiction.

Andy

In presenting the case of Andy, I hope to demonstrate the complicated multi-determined functions of feminine identifications and strivings in a boy with a diagnosable gender identity disorder. My patient's fantasies of wishing and needing to be a girl were not just the result of the influence of parental behavior and attitudes. Equipmental problems resulting from inborn factors and interferences with optimal development due to ongoing interaction with his environment were major contributing influences. Andy's experience of his body and his psychological elaboration of certain childhood events as well as his sexual and aggressive fantasies strongly influenced his feminine desires.

Textual Studies, Feminism, and Peformance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The social construction of identity has been a central concern in the criticism of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) for at least the last thirty-five years. In Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Larry Benson observes that "a knight's name, which is at once his identity and his fame, is 'an augur and program for life,' a sign of what his future conduct will be." 1 More recently, John Plummer has argued that the poem "illustrates" how identity "is essentially a social construct. We are the 'person' (as opposed to the purely biological object) that, simultaneously, we claim to be and our contemporaries accept us as being." 2 According to such readings, the Green Knight and the Lady test Gawain's ability to inhabit his identity fully, that is, to "be" the seamlessly perfect knight his pentangle and reputation claim him to be. Although the Lady and her husband play multiple roles as they test Gawain, critics have subordinated the significance of their performances to the dominant function of testing and producing Gawain's identity. Geraldine Heng provides a notable exception in "A Woman Wants: The Lady, Gawain, and the Forms of Seduction," where she focuses on the simultaneous production of both characters' identities in the bedroom sequence. 3 Drawing on a psychoanalytic feminist formulation of identity, Heng argues that "identity is exposed as a discursive construct" in the bedroom sequence. 4 For Heng, the Lady's manipulation of gender roles in the bedroom scenes destabilizes traditional categories of the masculine and feminine, leaving her irreducible feminine desire.

Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and NineteenthCentury American Literature. By Lori Merish. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 389. Illustrations. Cloth, $64.95; paper, $21.95.) Almost twenty-five years ago, in The Feminization of American Culture (1977), Ann Douglas posited connection between antebellum sentimental culture and the rise of an ethic of mass consumption. The pairing, however, came almost as an afterthought in Douglas's analysis of Calvinist decline and remained suggestive but largely undeveloped theme of her study. Nor have subsequent scholars of sentimentalism-Jane P. Tompkins, Mary Kelley, and Karen Halttunen, to name few of the most prominent-really explored the connection. Powerful scholarship, including Douglas's own work, on the emergence of separate male and female in the antebellum period may have rendered links between the apparently feminine realm of sentimental culture and the apparently masculine realm of economy difficult to discern. But building on recent revisions of the separate spheres thesis and picking up the thread of analysis that Douglas left dangling, Lori Merish, in Sentimental Materialism, has now provided bold and thoughtful investigation into the relationship between sentimentalism and consumption in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century America. Rejecting the once dominant idea that the culture of sentimentalism marked an escape (capitulatory or otherwise) from market discipline and bourgeois competition, Merish places sentimental discourse at the center of an emerging liberal capitalist economy and middleclass social order. The results, though not without problems, are provocative and promising for future study. Merish argues that sentimental discourse instated new feminized self, or what she calls new political subjectivity (2), for which affective ownership of commodities served as the basis for personal refinement and the model for social relations. By weaving commodity consumption into the very fabric of middle-class subjectivity, sentimentalism, according to Merish, made capitalism `habitable' (117) in democratic society and legitimized white men's proprietary interest in persons, both black slaves and white women. Thus Merish intervenes in debates over the liberatory potential of sentimental fiction for middle-class women. She maintains that the apparent validation of feminine desire in sentimental discourse was illusory because circumscribed within domestic ideologies, and, worse yet, that it naturalized and psychologized fundamental relations of inequality in American society. Merish begins her study with the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, finding in the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume, John Millar, William Robertson, and Lord Henry Karnes a representational matrix that (re)defined the ways in which ... consumption ... could be 'thought' in the new [American] republic (31). In short, Merish argues that Scottish discourse refigured sympathy and conscience as sentiments constituted, rather than undermined, by intimate proprietary relations with luxury goods. Scottish thinkers maintained that commodities and their exchange brought refined sensibilities; respectful, even loving, relationships across status groups; and broadly egalitarian social cohesion. Merish then discusses briefly-and with perhaps too little attention to the process of transmission-the ways in which late-eighteenth-century American writers of advice literature and sentimental fiction picked up this Scottish discourse, situated it within emerging ideologies of domesticity and femininity, and attached it to rising American middle class. In the second and third chapters, Merish addresses writings from the three decades preceding the Civil War. Focusing on the work of Caroline Kirkland, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, these chapters use the argument developed in the opening chapter to explicate set of well-known texts and to elaborate on connections among sentimental ownership, domesticity, and middle-class identity. …

The CAPital Letter: Balzac's Le Colonel Chabert and the Names of a Rose

This article examines sounds, names, and the writing of them in Le Colonel Chabert in order to uncover a subtext of primitive nightmare and fairy tale. The primary phonic clues are condensed into the names of the two central characters, Colonel Chabert and Rose Chapotel, and they echo the roots /kab/ and / ap/ found in words evoking the horse and the head. These phonemes and sememes point beyond the verbal narrative to the bodily relation of the protagonists to their most intimate fears and desires, and ultimately to the triumph of feminine desire over the laws/loss of the father. (ML)

History as a discourse in Jeanette Winterson's "The passion" : the politics of alterity

Set in the historical context of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is an outstanding example of the kind of fiction that Elizabeth Wesseling (1991: vii) calls postmodernist historical novels, that is, "novelistic adaptations of historical material". Besides, being profoundly self-reflexive, the novel also falls under Linda Hutcheon's (1988) category of historiographic metafiction. The present paper focuses on Winterson's political choice of two representatives of historically silenced groups, a soldier and a woman, who use two apparently opposed narrative modes, the historical and the fantastic, to tell a story that both exposes history as a discursive construct and provides an alternative fantastic discourse for the representation of feminine desire.

Feminine Desire in the Age of Satellite Television

Television texts around the world increasingly feature female characters who resist or reformulate conventional gender roles. This trend seems to defy expectations that the concentration of media ownership leads to a conservative, homogeneous flow of popular imagery. Such an apparent contradiction can be explained by close analysis of the strategies, operations, and discourse of culture industries in the neo-network era of satellite and cable media. This era is paradoxically characterized by corporate conglomeration and by strategies of flexibility and decentralization. Consequently, media firms actually benefit from the transnational circulation of multiple and alternative representations of feminine desire. Although this does not necessarily democratize media, in most societies it significantly expands the range of feminine imagery available in popular culture.