Feminine Modesty Research Articles

Can a veiled Muslim woman speak? A feminist analysis of Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf (2010)

ABSTRACT Women’s presence in public spaces frequently attracts public gaze. More than any other item of clothing, women’s usage of the veil in public has generated controversy. Though the practice of veiling has been commonly held to preserve feminine modesty (in Christianity, Judaism and Islam); in modern times it is distinctively identified as an Islamic practice through which Muslim women are stereotyped as bodies deprived of sexuality and femininity. This study, using the framework of Islamophobia theorized by Allen, has explored the causes and effects of Islamophobic victimization of a veiled Muslim woman in Love in a Headscarf, a memoir written by Shelina Janmohamed. As a practicing Muslim who veils as an act of love for God and commitment to modesty, and as an immigrant who is acquainted with Western modernism, Janomohamed alludes to the wide gap between the perception of the veil, as a symbol of oppression, and the experience of veiling, as an empowering activity. Building on her identification, this paper concludes that recognition of the feminine, and the feminist sensibility of Muslim women who choose to veil their bodies is needed to understand the nexus between the veil, Islamophobia and oppression.

Reframing Feminine Modesty, Complaint, and Desire in the More Family

Reframing Feminine Modesty, Complaint, and Desire in the More Family

Defying modesty: sexuality, female desire and stardom, Chandidas (1932)

ABSTRACTSexuality and sexual display in Indian films, especially the more contemporary Indian cinema has often been labelled as regressive on account of it objectification of the female body and the splitting of the woman down to her bodily presence. This article however makes the case that female sexual displays, especially in songs (and dance sequences) have accounted for the making of stars, more so when such displays have stood out against the mainstream society’s codes of feminine modesty and reticence. In essence the article argues that what has often been criticised as a disservice to women has frequently been precisely the opposite, for its projecting of autonomous and potent feminine selves. That is not to take away from the truth of this cinema’s sexualisation and objectification of women, or the aspect of sexual exploitation in the workplace as epitomised by the infamous casting couch wherein women have had to dispense sexual favours in order to secure work. However when we consider stardom and the making of some female stars of Indian cinema, what stands out is a sexual openness in their portrayals, which made these exceptional for the agency that they ascribed to the female protagonist. As such, the article makes the case that women in films, even when figured as objects of the male gaze, occasionally actually stood forth as models for the debunking of social codes, and for giving a primacy to women that was not a given either within the diegetic space of the films themselves, or society at large.

The dark underbelly of land struggles: the instrumentalization of female activism and emotional resistance in Cambodia

ABSTRACTFacing land grabs and eviction in the name of development, women worldwide increasingly join land rights struggles despite often deeply engrained images of female domesticity and conventional gender norms. Yet, the literature on female agency in the context of land struggles has remained largely underexplored. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, my findings suggest that land rights activism in Cambodia has undergone a gendered re-framing process. Reasoning that women use non-violent means of contestation and are less prone to violence from security personnel, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) push women affected by land grabs and eviction to the frontline of protests. Moreover, female activists are encouraged to publicly display emotions, such as the experienced pain behavior that sharply contrasts with Cambodian norms of feminine modesty. I critically question this women-to-the-front strategy and, drawing on Sara Ahmed’s politics of emotions approach, show the adverse risks for female activists. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the instrumentalization of female bodies and emotions in land rights protests perpetuate gender disparities instead of strengthening female agency in the Cambodian society and opening up political space for women.

Are There Gender Differences in Professional Self-Promotion? An Empirical Case Study of LinkedIn Profiles Among Recent MBA Graduates

Women are more modest than men in expressing accomplishments, referred to as the “feminine modesty effect”. Given the importance of highlighting accomplishments and skills for professional advancement, our research revisits the classical question of equal opportunity with a modern dataset to examine how women leverage LinkedIn, a professional social networking site. We first apply propensity score matching methods to identify a subset of similarly qualified female and male U.S. users who recently graduated/will be graduating (2011-2017) from a top-ranked MBA program as indicated on their LinkedIn profile. We then analyze gender differences in online self-promotion choices, an often overlooked aspect of understanding the role of gender in the professional hiring pipeline. Among matched subsets of female and male users, we find that females are less likely relative to males to utilize data fields that require writing in free-form such as the Summary and Job Description fields. However, we find for most universities that females and males are equally likely to include more structured data fields such as Honors and Skills, and for some universities females are more likely to include at least one Skill. This work begins to quantify gender biases in user-provided data and introduces important considerations for how self-presentation choices affect professional opportunity in online hiring platforms.

A Mother's Martyrdom: Elite Christian Motherhood and the <em>Martyrdom of Domnina</em>

This article examines the Martyrdom of Domnina as recorded by John Chrysostom and Eusebius of Caesarea in order to show how early Christian ideas of mothering and motherhood for upper-class women were constructed through rhetorical examples. It is interested in how the martyr tale created new notions of Christian pudicitia (feminine modesty) and pietas (piety) through the rhetorical model of a devout mother who kills her two children as an act of Christian martyrdom. Through its comparative analysis of the ideal Roman matrona and the ideal Christian matrona as she emerged through the Domnina narrative, this article demonstrates how ideas about the elite Christian mother developed through the referencing and reframing of contemporary notions of Roman elite motherhood.

Women and modesty in late antiquity

This book offers a fresh approach to some of the most studied documents relating to Christian female asceticism in the Roman era. Focusing on the letters of advice to the women of the noble Anicia family, Kate Wilkinson argues that conventional descriptions of feminine modesty can reveal spaces of agency and self-formation in early Christian women's lives. She uses comparative data from contemporary ethnographic studies of Muslim, Hindu, and indigenous Pakistani women to draw out the possibilities inherent in codes of modesty. Her analysis also draws on performance studies for close readings of Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Pelagius. The book begins by locating itself within the complex terrain of feminist historiography, and then addresses three main modes of modest behavior - dress, domesticity and silence. Finally, it addresses the theme of false modesty and explores women's agency in light of Augustinian and Pelagian conceptions of choice.

Entangled ethics: Piety and agency in Turkey

Anthropologist Saba Mahmood has critiqued the Western, feminist concept of liberal selfhood that assumes individual agency naturally resists constraints on autonomy in the process of self-realization. Based on her study of the women’s mosque movement in Egypt, Mahmood suggests that pious Egyptian women readily submit to disciplinary practices that emphasize feminine modesty, humbleness, and obedience – practices that would appear oppressive to many Western feminist observers but allow the women to cultivate a proper and (for them) desirable Muslim piety. While Mahmood’s critique is welcome, she tends to discuss individual ethical cultivation as occurring within only one normative system or another. This article will instead explore the fact that at any point in time, most individuals, especially those in a complex society like Egypt, operate under multiple normative systems and must engage with several layers of authority – family, religion, community, state – some of which may make contradictory demands on the participants in those systems. In such situations acts of submission to one set of norms may entail resistance to another set, so that acts of submission and resistance become entangled with each other. Drawing on examples from fieldwork conducted in a women’s Koran study group in Turkey, the article will explore these entanglements and discuss how they further complicate theorizing about the nature of individual agency.

Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830 ed. by Elizabeth Eger (review)

Reviewed by: Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830 ed. by Elizabeth Eger Mary A. Waters Elizabeth Eger, ed., Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Pp. xv + 309. ₤60.00/$95.00. The twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of interest in eighteenthcentury women’s intellectual life. Propelled by such books as Harriet Guest’s Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 and Anne Mellor’s Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830, both published in 2000, this new turn in research has shredded the twentieth-century commonplace that feminine modesty kept women out of the public sphere. Instead, in sometimes small but nevertheless often recognized and always significant ways, women shaped British arts, cultural identity, and public policy. Among those early influential volumes figured Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (2001), a collection Elizabeth Eger edited with Charlotte Grant, Clíona O’Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton. In Bluestockings Displayed, Eger collects twelve essays on a similar topic, and those familiar with her prior work will not be disappointed. Eger’s previous collection included her own essay on the 1778 painting by Richard Samuel entitled The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, which emblematizes the nation’s women intellectuals and artists as the triumph of advanced civilization. The current collection extends this inquiry by exploring the dynamics of visual representations, public image, and reputation in a culture with shifting, often even hostile, views regarding female agency in literature and the arts. Inspired by the 2008 National Portrait Gallery exhibition “Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings” that Eger co-curated with Lucy Peltz, the collection comprises the fruits of a conference associated with the exhibit. Together, its essays explore how visual culture shaped Enlightenment views on the relationship between virtue, patriotism, and female learning. [End Page 129] As one would expect of a book as engaged with the visual arts as with the literary, Bluestockings Displayed is illustrated with many of the prints and portraits that its contributors address. Unfortunately, all illustrations are in black and white, making detail difficult to discriminate in some prints, and leaving important background completely obscured in others. The exhibition catalog, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (2008), also by Eger, might usefully supplement, but that is a separate publication by a different press. Having invested in rich illustration, Cambridge might have taken the additional step of providing at least some of these images in color, especially in cases where the argument depends on details lost in the black-and-white renderings. Eger organizes the volume into three sections, beginning with five essays under “Portraits.” Spanning the years between Alexander Pope’s Epistle to a Lady (1743) and the early Victorian era, this section charts women’s efforts to represent themselves as respectable, even admirable, in the face of such visual and verbal derogation as Pope’s Epistle and the licentious satire of cartoonists like Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, Isaac Cruikshank, and others. Anne Mellor’s essay explores visual representations from the early years of the nineteenth century that combine eroticized femininity with moral propriety to contain public unease and depict female intellectual authority as compatible with Victorian respectability. Elizabeth Clery’s piece extends this argument with an overview of women authors who used paintings and prints, especially book frontispieces, to promote an image of virtuous femininity in an increasingly anonymous literary marketplace. Clare Barlow’s essay continues the exploration, analyzing Bluestocking portraits in the guise of mythological and historical figures as advocating female learning. In the only essay devoted to a woman visual artist, Anne Yarrington discusses the relationship between sculptor Anne Seymour Damer’s politics and her artistic fame. This section that opened with sentimentally erotic portraits of young women authors winds up with Devoney Looser’s essay confronting the ageism that often depicted elderly women as physically repulsive and forced older female intellectuals into self-representations of exceptional propriety and reserve. Part two on “Performance” opens with Joseph Roach arguing that soprano Elizabeth Linley, consigned to private concerts by her husband Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s ban on public performance, “recaptur[ed] her lost voice” in verse and “in the...

God and State in Egypt

God and State in Egypt

A Fine Balance: Negotiating fashion and respectable femininity in middle-class Hyderabad, India

AbstractDrawing on twelve months of fieldwork in suburban Hyderabad, this paper explores the double binds experienced by middle-class young women as they attempt to meet the competing demands of ‘respectable’ and ‘fashionable’ femininity. For middle-class women, respectability requires purposeful movement, demure posture and modest clothing when in public, as well as avoidance of lower-class spaces where men congregate. Status can, however, also be achieved through more revealing fashionable clothing and consumption in elite public spaces. Whilst respectability for some sections of the middle class necessitates avoidance of even platonic relationships with the opposite sex, upper middle-class informants encourage heterosociality and for some upper middle-class and elite youth pre-marital romance is a form of ‘fashion’ due to its location in high-status spaces of leisure and consumption. The tensions described in this paper reveal the fragmentation of Hyderabad's middle class and the barriers to social mobility experienced by women for whom the relationship between legitimate cultural capital and feminine modesty is becoming increasingly complex.

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain ed. by Beth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey, Lucinda L. Damon-Bach (review)

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain ed. by Beth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey, Lucinda L. Damon-Bach Carrie Tirado Bramen Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain. Beth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey, and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach, eds. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012. Pp. xviii + 330. $85.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper). Transatlantic Women is an important addition to a recent wave of collections that have opened up nineteenth-century studies to a transatlantic framework. It joins the ranks of volumes like Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture (2006) and Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age (2007), but where these earlier volumes [End Page 153] are structured around a single author, Transatlantic Women is more comprehensive in scope; it includes multiple genres and spans the period from 1830 to 1910 to cover an eclectic range of authors, including canonical figures like Stowe and Fuller as well as lesser-known writers like Anna Katharine Green and Louise Imogen Guiney. The essays in this volume grow out of a conference at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford in 2008, and they introduce a fascinating archive of primary material that yields real discoveries. These discoveries are not limited to literature: Libby Bischof’s discussion of the Women’s Rest Tour Association, for example, provides new insights into a Boston-based, intergenerational women’s travel network in order to highlight the therapeutic effects of travel as opposed to Silas Weir Mitchell’s infamous “rest cure.” Brigitte Bailey’s introduction, “Transatlantic Studies and American Women Writers,” traces the genealogy of the transatlantic paradigm from the works of Robert Weisbuch and Christopher Mulvey in the 1980s to the works of later figures like Paul Gilroy and Paul Giles. Bailey’s introduction is especially valuable for its overview of the most recent scholarship in the field, and her overview ends by arguing that the “transnational” does not simply replace the “national” as a preferred term; the “nation” and the “transatlantic,” she claims, are mutually constitutive terms that must be understood dialectically. This is a very fine introduction, and I would add that one could also trace a feminist genealogy of nineteenth-century women’s transatlanticism in the scholarship of Elaine Showalter and Nina Auerbach, both of whose work has moved back and forth across the Atlantic with insight and ease. The more recent emphasis on the transatlantic reflects on dominant paradigms and contests the terms “Englishness” and “Americanness,” and it expands the contexts and boundaries of literariness. Robin Peel’s contribution, for example, reads Emily Dickinson’s poetry alongside antebellum geological textbooks. “Travel,” understood both literally and metaphorically, provides the central rubric that structures the volume. The first part of the book centers on travel as an experience of social encounters, where travel writing plays a prominent role as a hybrid genre that incorporates elements from fiction, journalism, and letter writing. At the start of her essay on Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841), Lucinda Damon-Bach acknowledges that despite its popularity in the nineteenth century, Sedgwick’s travel writing has received little critical attention. Damon-Bach points out that rather than focusing on tourist sites—which was already a clichéd convention at the time Sedgwick was writing—Sedgwick instead describes her meetings with prominent British women writers such as Joanna Baillie, Mary Russell Mitford, and Harriet Martineau. Damon-Bach notes that Sedgwick was interested in how professional women writers negotiated between their intellectual lives and the routines of daily life, an interest personified by Mitford, who illustrates a model of female “genius” in a “humble home.” The first half of the book also explores how women writers grappled with their literary celebrity while travelling in Britain, how they balanced the public demands of successful authorship with the private modesty required of middle-class femininity. Sarah Klotz explores this theme with particular acuity in her chapter on Frances Osgood’s balancing act between poetic authority and feminine modesty. There are also three chapters devoted to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1853 journey to Britain, which she took immediately after the success of Uncle Tom’s...

Precipitous Sensations: Herman Mann's The Female Review (1797), Botanical Sexuality, and the Challenge of Queer Historiography

In 1800, printers in both New York and London released a republished edition of The Unsex'd Females, a political tract by Richard Polwhele, a London curate. Published anonymously in 1798, Polwhele's extremely popular poem was a vitriolic attack on Jacobin gender politics, reserving the largest part of its ire for one of the most notable unsex'd females of the decade, Mary Wollstonecraft. Historians and literary critics of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin politics alike have explored at great length the relationship between The Unsex'd Females and the essay to which it, in large part, responds: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Often overlooked, however, is that both the form and the content of Polwhele's poetic diatribe also parodically address another controversial and quite popular piece of literature from the 1790s: Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants (1789), an epic poem based on Linnaean taxonomy that described the sex lives of plants in pornographic detail. To Polwhele, Wollstonecraft's radical feminist politics and Darwin's lavishly copulating flora both reflected the same social ill: the violation of NATURE'S law (7) of feminine modesty. Tnough Wollstonecraft's work became cukurally associated with lasciviousness due to popular knowledge of her many romantic affairs, Polwhele's anxiety about the implications of the rise of popular interest in was derived from the science itself. Because of the 1735 publication of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, which introduced a sexual of taxonomy that identified plants by the presence or absence of their reproductive organs, emerged as a science, and cultural practices of plant exchange, dissection, and illustration exploded among the middle class and the wealthy. (1) If we keep this in mind, Polwhele's critique of radical feminism takes new shape when we consider his complaint that modesty was imperiled by Wollstonecraft's call for women's education. The American edition of The Unsex'd Females is permeated with assertions of his haughty disapproval of women practicing botanical science in the name of education. Describing a class, he writes that young students With bliss botanic as their bosoms heave, Still pluck with mother Eve, For puberty in sighing florets pant, Or point the prostitution of a plant; Dissect its of unhallow'd lust, And fondly gaze the titillating dust. (10-11) This series of lusty images--heaving bosoms, forbidden fruit, pant [ing] , prostitution, and the plant's organ of unhallow'd lust--render Polwhele's tract perhaps more pornographic than even Loves of the Plants, the poem it satirizes. In the American edition, Polwhele footnotes this passage, explaining that botany has lately become a fashionable amusement with the ladies. But how the study of the system of plants can accord with modesty, am not able to comprehend. In a somewhat voyeuristic validation of this claim, he also notes that, I have, several times, seen boys and girls together (n10). Polwhele's disgust at coeducational botanizing clearly demonstrates that the implicit sexuality of botanical taxonomy also spurred an explicit cultural awareness of as not only a science of sex but also an outlet for human practice. (2) This essay takes the transatlantic interest in popular as a point of departure in its examination of alternative sites for the study of American sexuality before the rise of formal sexology. (3) Focusing on the American interest in the sexual of popular in the wake of the Revolutionary War, turn to a lesser known unsex'd female of the 1790s, considering the historical problem posed by Deborah Sampson, the real-life, cross-dressing, lesbian-like protagonist of Herman Mann's The Female Review; or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady (1797). …

For Shame: Feminism, Breastfeeding Advocacy, and Maternal Guilt

In this paper, we provide a new framework for understanding infant‐feeding‐related maternal guilt and shame, placing these in the context of feminist theoretical and psychological accounts of the emotions of self‐assessment. Whereas breastfeeding advocacy has been critiqued for its perceived role in inducing maternal guilt, we argue that the emotion women often feel surrounding infant feeding may be better conceptualized as shame in its tendency to involve a negative self‐assessment—a failure to achieve an idealized notion of good motherhood. Further, we suggest, both formula‐feeding and breastfeeding mothers experience shame: the former report feeling that they fail to live up to ideals of womanhood and motherhood, and the latter transgress cultural expectations regarding feminine modesty. The problem, then, is the degree to which mothers are vulnerable to shame generally, regardless of infant feeding practices. As an emotion that is less adaptive and potentially more damaging than guilt, shame ought to be the focus of resistance for both feminists and breastfeeding advocates, who need to work in conjunction with women to oppose this shame by assisting them in constructing their own ideals of good motherhood that incorporate a sense of self‐concern.

Privacy, Property or Propriety: The Case of “Pretty Portraits” in Late Nineteenth-century America

The advent of the photographic camera in the mid-nineteenth century enabled the “likeness” of an individual to be lifted with relative ease from its possessor and rendered with uncanny precision upon material. This fracturing of the subject into transportable, reproducible objects threatened a novel kind of harm, especially for women. This article brings new research to bear on the origins of the American “right to privacy” (such as the Federal 1888 “Bill to Protect Ladies”), arguing that the foundational 1890 article by Warren and Brandeis was but one of numerous attempts to remedy the unauthorized circulation of women’s photographic portraits. The gendered nature of this “right” means it must also be contextualized within women’s history and the broader struggle for equal citizenship. The “right to privacy” cannot simply be dismissed as a purely conservative doctrine invoking feminine modesty. In its demands for the legal recognition of those pictured as active subjects, rather than “pretty” objects, as individuals rather than nameless faces, as possessors of valuable property, rather than as valuable possessions in themselves, I argue that the “right to privacy” challenged the masculine prerogative of copyright law and pushed back against the reduction of women to silent, compliant images that was occurring on an industrial scale, in the late nineteenth century.

여성의 신체이미지가 의복행동과 체중조절에 미치는 영향

This study targets adult females and shows the analysis of physical images affecting clothing behavior, satisfaction or dissatisfaction of ready-made clothes, favorite ready-made clothes design, and weight control as well as the result of demographic characteristic influencing clothing behavior. An individual satisfied with their body prefers bright colors and shiny clothes, on the other hand, an individual who is dissatisfied with their body do not like ready-made clothes and favor loose suits. This study shows that individuals not satisfied with their body are afraid of becoming fat and are following a weight control program. The analysis explains that women (who care for their appearance well) pursue aestheticism, superiority, and are more satisfied with ready-made clothes with casual, feminine, and fancy motifs. It also shows that women who have no confidence in their body follow feminine modesty; on the contrary, those who are confident of their body are satisfied with ready-made dresses and prefer a sexy image. As a result, those who do not care about their looks seek feminine modesty, functionality, and easy-management.

Coriolanus : Inordinate Passions and Powers in Personal and Political Governance

For wisdom is the property of the dead, A something incompatible with life; and power, Like everything that has the stain of blood, A property of the living ... --William Butler Yeats, Blood and Moon Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, defines moderation as a disposition to choose the just mean between excess and deficiency emotion and action as a response to varying circumstances and relative to each particular person. (1) As a situational ethic, moderation can only be limned in outline and not precisely, (2) but that did not stop the golden mean from becoming a powerful cultural commonplace early modern England. (3) Despite its ubiquitous invocation as an ideal, there was a great divergence how this ethical principle was to be construed or applied to the various spheres--economic, religious, social, amorous, convivial--of early modern life. (4) Shakespeare distinguishes himself from most of his contemporaries, Who pitted passion against moderation, excess against what they considered a lackluster Aristotelian mean. Given his complexity of thought, Shakespeare, throughout his corpus, presents diverse representations of moderation, reflective of various contemporary views: for example, self-restraint with regard to common pleasures, discipline politics, virtuosity self-advancement, and feminine modesty. Among Shakespeare's various depictions of the mean, however, none, I believe, is as innovative and potent as virtuous moderation, deploying rather than decrying passion toward salutary and excellent ends. Shakespeare throughout his plays vividly dramatizes a conception of moderation faithful to Aristotelian ethical theory of the mean as a situational virtue, which comprehends excessive affect and action. Moderation is, value, a virtuous extreme and, practice, an instrumental mean that involves the entire range of excessive and moderate passion and action: an excellence of disciplined passion. (5) In Aristotle's famous illustration of moderation as the action of a skilled archer aiming at his target, (6) the mean and the extreme converge literally the bull's eye. As Aristotle suggests, even discerning the target real life is much more complex than archery that the just mean is a moving target--not a simple arithmetic mean--varying by person, by circumstance, by emotion. As Shakespeare so richly shows, this perfective moderation, harmonizing passion and reason, fuses effective strategy with virtue. The virtuous mean comprehends rather than eschews the sometimes extreme measures required of prudence; affectively, moderation, depending on the situation, might entail an intense expression of passion or a submerged one, without ever extirpating it. Entailing rational deliberation implemented effective action--all fueled by a noble end--virtuous moderation presupposes psychologically complex, well-developed characters. It is no surprise then that the plays of Shakespeare, through their wealth of nuanced characters engaged psychologically complex action, are so congenial for examinations of the passions and their virtuous governance. This ethico-political study examines Shakespeare's Coriolanus how the lack of virtuous moderation the eponymous hero, Rome's first citizen, reflects the collective immoderation of the entire polity: the state's inability to bring its various parts into salutary corporate balance, thus overturning its pro-republican advances. This tragedy has intrigued audiences at two levels--characterological and political. Its title character, herculean his strength and moral integrity, continues to baffle and provoke ambivalence us. The play, a dramatization of Rome as an emergent republic, has also garnered critical attention recently the effort to recuperate early modern texts as pro-democratic documents. (7) The personal and political strands merge the interlinked fates of Coriolanus and the state. In this play exploring governance, Coriolanus's incontinence contributes to and is emblematic of Rome's constitutional imbalance as an incipient republic. …

Madeleine de l’Aubespine: Life, Works, and Auto-Mythography: An Exchange with Ronsard, ca. 1570–80 1

Madeleine de l’Aubespine:Life, Works, and Auto-Mythography: An Exchange with Ronsard, ca. 1570–801 Anna Klosowska In 1587, the posthumous printing of Ronsard's Amours diverses included for the first time among the Gayetez a sonnet praising a woman poet quite forgotten today, Madeleine de l'Aubespine (1546–96).2 That poem is one of the very few in Ronsard's œuvre where he praised a woman for her writing.3 L'Aubespine answered by a sonnet where she compared herself to Phaeton, and called Ronsard "her Apollo" (7).4 Ronsard's reply continued the theme of Phaeton. Only the last tercet of this unpublished sonnet remains:5 Si vollant vous tombez pour me vouloir trop croire Au moings vous acquerez pour tombe ceste gloire Q'une femme a vaincu les plus doctes françois. If, flying, you fall, too willing to believe me, At least you will have earned this glory for your tomb That a woman surpassed the most learned French men. The source of the Ronsard fragment is a nine-page handwritten description (including incipits and quotes) of the lost posthumous manuscript of l'Aubespine's poetry.6 That volume, containing over 4500 lines, disappeared in the fire of the Turin library in 1904.7 However, the description of l'Aubespine's lost volume, especially the incipits, led to the rediscovery of her works contained in other manuscripts, until now considered anonymous or attributed to other (male) poets. I will briefly describe l'Aubespine's life and major works, and then focus on her exchange with Ronsard. Rather than use the topos of feminine modesty, l'Aubespine and Ronsard fashion a national, heroic, [End Page 19] masculine figure of the author: l'Aubespine is Ronsard's successor, the French Phaeton to his French Apollo. Life and Works Louise Labé, a hoax?8 If Labé has a "problem"—as Huchon's recent study claims, she may have not existed, and instead was a fictional character invented and maintained by a group of poets and an eager public that took the bait and responded to the fiction as if it was reality, at the time, and over the centuries—l'Aubespine's "problem" is the opposite: she did exist and write, but had no public that sustained the tradition of reading her works with her name attached to them, into the present time. In view of this opposition, we may ask ourselves what is a canonical author but une créature de papier, a nexus of discourses that actual presence and poetry written in an originary moment in history only anchor but do not determine? I believe we have always answered this question by editing and discussing anew certain forgotten writers, including women. The canon is not a matter of universally recognized beauty, but a matter of maintaining the old or creating new discursive fields that are trendy enough to attract attention. Once a certain critical mass of responses is reached, the field takes on a life of its own. By contrast with Labé, l'Aubespine's life in letters was limited by the nearly intangible practice of writing poetry shared in the ephemeral context of a literary circle. Manuscripts vanish, memories fade, unpublished authors disappear. It took the current confluence of scholars, access, and accidents of preservation, to bring out l'Aubespine's legacy. What will be its assessment? That will be determined in the conversational space formed around her writing: her auctorial and erotic self-fashioning, nothing short of exciting because it emphasizes two trends that go against the stereotype of "feminine modesty": one, the fact that women authors had literary ambitions expressed by myths of creation and author personas that we would consider "masculine," and two, that women in the period read, wrote, and publicly shared erotic poetry, sometimes with lesbian themes; the emergence of her works, of which only a third has been recovered; Colette Winn's uncertain attribution to l'Aubespine of the Cabinet des saines affections;9 Isabelle de Conihout and Pascal Ract-Madoux's discovery of the magnificent bibliothèque évanouie, inventoried at l'Aubespine's death: some three thousand volumes including, for [End Page 20] instance, an Aldus...

"Weil ich der raschen Lippe Herr nicht bin": Oral Transgression as Enlightenment Disavowal in Kleist's Penthesilea

Kleist's Penthesilea so shocked contemporary readers that the writer insisted: "She really did eat him, Achilles, out of love." Indeed, the oral aspect of Penthesilea's destruction of Achilles is sometimes overlooked, an omission this article seeks to address. I argue that by radically conflating oral appetites, the figure of Penthesilea disawows Englightenment culture in three respects: the ideal of feminine modesty; aesthetic values that posited woman as an object of appreciation rather than an agent of aesthetic taste; and the Enlightenment's social contract, which subordinated bodily appetites to the interests of the community.

Dismantling the myth of “mad madge”: the cultural context of Margaret Cavendish's authorial self-presentation

This study aims to show how Margaret Cavendish's unprecedentedly self-affirming stance as a woman author is enabled by factors associated with her position as a displaced royalist during the 1650s. Her publication is initially catalysed by contact with royalist literary production in Interregnum London. Meanwhile, the setbacks suffered by her exiled husband provide one of a number of contexts in which her attention-seeking approach to publication might be construed as a form of legitimate self-display. The literature of feminine conduct also posits a connection between women's display and the maintenance of aristocratic authority rendered so vital for the wider body of royalists by their current political predicament. Even Cavendish's forthright statements of a desire for fame need not be seen to transgress feminine modesty if we regard her as drawing on the topical representational tradition of thefemme forte. Nevertheless, the changes in post-Restoration royalist culture necessitate alterations in her powerfully self-assertive authorial image.