Feminine Virtue Research Articles

The politics of care

Editors Rachel Brown and Deva Woodly bring together Mara Marin, Shatema Threadcraft, Christopher Paul Harris, Jasmine Syedullah, and Miriam Ticktin to examine the question: what would be required for care to be an ethic and political practice that orients people to a new way of living, relating, and governing? The answer they propose is that a 21st-century approach to the politics of care must aim at unmaking racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, the carceral state, and the colonial present. The politics of care is an approach to political thought and action that moves beyond the liberal approach which situates care as a finite resource to be distributed among autonomous individuals, or as a necessarily feminine virtue. Instead, those elucidating the politics of care for the contemporary era draw on rich interdisciplinary traditions and social movements to theorize and practice care as an inherently interdependent survival strategy, a foundation for political organizing, and a prefigurative politics for building a world in which all people can live and thrive.

Original Sin and Feminine Virtue in Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife

Abstract: Though rarely read today, Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife was one of the bestselling novels of the early nineteenth century. This essay explores an underexamined tension within More’s evangelical novel: its expectation that exemplary Christian women, such as the heroine Lucilla Stanley, be angelically good yet wracked with guilt over their sinfulness. Drawing upon the writings of More’s friends and collaborators, William Wilberforce and John Newton, this essay ties the inconsistencies in Lucilla’s characterization to broader tensions within evangelical thought—mixed messages that evangelical women had to grapple with throughout much of the nineteenth century.

Creating Juvenalian Mirrors in Reading Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty

Abstract A great deal of African literature attempts to create Juvenal mirrors in addressing topical issues that confront aspects of society itself. This essay argues that Okpewho’s The Last Duty employs Juvenal satires in exposing the follies and foibles of the society. Okpewho presents detailed description of the inhuman and devastating issues, including corruption, wickedness, dishonesty and injustices that bedevil the society. Okpewho employs the candour and perceptiveness of narrators and characters to depict the suffering and violence in African society. The study examines selected Juvenal themes such as Corruption, People without Compassion are Worse than Animals, Soldiers are above the Law, The Decay of Feminine Virtue and The Vanity of Human Wishes.

The changing sensory experience of menstruation in central Kerala, India

ABSTRACT This paper enucleates menstruation as a sensory experience within and across three generations of women in central Kerala. Drawing heavily on the collected ethnographic data, it establishes that in central Kerala, until the second half of the 20th century, the practices surrounding menarche rites were employed as useful channels to aid a girl in internalizing the sensory order that the society deemed fit for a woman. Similarly, monthly menstruation was marked by compulsory sensory restraint to teach her the feminine virtues of moderation and obedience. However, this has undergone considerable transformation in present-day Kerala, owing to a variety of factors such as the community reform movements of the 19th century, the advent of certain aspects of consumer culture and the introduction of a modern, medical discourse of menstruation. For instance, a short analysis of the everyday sensory practices of contemporary women surrounding menstruation reveals a concurrence with the scheme of modernity to render menstruation and menstruating bodies as invisible. All of this emphasizes the fact that a woman’s sensorium has always been contingent upon the way in which her senses are socialized through menstrual practices, albeit differently at different points of time, in the history of central Kerala.

Peeta’s Virtue in the Hunger Games Trilogy

The Latin virtus literally means “manliness” (vir = man) and, by extension, the positive qualities that a man should have. During the transition from Latin to French to English, “virtue” lost its gender specificity, but retained its reference to positive qualities. Thus, by the Enlightenment period, separate standards of virtue had emerged for women and men. Suzanne Collins disrupts this gendered virtue dichotomy in her Hunger Games trilogy. Peeta Mellark is a natural diplomat and peacemaker, a gentle soul who fits the feminine model of virtue better than the masculine model. Although Peeta engages in violence when necessary, he is philosophically closer to Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi. Peeta is the complement of Katniss Everdeen, who echoes classical male heroes like Odysseus in her combination of martial prowess and trickster wiles. Other significant characters in the series, such as Primrose Everdeen and Gale Hawthorne, reflect the traditional virtues assigned to their gender. Thus Collins depicts various masculinities and femininities: masculine virtus, feminine virtus, masculine virtue, and feminine virtue. By having Katniss choose Peeta over Gale, Collins portrays Peeta’s gentle masculinity as a fully legitimate alternative to Gale’s martial heroism.

Heterosexual Plots and Ill Narratives in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Heterosexual Plots and Ill Narratives in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice Hannah Chaskin (bio) Angry at Fitzwilliam Darcy for his role in disrupting her sister's courtship, Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice (1813) looks on his alleged intended with a sarcastic bite in her voice: "I like her appearance. … She looks sickly and cross.—Yes, she will do for him very well. She will make him a proper wife."1 The "sickly and cross" woman is Anne de Bourgh, cousin of Darcy and daughter of the overbearing Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In the context of Pride and Prejudice's primary marriage plot, Anne is Elizabeth's most direct structural foil: both are imagined as potential future wives for Darcy. Yet Anne is not a real obstacle to Elizabeth's ultimate success; she exists in the narrative primarily to delineate the difference between the marriage of interest (in which Darcy marries Anne to consolidate his wealth) and the companionate marriage, or marriage for love (in which Darcy and Elizabeth enter into a partnership based on mutual esteem and compatible personalities). The novel's critique of aristocratic greed and the marriage of interest is figured through Anne's under-defined illness; her elitism and her illness are conflated, as though "sickly" and "cross" are synonymous. This essay concerns the roles of sickness and health in the construction of Pride and Prejudice's heterosexual marriage plot. My title pays homage to Marilyn Farwell's work of queer feminist narratology, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives, in which Farwell argues that normative narrative [End Page 313] structure "encode[s] heterosexuality … in its very mechanics."2 I will suggest that the mechanics of Austen's most influential marriage plot operate by deploying an idealized femininity that is essentially healthy and by defining ill femininity as narratively unviable. We are generally accustomed to a gendered ideology that understands dependency, passivity, and femininity to be interlocking terms that are set against self-sufficiency, agency, and masculinity. It is not, therefore, surprising that a propensity towards illness has often been conceived of as a feminine trait. Symptoms of specific illnesses, like consumption, intersect with norms of feminine beauty, and sentimental literature often represents acute or fatal illness in the wake of trauma as indicative of feminine virtue.3 However, by the end of the eighteenth century, feminist critiques of sentimental femininity were becoming prevalent, and these critiques were often framed in terms of illness and illness's effect on companionate heterosexuality. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, indicted a system of sentimental education designed to keep upper-class white women weak, beautiful, and essentially ill. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft argues that due to "inattention to health during infancy … dependence of body naturally produces dependence of mind; and how can she be a good wife or mother, the greater part of whose time is employed to guard against or endure sickliness?"4 Wollstonecraft and Austen are often cast as political foils, but Pride and Prejudice manifests Vindication's pathologizing strategy to critique sentimental, aristocratic femininity, with the result that it paints healthy and resilient femininity as essential to the companionate marriage plot. All of Austen's novels are invested in exploring the lines between health and illness, and between illness and character flaw.5 I focus on Pride and Prejudice in this essay because the relationship between the healthy heroine and the ill foil is so stark and so central to the plot itself and because it is perhaps the most influential of Austen's novels, insofar as it provided both plot and character types that have become ubiquitous in Anglo-American culture. If we accept that Pride and Prejudice has had an outsized role in the replication of what we now call the romantic comedy, the fact that Austen understood narrative structure through the lens of health and illness matters. While Austen's novels do not evince uncomplicated relationships to their own marriage plots, it is the narrative and characterological structures—often flattened out or simplified—that have made their way through the centuries in many forms. These structures have impacted our modern assumptions about the role of health and wellness in happy...

Women in the New Testament World

As the fourth book in the Essentials of Biblical Studies series published by Oxford University Press, Women in the New Testament focuses on the cultural context of the NT in relation to women in familial, occupational, and social realms of life. Along with the other volumes in this series, it is targeted to be a textbook-style introduction for use in the classroom.The first chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book as the introduction. Citing examples from women in Luke’s Gospel, Lydia in Acts, and 1 Tim 2, Hylen states her objective clearly: “to provide as clear a picture as possible of the legal and social status of women” (p. 4). She also clearly outlines her definitions of “women” and “New Testament world,” as these terms may be taken for granted today, and argues that women’s lives were varied and developed in the “New Testament world,” or the world(s) in which the NT writings are situated. The chapter ends with identifying the limitations of primary sources, which contains only glimpses of or passing references to women’s lives. These evidences include philosophical, historical, and literary works, inscriptions, and papyri (although I think she is referring to the documentary papyri as opposed to literary or other forms of papyri).The second chapter, entitled “Interpreting Evidence for Women’s Lives,” appears to be at first glance an expansion of the evidences at the end of ch. 1. It is, however, an explanation for the diversity and variation of statements about women in the primary sources. Hylen addresses some misconceptions that have arisen about ancient women, that women leaders were not “real” leaders, that they were exceptions to the rule, that they were limited to distinct communities, and that they were limited to the private sphere. One disappointment of this analysis is that Hylen relies on secondary more than primary sources. The argument for the diversity of views of women in the ancient world would have been much stronger if more primary sources were interpreted, instead of relying on secondary interpretations of the evidence. In any case, the point stands that social norms and practices of the NT world were probably diverse and complex, rather than uniform and homogenous, as with any society.The rest of the book identifies various aspects of women’s lives in the NT world. Chapter 3 addresses gendered virtues in the NT world, targeting modesty, industry, and loyalty. Hylen concludes that how these feminine virtues were displayed was complex and variegated and that the picture of docility that modern readers may imagine about ancient women may not reflect the reality of that world. Chapter 4 addresses the topic of marriage, divorce, and widowhood, challenging the traditional idea that women were strictly bound in authority by their fathers or their husbands (the paterfamilias). Chapter 5 describes the class status, wealth, and patronage of women in the ancient world. Hylen shows that women were owners of property and wealth as men were and acted in the capacities that men did, even if there were fewer women than men in these positions. Chapter 6 identifies the various occupations that ancient women were involved in, especially those relating to household management and production. Chapter 7 addresses the issue of speech and silence of women in the NT world. Her survey shows that women did speak publicly about many issues, especially those related to domestic and civic life, but they tended to refrain from speaking in public about political or judicial matters. Thus, the command in 1 Cor 14:34 for women to remain silent should be understood in view of that social convention and Paul’s maintaining those conventions in the public assembly (church). The final chapter is the conclusion, where she states that her goal is not to argue for a specific position on women in the NT but to invoke questions about NT passages based on its historical context.Hylen accomplishes the goal of the series of producing accessible books for classroom use, and she covers the broad topic of women in the NT world within a limited amount of space. The strengths of the book are providing an overview of the subject matter and questioning commonly held presumptions about the lives of ancient women. However, the overall argument of the book would be strengthened by relying more directly on primary sources than on secondary sources. Despite this suggestion, this book is informative and helpful for students and teachers alike in obtaining an overview of women in the world of the NT.

Who Could Tell the Joy That Is Between a Husband and His Wife? Feeling with the Good Wife in the Franklin's Tale

Abstract By focusing on the problems that Dorigen faces in maintaining her status as a good wife after Arveragus departs for England, the Franklin's Tale reorients the romance conventions of the Breton lai to follow the logic of contemporary conduct texts for good wives. Chaucer thereby explores how masculine sympathy for the good wife appropriates the structures of feeling at work in conduct texts in order to forge new associations between men as disparate as Arveragus, Aurelius, and the clerk of Orléans. But Chaucer also encourages us to linger and continue to feel alongside Dorigen, and as a result to feel the emotional costs women must bear to make such feminine virtue and masculine sympathy possible.

Special Issue: Heredity and Evolution in an Ibero-American Context

Special Issue: Heredity and Evolution in an Ibero-American Context

WOMEN'S ROLE IN THE PRODUCTION AND SALE OF ALCOHOL IN HAN CHINA AS REFLECTED IN TOMB ART FROM SICHUAN

AbstractPictorial brick tiles and stone carvings from the Eastern Han period show women engaged in the production of alcohol, and early histories and literary sources provide an insight into women's role in brewing, drinking, and selling alcohol in shops and in the market. Preparation of alcohol for ritual ceremonies, banquets, and daily consumption is listed among the many household duties for which women were responsible. It was women's work (nüshi 女事), as was the production of textiles, which assigned women with an economic role but also gave them a moral identity in the social sphere. However, women's mastery of brewing—mentioned but rarely elaborated—upon, did not connote feminine virtues in the same way as weaving. Through a close examination of artistic representations that show women engaged in the making of alcohol on the estate and in a workshop setting in the southwest (present-day Sichuan province), this article aims to examine the role women played in alcohol production and their contribution to the economy of both their household and the region in early Imperial China.

Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World ed. by Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea

Reviewed by: Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World ed. by Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea Ursula A. Potter Akhimie, Patricia, and Bernadette Andrea, eds, Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (Early Modern Cultural Studies), Lincoln/London, University of Nebraska Press, 2019; paperback; pp. 384; 3 b/w illustrations, 2 b/w maps; R.R.P. US$35.00; ISBN 9781496202260. I learned much from this collection of sixteen essays, in particular those in Part 1, which documents the travels of a handful of exceptional women within and between Europe and the Islamic world (Ann Broomfield Keeling, Mariam Khan, Teresa Sampsonia Sherley, Catherine Whetenall) and between America and Europe (Pocohontas). Their exploits are impressive, and their lives make for good reading. Part 2, which looks at women and travel in drama, has some outstanding contributions but was more uneven in terms of speculative arguments. Of the eight chapters, three deal with Desdemona in Othello, and the others with less obvious but nonetheless interesting targets such as Cleopatra, Marina in Pericles and The Empress in The Blazing World, Rosalind in As You Like It, and Bess in The Fair Maid of the West. The aim of the collection is to demonstrate that, despite the ubiquitous bans on women’s mobility in prescriptive literature, women did indeed travel overseas, and they participated in the era’s expansionist projects (Introduction, 4). Richmond Barbour paves the way for this counter-argument to the conduct books in the opening chapter with a fascinating description of Mrs Keeling’s travels with her husband, General William Keeling, in the East India Company. This very readable chapter provides ample evidence of support for wives on board for a range of reasons all ultimately in the interests of the company. Barbour uses Desdemona as an apt comparison. Michael Slater similarly presents documentary evidence to show that women such as Desdemona from elite circles were indeed expected to travel with their husbands. Given all the women in this collection are from these higher echelons of society is it necessary to justify their travels? Apparently yes. For contemporary biographers it remained obligatory to prove that feminine virtue, chastity and respectability were not incompatible with their female voyager. The two most common justifications for travel were love of husband and religious motivation. In the case of Teresa Sampsonia Sherley, a Circassian polyglot who travelled widely with her husband, the adventurer Robert Sherley, Carmen Nocentelli proposes her representation as a travelling consort, a gender-neutral term, overcame the usual sexual suspicions for female travellers. By drawing on European biographies Nocentelli uncovers a very different Sherley myth. Bernadette Andrea’s essay focuses on Teresa’s religious motivations by reference to a Carmelite relic she wore around her neck, a piece of flesh from [End Page 171] the body of St Teresa of Avila. The account of the relic’s origins and subsequent ‘career’ makes for compelling reading. Most of the historical essays draw on archival records or biographies. One of the few to use personal travel writings is Laura Ambrose, whose careful analysis of Lady Anne Clifford’s diaries and memoirs reveals how Clifford constructed her own image of herself not so much as a traveller but as moving between her estates. This also explains Clifford’s use of the term ‘remove’ rather than ‘journey’ (p. 169). Mobility in fact becomes the primary means through which Clifford organizes and remembers her life (p. 171) and by which she continually claims her legal entitlement to her estates. It is not possible to cover all sixteen contributions here, but the following stand out in Part 2. One is Laura Aydelotte’s ‘Mapping Women’, which covers several plays, including Othello. Aydelotte traces the way male and female characters employ geographic names and what that says about the boundaries of their power within the world of the plays they inhabit (p. 182). This is part of a digital project, ‘Shakespeare on the Map’, to identify and map the place names in Shakespeare’s plays and their gendered contexts. The Taming of the Shrew (not discussed by Aydelotte) is a good example of the value of this type...

Queer eye for the housewife: Julianne Moore, radical femme-ininity, and destabilizing the suburban family

This article uses the concept of “radical femme-ininity” to signal the queering of femininity as a political gesture, one that relies on misinterpretations of cisgender femininity as straight in order to disrupt normative expectations around gender roles and gendered behavior. I situate my analysis in relation to theories about femme identity, femininity in heteronormative spaces, and queerness/lesbianism as a productively destabilizing lens with which to engage media representation. I focus on the role of the housewife as one of the most seemingly banal and yet fraught positions historically presented to (white, middle-class) women. Particularly, I examine how actor Julianne Moore embodies these roles via a radically femme-inine representation that queers and refuses social convention. Normative articulations of the housewife writ large cast her as a guardian of familial and marital integrity. As such, housewife characters can destabilize ideas around marriage, domestic labor, motherhood, and feminine virtue from within the context of legible—but not always actual—heteronormativity. Moore often plays characters who question feminine behavioral norms and operate under the cloak of femme-ness (both straight and queer) to buck social expectation. This essay explores two of Moore’s films in which her character’s radical femme-ninity and lesbian identification unsettle expectations of her role as a housewife: The Hours and The Kids are All Right.

Martyred Patriarchs, Institutionalized Virtues, and the Gendered Republic of Twentieth-Century China

This article draws attention to the cultural and social specificities of women’s agency in Republican China and suggests a way to rethink the polarizing impacts of revolution- and war-related deaths on women’s lives. Analyzing a number of petitions submitted by widows of martyrs, this article explores the transformation in family-state and gender relations during the Republican era. I argue that the Nationalist martyr compensation law perpetuated the imperial-era standards for the feminine virtues of chastity and sacrifice, circumscribing women’s social and political roles in twentieth-century China. Under the new equality-promoting legal regime and in the absence of familial patriarchs, women had new opportunities to venture outside their domestic quarters and to engage with the state. Yet, the Republican state often made exceptions to the law based on petitioners’ display of feminine virtues. By entering into this negotiation of virtue with the state, Chinese women defined themselves primarily through their performance of moral qualities.

Doble ejemplaridad de la mujer en discursos religiosos novohispanos del siglo xvii

La presencia de la mujer en discursos religiosos es asunto bien estudiado, aun­que se ha insistido más en los poderosos tópicos misóginos que guían su representación, y menos en sus valoraciones positivas. En este artículo se exponen los resultados de un breve estudio retórico de las representaciones femeninas en discursos religiosos novohis­panos, a partir de uno de los lugares del discurso donde es posible observar con mayor cla­ridad su dimensión ideológica: la argumentatio, el lugar de las pruebas. Quintiliano había establecido tres modos en que la comparación ejemplar podía tener lugar en el discurso: en su relación de «semejanza» con la causa, en relación de «desemejanza» o el «ejemplo contrario»; la mayor parte de los tópicos misóginos religiosos —cuya observación ha sido dominante en los estudios al respecto— corresponden técnicamente a usos ejemplares contrarios a su causa, pero la representación femenina no se agota en estos tópicos pues falta una serie importante de representaciones semejantes, que muestran ya no los vicios de las mujeres sino sus virtudes deseables y su utilidad social. En cualquier caso, los es­pacios para la virtud femenina que encontramos en los ejemplos semejantes siguen siendo asfixiantes e injustos para las mujeres; aunque su observación permite completar el marco de posibilidades de representación femenina en discursos religiosos, y permite además determinar otro modo de realización retórica de dichas representaciones.

“Since All the World is mad, why should not I be so?” Mary Astell on Equality, Hierarchy, and Ambition

Ever since Mary Astell was introduced as the “First English Feminist” in 1986, scholars have been perplexed by her dual commitments to natural equality and social, political, and ecclesiastical hierarchy. But any supposed “paradox” in her thought is the product of a modernist conceit that treats equality and hierarchy as antonyms, assuming the former must be prior, normative, and hostile to the latter. Seeing this, two other crucial features of Astell’s thought emerge: her ethics of ascent and her psychology of superiority. These, in turn, illuminate her lifelong fascination with ambition as a feminine virtue, as well as her curious embrace of Machiavelli. Astell’s politics and ethics are thus doubly worthy of recovery, both as the product of a singularly brilliant early modern mind and as a fascinating but forgotten vision of “equality before egalitarianism” that sheds light on the persistent complexities of equality and hierarchy to this day.

The Gatekeeper within: Early Modern English Architectural Tropes of Female Consent

This essay maps out a constellation of early modern English feminine gatekeeper tropes that represent female sexual consent and imagine a gendered Cartesian dualism. This trope’s inherent mind–body divide grants the female subject’s mind a greater measure of rationality and autonomy from the body than other early modern discourses of feminine virtue, such as humoralism. However, it can also undercut feminine agency in self-regulation by placing all the responsibility and blame on the woman’s mind in cases of sexual harrassment and assault. Hadrian Dorrell’s Avisa, Shakespeare’s Lucrece, Thomas Heywood’s Jane Shore, and Christopher Marlowe’s Hero represent a spectrum of feminine mental complicity in extramarital sex, yet their mental “gatekeepers” are all suspected of failure. Shakespeare’s Juliet and Cressida literalize this gatekeeper trope and render it a material allegory when they negotiate with male suitors at literal portals on stage, a window and a chamber door. Examining the extraordinary pressures put on feminine “gatekeeper” minds in early modern texts allows us to discern contemporary willingness to blame the victims of sexual assault.

Draupadi returns with a vengeance

ABSTRACTThe importance of the Sanskrit epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata in the shaping of modern Indian social morality can hardly be overestimated. Many women have long chafed against Sita as a model of feminine virtue, deriving inspiration instead from the Mahabharata’s powerful and polyandrous Draupadi. This article analyses two contemporary authors of popular fiction who have produced Draupadi-centric adaptions of this epic: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni in The Palace of Illusions and Trisha Das in Ms Draupadi Kuru. Beyond confirming the existence of a booming Indian market for mythological fiction, such counter-texts to a traditionally patriarchal epic suggest an ongoing search for vernacular feminisms as alternatives to adopting western models of modern (and secular) gender identities.

Performative Utterances and Gender Performance in Shakespeare's Richard III

This article aims to analyze the discourse of cursing and gender performance in Shakespeare's Richard III (1592) through Judith Butler's theory of gender as a performative act in conjunction with J. L. Austin's concept of performative utterances, in order to further a cultural understanding of the beliefs surrounding curses in early modern England. I deploy Richard III as a case study to demonstrate that speech-act theory is applicable in a dramatic text, a context that Austin failed to consider when he theorized illocutionary acts. Since the construction of feminine identities in Richard III is based on performance–in early modern England boy actors impersonated female figures vocally and physically, I argue that curses are gendered feminine despite the fact that cursing women transgress the conventional feminine virtue of silence and despite the cultural belief that curses produce agency of which women are conventionally deprived. As such, the discourse of female cursing can be read as a case of minor literature, a mode of enunciation that challenges and eclipses Richard's discourse, and which emanates from the conventional view that the female curse is a performative speech act that is divinely endorsed. It is an effective means of retaliation, leading to the destruction of villainous figures.

Seduction's Offspring: Resisting Sentimental Violence from Wilson to Wells

Seduction's Offspring:Resisting Sentimental Violence from Wilson to Wells Sarah Sillin (bio) The story of American sentimentalism is one of literary bequest, wherein eighteenth-century seduction novels passed an aesthetic legacy down to nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Both pervasive genres relate stories about the need for American girls to restrain their passions and feel for others, punctuated by thick descriptions of characters' affect. Given this shared emphasis on how feeling shapes local and national communities, critics often interrogate sentimentalism's politics. Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins famously debated whether the mode's valorization of suffering and sympathy proves conservative or progressive.1 Further, critics have explored the political stakes of sentimentalism's turn from seduction novels to domestic fiction and what that turn suggests about American culture. Does the shift from seduction novels' unruly desire to domestic fiction's well-regulated sympathy signal that women were gaining power to foster national cohesion (Baym)? Or did antebellum fiction perpetuate demands that women subordinate their own desires to serve the community (Barnes)? Meanwhile, Laura Romero argued that sentimental texts often integrate "radical" views (for instance, on gender or class) with "reactionary" stances (say, on race); thus, we would do well to consider how sentimentalism's turn affected various groups, such as white and black women, in disparate ways (4). In response to these uneven effects, a number of nineteenth-century writers entwine conventions of both genres to offer divergent views on sentimentalism's legacy.2 This essay argues that tensions in sentimentalism proved generative for nineteenth-century African American women writers who rethink familiar portraits of the shift from the seduction plot to domestic fiction. Prior scholarship elucidates how African American writers blend genres to create space for black voices. Slave narratives often play on sentimental conventions to claim authority for and direct readers' sympathy to enslaved peoples (F. Foster; Carby). Likewise, midcentury African American novels interweave autobiography and fiction to question whose discourse readers recognize as authentic (Andrews 24). We can see this engagement with slave narratives and sentimentalism in one of the first novels by an African American woman: Harriet Wilson's Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). Scholars demonstrate that Wilson draws on sentimental conventions as rewritten in slave narratives (Carby 45) to fictionalize elements of her own life via a protagonist who resembles sentimental heroines and enslaved women (Peterson). Wilson found that the "sugar-coated, wealth-bestrewn happy endings" of "white sentimental novels," "did not match [her] … constant struggle" (Gates and Wilson lix). In other words, she participates in what Lauren Berlant calls postsentimentalism: work that rethinks the mode's conventions by refusing to sublimate "subaltern struggles into conventions of narrative satisfaction and redemptive fantasy" (655). Sentimentalism often conflates all forms of pain and then redirects sympathy toward the privileged (Berlant 641). In contrast, Wilson questions whether powerful white women merit sympathy, given that claims of white moral sensibility mask antiblack violence. Beyond suggesting that the critiques that would define postsentimentalism emerged alongside sentimentalism, Wilson demonstrates that comedy can play a [End Page 277] vital role in such affective resistance. By entwining sentimental conventions with humor, she unsettles this mode's fantasy that benevolence superseded intemperate feeling. Nina Baym argues that antebellum writers of "woman's fiction" rejected sentimentalism that expressed "private, excessive, undisciplined, self-centered emotionality" (as in the seduction novel), while celebrating sentimentalism that reflected "Enlightenment advocacy of philanthropy and benevolence" (xxix, xxx). Wilson, however, satirizes these forms for their shared narratives of white feminine virtue that obscure African Americans' pleasure and pain.3 The white fallen woman's desires foster violence, rendering her undeserving of sympathy; Wilson invites readers to identify instead with her irreverently funny African American protagonist.4 Although antebellum culture valorized well-regulated sympathy, the illicit desires of the seduction plot did not dwindle away; instead, they became a nest egg, accruing interest in the domestic sphere.5 Wilson suggests that the white fallen woman and republican mother spend their unruly feelings in violent displays of power as they project their sins onto an African American girl. This rewriting elucidates a criticism that African American writers would level at sentimentalism across the nineteenth century: the...

Burial of a woman with an amber distaff at Viminacium

A luxurious set of spinning implements was discovered as part of the furnishings in the grave of a woman, unearthed in the surroundings of ancient Viminacium. A unique amber distaff with the upper part modelled in the form of a female bust stands out as the most important part of the grave assemblage. Similar artefacts were often misinterpreted, but this specimen was found together with a spindle, thus confirming that it actually is a distaff. Miniature copies of spinning equipment made out of precious materials are known from sepulchral contexts, and are described as objects expressing feminine virtue. It is considered that they were used in wedding rites, thus indicating the possible age of the deceased. Spinning implements can represent useful tools for studying the life course of Roman women. In this paper, an attempt was made to identify the divinity or person depicted on the distaff from Viminacium, considering the symbolic nature of these artefacts.