Feminist Recovery Research Articles

‘Back from the silence with something to say’: Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia and silence as classical reception

Abstract This article explores the power of silence in the feminist recovery of classical texts to open up engaged spaces for women’s creative reworkings, taking as a case study Lavinia and her reception in Ursula Le Guin’s (2008) novel of the same name. By re-evaluating silence in dialogue with feminist and classical reception scholarship, I argue that Le Guin is able to bring a different angle to the reception of classical literary women, focusing on the gaps and spaces in Lavinia’s character that provide a medium for engagement with the incomplete text of the Aeneid. Silence thus becomes a locus in which Le Guin can transform Vergil’s silencing of Lavinia into a generative vision of the open space of interpretation available in classical literature and its reception.

Noncanonical Victorian Women Novelists in the Twenty-First Century: Reconsidering Recovery Work

ABSTRACT Over the last decades, projects of rediscovery, driven by feminist criticism as well as a growing interest in the noncanonical itself, have reshaped Victorian Studies. Nevertheless, even as a growing number of these rediscovered texts have now been absorbed into the canon, their inclusion in anthologies, general overviews, and companions has been intriguingly uneven. This article offers a reconsideration of the feminist recovery of noncanonical Victorian texts in the contrasting case studies of the sensation novel, the silver-fork novel, and antifeminist writing. Examining the rediscovery and shifting reception of these three genres sheds light on the changing goals, methods, and effects of recovery work, as well as the opportunities that exist for this work in the twenty-first century.

“For the Women Who Came Before”: The Hidden Hands of Literary Recovery Scholars

AbstractThis essay review discusses the Reclaim Her Name project and Radicals, a two-volume anthology of writings by US women.Collaboration and community have been at the heart of the feminist recovery of American literary works from the beginning.

Writing the Landscape: Exposing Nature in French Women’s Fiction 1789–1815. By Christie Margrave

The feminist recovery project in francophone women’s writing is decades behind its anglophone counterpart and this book makes an important contribution to the field. Christie Margrave’s analysis of women writers’ feminist engagement with the ­Romantic vogue for natural landscape not only offers a fresh perspective on Romantic ­luminary Germaine de Staël; it also sheds light on the novels of Félicité de Genlis, Sophie ­Cottin, Barbara von Krüdener, and Adélaïde de Souza. These writers remain astonishingly under-researched, despite their considerable renown during the First Republic and First Empire, and notwithstanding vital work by scholars such as Gillian Dow, Isabelle Brouard-Arends, and Mary Seidman Trouille. Margrave illuminates the mutual influence of all five Romantic-era women and their canonical male contemporaries, demonstrating that the women reconceived fashionable landscape imagery to confront and challenge the patriarchal norms, restrictions, and prejudices which shaped the female condition and informed their writing. The subtitle, ‘exposing nature’, refers to Margrave’s analysis of natural landscapes but also to the centrality of what she calls, adapting Virginia Woolf’s famous phrase, ‘a landscape of one’s own’ (p. 1 et ­passim), a fictional topography representing the contours of women’s lived experience. Although the monograph would have benefited from a stronger feminist theoretical framework, Margrave’s work is rich in fascinating detail about the ­landscaping vogue and language of flowers, and this thorough research underpins persuasive and pivotal close readings. Occasionally, these readings are limited by her tendency to interpret the novelists’ commentary solely in terms of gender and sexual politics. In the case of Souza’s Adèle de Sénange (1794), for instance, the emphasis on gradual reform could easily be read as a political metaphor, especially in light of the recent Revolutionary Terror. On the whole, however, Margrave’s literary-critical acumen is impressive. Chapter 3, ‘Landscapes of Rebellion: Natural Madhouses’, is particularly effective, placing forensic analysis of the works of Cottin and Krüdener in the context of nineteenth-century attitudes to mental illness to demonstrate how landscapes function to portray female madness as feminist protest. Another highlight is Chapter 5, ‘Writing the Landscape: The Ossianic North and the Debate over ­Women’s Writing and Education’, which analyses Scottish landscapes as well as implicit and ekphrastic allusions to James Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’ poems in Cottin’s Malvina (1800) and Staël’s Corinne (1807). Connecting the eponymous heroines with the Ossianic female bard, Malvina, Margrave demonstrates that, even as Cottin and Staël depict ­women writers suffering social exclusion and psychological torment, they also engage in ­meta-commentary on their cultural importance. In a particularly innovative reading of Corinne, she argues convincingly that the love affair between the heroine and the British Lord Oswald models the synthesis of social independence (Corinne) and political liberty (Oswald) that could free future generations to live on terms of political and gender equality. She goes on to demonstrate that Staël depicts Corinne taking up the legacy of Ossian’s Malvina, making her the doomed prophet of this ideal. This is an insightful, valuable, and timely study bound to inform and inspire future ­scholarship in French women’s writing of the Romantic era.

Building back better through feminist entrepreneurship policy

PurposeMost feminists policies are aspirational. Deficiencies include vague terms of what constitutes ‘feminist’ within policy, ambiguous investment criteria, lack of consultation and the use of the binary definition of gender negating gender-diverse people (Tiessen, 2019). The purpose of this study is to identify parameters that characterize feminist entrepreneurship policies and to advance recommendations to operationalize these policies.Design/methodology/approachThe COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled fragilities in the socio-economic gains that women entrepreneurs have achieved. Gender-regression is, in part, the product of entrepreneurship policies that fail to recognize the nature and needs of women entrepreneurs. To inform recovery measures, this article considers two research questions: what are the parameters of feminist entrepreneurship policies? and how can parameters of feminist entrepreneurship policy be operationalized in pandemic recovery measures? To inform the questions, the study draws on the academic literature and thematic analysis of three collective feminist action plans to operationalize ten parameters that characterize feminist entrepreneurship policy.FindingsSupplanting ‘feminist’ for women in the construction of entrepreneurship policies, without specifications of how parameters differ dilutes government's efforts to achieve gender quality and women's economic empowerment. To inform policy, recommendations of three feminist recovery policies clustered under seven themes: importance of addressing root causes of inequality; need to invest in social and economic outcomes; economic security; enhancing access to economic resources; investment in infrastructure; inclusive decision-making; and need for gender disaggregated data to inform policy. Differences in policy priorities between collective feminist recovery plans and the academic literature are reported.Research limitations/implicationsThe parameters of feminist entrepreneurial policy require further interpretation and adaptation in different policy, cultural and geo-political contexts. Scholarly attention might focus on advisory processes that inform feminist policies, such as measures to address gender-regressive impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Research is also needed to understand the impacts of feminist policies on the lived experiences of diverse women entrepreneurs. Limitations: The study design did not incorporate viewpoints of policymakers or capture bureaucratic boundary patrolling practices that stymie feminist policies. Thematic analysis was limited to three feminist recovery plans from two countries.Practical implicationsRecommendations to operationalize feminist entrepreneurship policies in the context of pandemic recovery are described.Originality/valueTen parameters of feminist entrepreneurship policy are explored. The conceptual study also advances a framework of feminist entrepreneurship policy and considers boundary conditions for when and how the parameters are applicable.

“You Horrible Lovely Genius”: Assia Wevill, Storytelling, and Feminist Recovery

“You Horrible Lovely Genius”: Assia Wevill, Storytelling, and Feminist Recovery

Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone

Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone

“He’s Busy Espalliering Sylvia”: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Assia Wevill

Abstract: Prompted by recent feminist recovery efforts, this essay traces and considers Assia Wevill (1927–1969) as a noteworthy woman writer, whose life and literary contributions were influenced and inspired by the Pulitzer Prize–winning Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) and the former British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930–1998). Reflecting on the manner in which Assia has been understood as a femme fatale archetype, the article seeks to reframe our understanding of her life primarily and her work secondarily by foregrounding them in her own words. While Assia has conventionally been approached as an attendant figure in the biographies and poetry of Plath and Hughes, this piece maintains that her life and literary contributions provide material for literary scholars to engage with and make inroads in feminist scholarship, as well as to forge new pathways in Plath studies and Hughes studies. Increasingly more than a footnote to Plath and Hughes, Assia Wevill emerges as a relevant subject for scholars who wish to track and map gendered dynamics in connection with biography in twentieth-century literature and letters.

Lost Ladies: (Dis)locating Willa Cather as Feminist Recovery Work

Lost Ladies:(Dis)locating Willa Cather as Feminist Recovery Work Anna Creadick Peacocks are inspiring . . . but they sure don't stop to consider they might be standing in your way. —Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983, p. 59) For so long, and justifiably, the project of Legacy in general and the Profiles feature in particular has been a commitment to bringing women writers in. As we teach and write about women writers today, are there some who ought to be left out? Are there some women writers who, like Flannery O'Connor, to whom Walker is referring in the epigraph above, might even be "standing in [the] way"? In this essay I take up the case of Willa Cather in service of what might seem a counterintuitive question: Could the sidelining of some women writers ever be part of feminist recovery work? Where and why must we include or exclude a writer like Cather? And why, or at what cost, has she received what could be seen as an excess of scholarly attention? leaving cather out I recently decided to resuscitate an American women writers course long on the books at the small liberal arts college where I teach. After some agonizing about the book list, I decided to leave Cather out. That difficult choice led me to this essay.1 Cather's centrality to the American literary canon is as unquestionable as her critical status is formidable. Over twenty years ago, Phyllis Frus and Stanley Corkin charted a "climactic phase" of Cather scholarship, noting with satisfaction that "[a]t last count there were 860 online citations for [Cather] in the [End Page 102] MLA bibliography" (206). In the two decades since, that number has nearly tripled. The MLA International Bibliography currently lists more scholarship on Cather than on Edith Wharton or Kate Chopin, more than on Alice Walker or Zora Neale Hurston, more than on Tillie Olsen or Flannery O'Connor. Today, Cather trails only Emily Dickinson and Toni Morrison as the most-studied American woman author.2 One explanation for the endless fascination with Cather as a subject comes from Deborah Carlin, who notes, "Whether viewed as an American icon, a woman writer, a lesbian, a cosmopolitan Midwesterner, a conservative Republican, a scathing journalist, an antimodernist, or an embittered elegiast, Cather remains an anomaly in American literature and her fiction is peculiarly hard to place" (6).3 These same qualities that make Cather so hard for scholars to "place" also make her so easy to place in the classroom. I could, and do, teach Cather in my Modern American Literature class and in my Sexuality and American Literature class. But in my American Women Writers course, I balked. Why? To manage the enormity of the course subject, I chose an organizing theme: "Feminist Recovery Work." We would read the women writers we might never have read at all if not for the labor of feminist critics who rescued those writers from obscurity, or at least from the margins. So I assigned Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anzia Yezierska. We read Gloria Anzaldúa, Mitsuye Yamada, and Grace Metalious. The course opened with Harriet Jacobs's 1861 slave narrative and closed with Janet Mock's 2014 memoir of trans womanhood, which enacts a different kind of recovery work while also regularly name-checking many authors already on the syllabus. But I kept Cather out. That decision had to do with three forces often at play in American women's writing: misogyny, canonicity, and feminism. misogynist (mis)readings Flashback, 2005: I was a new visiting assistant professor, teaching an American literature survey, when one especially enthusiastic student asked if he could come to office hours "just to talk more about the reading." I remember so clearly how he knocked on the doorjamb, stepped in, sat down in the late autumn light, looked up at me, and said, "I usually hate female writers—but I really love this book." After working to control my shock, I smiled weakly, took a breath, and in my mind began to compose a Cather paper. The book? Cather's 1923 novel A Lost Lady. A Lost Lady offers excellent terrain for...

Gender in American Literature and Culture ed. by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis

Reviewed by: Gender in American Literature and Culture ed. by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis Aimee Armande Wilson Gender in American Literature and Culture. Edited by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. v + 375 pp. $39.99 cloth/$32.00 e-book. Gender in American Literature and Culture seeks to build on previous generations of feminist and gender studies scholarship. The chapters "honor the tradition of feminist recovery projects," "follow in the wake of previous critics who have redefined some of the texts that are considered canonical," and challenge "the well-entrenched white patriarchy that has often narrowly defined what counts as literary" (3). These may be familiar goals, but they are nevertheless important ones. The outcomes that the earliest feminist literary critics set out to achieve are still as worthy as they are unattained. This is not to suggest that no progress has been made but to recognize that much work remains. As editors Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis point out, "decades of canon-busting have barely nudged white male authors from their primacy of place" (3). Current issues get top billing in Gender in American Literature and Culture; a small sampling includes #MeToo and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movements, settler colonialism, transphobia, and attacks on reproductive rights. The book's scope is admirably diverse, citing "texts by forty-three white authors and forty-six writers of color, written as early as 1630 and as recently as 2018" (3). Many of these authors are well known, such as Anne Bradstreet, Edith Wharton, and Zora Neale Hurston. The book covers just as many lesser-known authors, too, including Gerda Saunders, author of a contemporary Alzheimer's memoir, and 'Afīfa Karam, an early-twentieth-century Lebanese-American journalist, novelist, and translator. As with any volume covering such a large swath of authors, topics, and time periods, comprehensiveness is impossible. The editors admit that they are not attempting comprehensiveness and, furthermore, confront the intellectual flaws of such grand-sweep styles of literary scholarship. In one of the most insightful moments in the introduction, Lutes and Travis establish the scope of the book while simultaneously commenting on the state of literary studies in 2021: "While we believe that understanding the cultural and historical operations of gender in the United States is more pressing than ever, we also recognize that a chastened model of literary criticism has emerged, one that is less confident in its transformative potential, more skeptical of liberatory claims, and more modest in its sense of what it can accomplish" (2). Although the volume was completed before the global pandemic and its continuing fallout, the inequities laid bare by these events were evident long before, and the writers in this volume respond to those extant [End Page 125] inequities. If anything, the pandemic years have made this book timelier and more urgent. As would be expected given this feminist approach, the volume does not shy away from political issues. Indeed, the feminist underpinnings of the volume can be seen in the editors' open embrace of presentism. Lutes and Travis state that the book "responds to this cultural and political moment with chapters that are presentist and activist but also keen to avoid overreaching" (2). At its best, the presentism employed by the writers in this volume simultaneously considers differences between historical periods as well as bridges between them in service of a better understanding of the conditions that led to current tragedies and political flashpoints. Each of the book's three thematic sections is organized chronologically. In the first, "Intimacies," writers consider literary depictions of intimate relationships. Chapters focus on the various forms of desire and violence contained in these relationships. Standouts include Marion Rust's "Post-Reproductive Female Sexuality and the Early American Novel," which is part of a resurgence of scholarly interest in sexuality in early American literary studies, and Travis M. Foster's "The Effeminate Man in Nineteenth-Century America," which considers the intersection of masculinity, eugenics, and white supremacy in the popular press. "Aggressions," the second section, "demonstrate[s] that gendered violence is endemic to American literary history and culture" (8). This section is the strongest of the...

Behind the veil of the zenana: Cornelia Sorabji and the colonial heritage of the trapped housewife

ABSTRACT This essay argues that second wave feminist accounts of the trapped housewife type, who must remain inside the house, consumed with domestic drudgery, derive from a colonial precedent. Many second wave writers relied on Orientalist metaphors and anecdotes in order to dramatize their theses of global patriarchal oppression. My essay reframes this bibliography by centering the neglected work of modernist-era Indian writer and activist Cornelia Sorabji. As an Anglophile and defender of empire, Sorabji fails many of the terms of a valorized feminist recovery. However, her writing suggests a clear precedent for the Orientalized housewife type later adopted by second wave feminists. In addition, she appropriates a white feminist literary persona to new, modern results: she is an intermediary to women living in purdah in pre-Independence India. Because she shares the heritage and language of these confined housewives, she can chronicle their lives with nuance and ambivalence. Ultimately, Sorabji inaugurates a tradition of women who have evoked modernity for themselves by differentiating themselves from a cloistered, racialized throng.

Modernism, Sex, and Gender by Celia Marshik Allison Pease

MLR, .,   such as Peter Brooker and Andrew acker’s three-volume e Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines or the two Oxford Handbooks of modernist literature are also absent. No select bibliography can be exhaustive—and in a field which has expanded as rapidly as modernist studies, one sympathizes with Howard because the bibliographer’s task is exceedingly difficult—but these omissions do seem odd. e former exclusion points less to a weakness of Howard’s bibliography and perhaps more to a weakness of the collection as a whole and, indeed, to a weakness of studies of ‘British’ modernism, which remain dominated by considerations of Anglo- and Irish contexts, as well as ‘expatriate’ writers such as Eliot, Mansfield, and Pound. On a related note, the Euro-American emphasis of the Companion’s timeline reifies some of the more problematic limits of the field. Despite these slight limitations, the assembled essays and resources comprise an impressive array of frequently challenging, illuminating scholarship. e volume is perhaps best suited to advanced scholars, but many newcomers to modernist studies will find the assembled resources, overviews, and bibliographies an immense aid. Modernist studies is an increasingly large, diverse field, and while all modernists will find something to quibble with in this volume (as this reviewer has), they will find far more that informs and expands their understanding. is Companion does not settle for simply being a guide to existing knowledge, but instead blazes exciting new trails for the rest of us to follow. B U D H Modernism, Sex, and Gender. By C M and A P. (New Modernisms) New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. . x+  pp. £.. ISBN ––––. As part of the New Modernisms Series published by Bloomsbury, Modernism, Sex, and Gender is a clear and comprehensive guidebook to the scholarly debates concerning the relationships between gender, sexuality, and modernist literature, which began with the inception of modernism and continue today. is short volume is split into four sections, covering modernism’s relationship to representations of femininity and masculinity in the first two chapters, modernist representations of sexuality in the third chapter, and finally a chapter on modernism, politics, and law. Celia Marshik and Allison Pease cover a wide range of conceptual models of modernism, from the influential early accounts of literary tradition expounded by T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis to the revisionary explorations of scholars who ‘placed gender and sexuality at the center of modernist literary study’, such as Bonnie Kime Scott and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (p. ). However, rather than privileging one conceptual paradigm over another, they invite readers to imagine modernist literature and criticism ‘as a palimpsest, a manuscript that has layers of writing, one on top of the other’ (p. ). In the first chapter, for example, the authors show how second-wave feminist scholars from the s onwards engaged  Reviews themselves in a ‘scraping off of top layers of early modernist criticism to find, just below, a body of work by women writers and early feminist thought’ (p. ). Later chapters reveal how subsequent scholars focused on other layers in the palimpsest , such as modernist representations of masculinity, sexuality, and obscenity. e benefit of this approach to the development of modernist criticism is that it encourages readers to engage with and appreciate the changing understandings of modernist literature and culture, and to see how older approaches and concerns may still have relevance and purchase today. e metaphor of the palimpsest is employed throughout the four chapters, acting as a frequent reminder to readers that both modernist texts and scholarly models of modernism are multiple, diverse, and overlapping, and that further intellectual work of uncovering is still important today. In addition to splitting the debates about sex, gender, and sexuality into discreet chapters, the book also usefully features case-study sections within each chapter, which illustrate the conceptual points being discussed. e case study of May Sinclair in the first chapter, for example, highlights the ‘feminist recovery work’ that began in the s (p. ). e authors show how, despite May’s interest and active participation in feminist struggles, her practice and defence of modernist experimentation, and her popularity during her lifetime, she was out...

Restoring Authority for Women Writers: Name Authority Records as Digital Recovery Scholarship

Personal name authority records in the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF), which feeds directly into the Virtual International Authority File, are valuable for recovering women writers whose texts are electronically circulated yet whose identities as authors and people are often difficult to research. Using The Stainforth Library of Women's Writing as a case study, this essay encourages close collaboration with catalog librarians who are certified by the Name Authority Cooperative Program to create and contribute name authority records to the LCNAF for lesser-known women writers. This methodology can advance feminist recovery scholarship by curating a global women's book history that values women's identities on and beyond the page.

Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination by Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick

Reviewed by: Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination by Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick Janet Badia Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. 224. $45.00 (cloth). Robin Morgan was perhaps the first feminist writer to take up Assia Wevill's cause; at the very least, she is likely the most notorious one to have done so. In her poem "Arraignment," Morgan introduces Assia to a world of general readers likely unfamiliar with her place in Ted Hughes's legacy in 1972, just three short years after her death.1 Morgan dedicates almost two complete stanzas of the poem (out of eight) to "Assia Guttman Wevill" and, in them, identifies Assia as a translator of poetry, a woman "afraid of losing her beauty," the subject of Plath's poem "Lesbos," and the second of Hughes's "wives" to commit suicide (while also acknowledging that she and Hughes were, in fact, never married). By way of introducing Assia to her readers, Morgan writes: she, like Sylvia Plath, also "was a suicide, / or didn't you know?"2 This question—which is really a broader interrogation of all that we do not know about Assia Wevill and why this lack of knowledge matters—is at the heart of Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia [End Page 398] Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination, the latest book of literary scholarship by Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick. Positioning her book as feminist recovery work, Goodspeed-Chadwick notes her indebtedness to the history of feminist literary studies in the introduction to her book. As I read each chapter of Reclaiming Assia Wevill, I could not help but think, in turn, of our own indebtedness as readers to Goodspeed-Chadwick, who has written a brilliantly engaging study of Assia's legacy, of the erasure of women's voices and work in culture, and of the ways gendered scripts entrap us all, even those writers, like Plath, whom we are reluctant to see as flawed. It is heartening to read a literary study that recognizes that there is still a lot of feminist recovery work to be done and then gets busy with that work with such conviction of purpose. Reclaiming Assia Wevill begins from the assumption that Assia is important to "literary studies, women's studies, and work on Plath and Hughes" and then goes on to demonstrate the myriad ways her life, work, and impact have been marginalized and sometimes "scrubbed" to the detriment, not only of Plath and Hughes studies, but of women in general and victims of injustice in particular (Goodpseed-Chadwick, 2, 11). In some of the most compelling moments in her book, Goodspeed-Chadwick presents a case for understanding Assia as a victim herself, first in life, as a person mistreated by Hughes at nearly every turn over the six-plus years they spent together, and second in death, as someone deemed undeserving of grief. That she has been unfairly blamed for Plath's suicide by a host of people (family and strangers alike) only compounds the injustice. Versed in feminist theories about the lived body, grievability, abjection, and gendered subjectivity, Goodspeed-Chadwick is able to unearth layers to Assia's life and work that ought to change profoundly our discourse about her. In some ways, Reclaiming Assia Wevill covers the territory one might expect, including the poems Plath and Hughes wrote that take up Assia as their subject. Through close readings of both well-known and more obscure examples, Goodspeed-Chadwick argues that Assia is represented unfairly in Plath's and Hughes's writings and that these representations are not simply unflattering but actually harmful to Assia's legacy and to women more broadly. Her thorough and careful examination of Hughes's treatment of Assia in Capriccio and Birthday Letters leaves little room for arguments against such conclusions. At the same time, Goodspeed-Chadwick is not content to simply flip the script back to a narrative that casts Hughes as the indisputable villain, as Morgan had plainly hoped to do in 1972. Instead, Goodspeed-Chadwick argues that Hughes's Assia poems reflect, in part at...

Queer Narrative Ecology in Margaret Fuller's "The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain" and Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens"

Historically, scholars have not linked Margaret Fuller and Virginia Woolf. This essay acts as a transatlantic feminist recovery project, delineating Woolf's knowledge of Fuller, and how their experimental works subvert classical and romantic-chivalric literary precedents which they deem masculinist and foreclosing of possibility.

Making Space

Making Space

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Ralph the Bailiff ”: Speaking Truth to Madness

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Ralph the Bailiff ”: Speaking Truth to Madness Brittany Roberts (bio) Mary elizabeth braddon’s 1861 short story “Ralph the Bailiff ”1 offers an early example of how accusations about women’s mental health might be weaponized as a way of protecting and preserving power and status at a time when social hierarchies were becoming increasingly unstable. Like Braddon’s most popular novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, “Ralph the Bailiff ” presents marriage as a social convention that can easily be manipulated by the female servant class to climb the social ladder in a way not otherwise permitted by nineteenth-century British custom. Unlike the novel, however, the perpetrator of the “crime” in this story ends up with money, freedom, and a blemish-free name while her affluent husband ends up in the grave. Dudley Carleon, the gentleman farmer who marries his housekeeper, Martha, is not a sympathetic victim, as the marriage is motivated by his need to cover up his role in his older brother’s murder by buying her and her brother Ralph’s silence. Free from debt with his newfound fortune, Dudley solicits the hand of young, beautiful Jenny Trevor, an orphan with six thousand pounds, who has no idea that her marriage proposal is coming from a murderer and would-be bigamist and will put her fortune—and ultimately her life—in jeopardy. The only person who can save Jenny from a lifetime of unforeseen misery is her best friend, Agnes, who, Dudley warns, “is a madwoman; whatever she says to you” (25). Preventing the ill-fated marriage between Dudley and Jenny thus seems to hinge on one very important question: can women be believed? Jenny, unfortunately, believes Dudley, and, in turn, will later learn first-hand how easy it is to discredit a woman [End Page 166] by questioning her mental stability. In this sensational short story, believing women has much to do with what they are believed to be and little to do with what they say. Appearance and truth are frequently at odds in sensation fiction, and here, the “shocking reveal” is not that the women are mad, but that they are perfectly sane. “Ralph the Bailiff ” highlights the tendency to label as “madness” any criticism of the status quo that women might make, while also cautioning that such labels are destructive to justice and truth. Braddon’s “fair-haired demon of modern fiction,” Lucy Audley, will raise similar concerns when Lady Audley’s Secret is published the following year (Oliphant 263). Indeed, Lady Audley’s confession that she has killed her husband simply because she is a “madwoman” has persisted as a source of both suspicion and frustration for feminist recovery scholars, as it pathologizes women’s defiance and under-cuts what seems like a perfectly “sane” desire to rise in a society where few opportunities to do so were available to women. For example, Jill Matus has famously argued that this final revelation in a story punctuated with thrilling “reveals” actually functions as a “cover-up,” serving instead “to displace the economic and class issues already raised in the novel and to deflect their uncomfortable implications” (334).2 Braddon evidently recognized how madness could be used as a cover-up because “Ralph the Bailiff,” published just one year before the novel, operates on precisely that premise: the only character with the power to implicate a “good man” in a plot of unfathomable wickedness is one whom he has, conveniently, labelled a “madwoman.” Dennis Denisoff has remarked on short fiction’s relative “invisibility” as a literary form despite its widespread availability in nineteenth-century Britain, arguing that it was “consumed by millions from all classes, age groups, and literacy levels,” which ultimately made it “so common as to be invisible” (17). While the subversive potential afforded by such invisibility is a relatively new source of inquiry for scholars of Victorian short stories, it is something Victorian writers, especially women, may have understood all too well. In this case, Braddon’s short story exposes how women are often silenced through pathologization, a tendency to which she herself will later conform in her highly “visible” sensation novel. As supposed “filler material...

Social Justice, Diversity & Inclusion Keynote: Are We There Yet? Gender Equity in Recovery Settings

Gender equity in recovery settings is the first topic we will tackle. Women represent just over 57% of the undergraduate college population in 2015 and are projected to climb to 58.8% of the total college population by 2024. While not as underrepresented as people of color in collegiate recovery programs (CRPs), women do make up a smaller share of CRP participants at 42.8%. While women are just as likely as men to become develop SUDs, they have lower rates of substance use and SUDs overall, and experience unique obstacles to treatment. Women of color may face additional obstacles and are at greater risk of being subjected to violence. We invite men, women, and transfolk alike to join our feminist recovery panel as we delve into issues of equity and inclusion. While some have deemed feminism, "the other "F" word, we will talk about how feminism benefits everyone. We bring an intersectional lens - realizing that no one shows up or experiences life through one aspect of identity. Our panelists will share from research, personal experience, and program data in order to describe how current societal structures inhibit the opportunities for women to get sober and work a program of recovery and the negative impact on men, collegiate recovery programs, higher education, and society as a whole. Considering an individual, group, and institutional framework for feminism, we hope to inspire attendees to challenge themselves to bring a feminist lens to their work to better create equity and access within collegiate recovery.

Bluestocking Studies 2011–2017: The Transnational Turn

AbstractAs international trade, exploration, and communication proliferated in the 18th and early 19th centuries, a significant group of British intellectual women, the Bluestockings, came to recognize themselves as part of a transnational network. They were attentive especially to intellectual pursuits, women's cultural, sociopolitical, and economic interests, and various forms of social progress, and some of these preoccupations developed over the period and fed into first‐wave feminist programs later in the 19th century. I consider the extensive Bluestocking scholarship concentrating on transnationalism as well as recent research that has incorporated international themes. The field of bluestocking studies at this juncture forcefully extends the feminist recovery project and, because of its international interest, might help to counter nationalist and anti‐feminist pressures currently challenging the academy.

Theorizing Democratic Feelings, Disagreement, and the Temporal Child in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's <em>The Linwoods</em>

Theorizing Democratic Feelings, Disagreement, and the Temporal Child in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's The Linwoods Marissa Carrere Written in the wake of the Nullification Crisis over tariffs on manufactured goods in which South Carolina threatened to leave the Union, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's 1835 novel The Linwoods stages the anxieties that condense around the desire to believe that democracy follows timeless certainties and the knowledge that its process necessarily entails negotiating contingent and ephemeral opinions. The Linwoods suggests that such irresolvable tension is vital to democratic thought, and Sedgwick uses the figure of the child to represent that tension. Because of nineteenth-century constructions of children as both malleable and transcendent, the figure of the child permits Sedgwick to dramatize the conflict between the self-evident truth and radical revisability of the Constitution and the patriotic feelings of American citizens. As the novel investigates the nature of both national and political commitments, Sedgwick uses the figural child to assert normative claims in response to her particular politico-historical moment while troubling the theoretical integrity of those claims. In limning Sedgwick's move toward the theoretical realm, my project aims to expand our understanding of how the child operates in the political literary imagination and to recognize Sedgwick's contributions to the archives of democracy. Contextualizing these aims demands that we read nineteenth-century American women's writing through the lens of political theory. Without question, the feminist recovery of nineteenth-century female-authored fiction introduced women writers to the political clime and canon; indeed, the inclusion of women involved disrupting the fantasy of an apolitical or ahistorical [End Page 33] aesthetic canon and recognizing literary texts as politically, socially, and historically contingent. However, literary historians have not fully examined how these texts theorize democratic governance and participation. While we read women's texts for their political valences and explicit political critiques and as political acts themselves, we might also ask how these texts variously theorize democracy not only in the ideological terms of gendered relationships to the political center but also at the level of philosophical principle. Admittedly, in seeking the conceptual nature of political critique I may be trying to tease a distinction that will ever elude us: What is the difference between reading a literary text for its political engagements and as a mode of political theory? How do we discern which aspects of a literary text count as articulations of political critique? Even without resolving these questions, we can acknowledge the need to rethink and revise the disproportionately (white-and) male-authored literary archive of democracy.1 This essay begins to offer a response by reading through the historical in order to reach the conceptual in Sedgwick's writing. the nullification crisis and the temporal child In the opening chapter of The Linwoods, a group of boys on a playground confound their adult audience with the un-childlikeness of their politically charged play. Mr. Linwood turns to his son and asks: "Herbert, can you tell me what these boys are about? They seem rather to be at work than play" (17). Herbert replies that the boys are "throwing up a redoubt to protect [their] fort" and to "keep off the British" (17–18), and Mr. Linwood is appalled by "the seeds of rebellion springing up in their young hot bloods": A loud huzzaing was heard from the fort—"What does that mean?" asked Mr. Linwood. "The whigs are hanging a tory, sir." "The little rebel rascals!—Herbert!—you throwing up your hat and huzzaing too!" (18) With this scene, Sedgwick establishes the intergenerational conflict between loyalist Mr. Linwood and his revolutionary children that the novel will work to resolve. Critical readings of The Linwoods generally characterize this conflict as a domestic political allegory responding to the nationalist concerns of its contemporary moment, in particular the passing of the Revolutionary generation and the threat of disunion raised by the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33.2 By casting these concerns about the current generation's national identity into the moment of its discordant origins, Sedgwick imagines the possibility of a reconciled and [End Page 34] healthy national future through proper models of republican virtue. In keeping with other domestic...