Domestic Ideology Research Articles

Mourning and Material Culture in Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless

Winner, Eighteenth-Century Fiction Graduate Essay Prize 2005 Eliza Haywood's mid-eighteenth-century novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, made its appearance at a time when the gloom and sepulchral melancholy of the Graveyard Poets suffused the literary marketplace.1 In 1751, the year of the novel's publication, Gray's "Elegy" was first published and then reissued no fewer than eight times, thus fostering a culture of mourning that continued to flourish throughout the decade.2 Haywood's novel was not exempt from this trend and owes more to its cultural moment than is often acknowledged. Ostensibly written in a more serious vein than her earlier [End Page 281] novels and in conformity with the didactic tendencies and "domestic ideology"3 prevalent in the works of the period, Betsy Thoughtless presents a bizarre co-mingling of the grave and the comic. In the midst of carelessly collecting lovers, a walking blank slate of a young woman loses her most eligible suitor (Mr Trueworth) along the way and settles for a more mundane runner-up (the aptly named Mr Munden). Evidently an unsatisfactory state of affairs, albeit instructive from a didactic standpoint, this romantic impasse is inevitably surmounted only through the intervention of an obliging deus ex machina. The narrative thus relies extensively upon death as an organizing principle; death neatly disposes of cumbersome characters and restores the romance trajectory of the novel, enabling lovers pulled asunder by marriage to reunite as widow and widower.4 Integral to the narrative economy of this novel as death is, however, it also registers as an excess, as Haywood introduces a character in the form of the amor phous Mrs Blanchfield (yet another admirer of Mr Trueworth), whose sole purpose in the story is to die and to be commemorated by her idol, thus providing an additional exemplum of the hero's true worth. But this detail is not as superfluous as it might seem, since it affords yet another occasion for the work of mourning that figures so prominently in Haywood's scripting of female consciousness. If Betsy Thoughtless is first and foremost a novel about the development of a female mind and its triumph over a consumerist environment, the representation of material things that are not quite so uncomplicatedly tied up in the growth of consciousness must inevitably introduce some interpretative difficulties.For the work of mourning, [End Page 282] as Haywood presents it, brings death firmly within the purview of the eighteenth-century marketplace.5 It has long been recognized that "commodity culture also cultivates melancholia,"6 but the role of mourning as a catalyst for consumption has attracted significantly less attention. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton urges the English to "work harder and control consumption,"7 while the physician George Cheyne, in his treatise The English Malady (1733), explicitly acknowledges the deep-seated connections between melancholy and consumption, which he regards as an inevitable by-product of economic prosperity.8 Unlike Burton, Cheyne prescribes a treatment for the nervous disorder without necessarily denigrating the economic factors that play a central role in the production of the disease. As an apologist of sorts for a consumption-induced melancholia, Cheyne anticipates the arguments elaborated by David Hume [End Page 283] and Adam Smith for the paradoxical benefits of luxury. But Haywood uniquely appears to question the typical understanding according to which melancholia is tied up with commodity culture, and by opposing melancholia to the practice of mourning, she reveals the latter category to be more properly aligned with the material culture of her day. Several characters in the narrative appear to advocate grieving less by producing more, but Haywood endeavours to retrieve melancholia from its associations with luxury and rampant consumerism by esteeming a melancholic reflection that dwells upon the past as preferable to the vapid sensibility that easily jettisons memory in order...

Motherhood as Resistance in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Claudia Tate has observed that for female slaves was an institution to which they had biological claim (108). Enslaved women and their children could be separated at any time, and even if they belonged to the same owner, strict labor policies and plantation regulations severely limited the development of their relationships. Hortense J. Spillers concludes that because of this fundamental maternal outrage, and the concomitant banishment of the black father, only the female stands in the flesh, both and mother-dispossessed. This problematizing of places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender (80). George Cunningham further argues, Within the domain of slavery, or culturally derived notions of man- and womanhood do not exist (117). The predetermined violence of slavery disrupts conventional meanings attached to words such as mother and womanhood. What is motherhood for a woman deprived of the ability to care for and protect her child? How are we to conceptualize maternal identity under conditions of enslavement? Furthermore, because procreation by bondwomen can be regarded as both a means of perpetuating slavery and an act of love and self-sacrifice, the sexuality of enslaved women and their relationship to their offspring must be understood as a complex negotiation involving individual agency, resistance, and power. Due to slavery's basic destabilization of blood relations, the black female demands new terms of radical self-determination. Spillers thus reminds her readers, is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject (80). It is precisely through her flesh as both and slave woman that Harriet A. Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) claims the insurgent ground of her social identity and formulates her resistance to human bondage. By emphasizing her narrator's maternal sentiments, Jacobs resists prevailing beliefs concerning black women's indifference to their children while also establishing an important association between her protagonist Linda Brent and domestic ideologies. (1) Much like Harriet Beecher Stowe and other nineteenth-century writers of sentimental fiction, Jacobs describes nurture as a quintessence of the maternal that crosses race and class boundaries (Stephanie Smith 215). Relying upon an understanding of maternity as a form of innate attachment, Jacobs presents Linda's actions as largely determined by the effect they will have on her children and their eventual emancipation. Many female slaves were unable to keep their families together, yet by emphasizing the oppositional action inspired by maternal sentiment Jacobs presents motherhood as a force that resists slavery and its supporters. By fashioning a literary persona who is defined almost exclusively by her maternal identity, Jacobs rejects the materialist logic of human ownership. Maternal love is shown to offer a model of relations that opposes the economy of exchange and possession characterizing the antebellum system of human bondage. Converting her body and reproductive abilities from sites of exploitation to vehicles of resistance, Linda undermines the authority of the slave master and works to liberate her children. Works by Carla Peterson, Valerie Smith, and Claudia Tate have focused upon Jacobs's departure from the assumptions and expectations of the male slave narrative to articulate the experiences and concerns of bondwomen. By contrast, I explore forms of female bodily resistance as well as ideological strategies of literary representation. Rather than conflate Jacobs with the text's protagonist, as many previous critics have done, I analyze Linda as a literary figure deliberately constructed to perform certain political aims. …

A House is not a Home: Gender, Space and Marquesan Encounter, 1833–34

In August 1833, a party of American missionaries with their wives and children took up residence at Taiohae on Nukuhiva, one of the three islands that comprise the northern group of the Marquesas, only to abandon their station eight months later in April 1834. This paper looks at the journal records of those few months and considers the pressure that cross-cultural encounter placed on American notions of gender and the domestic ideology that underwrites it. Desperate to make a home in an alien land, the missionaries oversaw the construction of a residential compound but, as the months progressed, it became increasingly obvious that the walls they built were not secure. Far from being a place of respite, the compound was continuous with the native landscape and an indigenous sexual culture the missionaries could only register with disgust. Despite the best efforts of the female missionaries to model Christian family life, the peculiar domestic architecture of the mission dwellings formed not the desired proscenium between savage and civil but a more disorienting hall of mirrors in which Marquesan concepts of sexuality and space dissolved the distinction between public and private on which American notions of gender depended. Accordingly, the fate of the Marquesan mission allows us to revisit many of the critical commonplaces that circulate around women and Pacific missionary endeavour.

Something Covered with an Old Blanket”: Nancy and Other Dead Mothers in Oliver Twist

In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva outlines her theory of abjection as a simultaneous fascination and horror stemming from sensorial reminders of the subject's primal, psychological relation to the mother. In this essay, I show how these psychological perspectives can potentially result in acts of physical violence, which I call the "abject response." Applied to literature, a study of the abject response explains why sexually active female characters, such as Nancy, the prostitute, in Oliver Twist, suffer extreme acts of physical violence: not simply because they are sexual, as critics of Victorian domestic ideology most often argue, but rather because their particularly female bodies give them an agency which threatens to destroy the mastery of women on which Victorian male identity is based. Reading Oliver Twist through the lens of Kristeva reveals the ways in which Sikes, Nancy's murderer, psychically links her sexuality to the fatal potential he perceives in her body. This threatening construction of women's sexuality derives from an imbalanced focus in the male psyche on the repulsion aspect of abjection, a focus socially inscribed as a threatening power, which is used to justify violent usurpations of the feminine in masculine constructions of gender.

The Joy of Cookbooks

Jessamyn Neuhaus. Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 336 pp. Notes, essay on sources, and index. $42.95. What is it about cookbooks? About 24,000 are published annually, and cookbook sales increase by 5 to 10 percent each year. In the United States, the past decade has seen revised publications of The Joy of Cooking and Fannie Farmer as well as a new, 1000-plus-recipe tome from Gourmet Magazine, with an initial print run of 250,000 copies. In addition to the flood of published cookbooks, there are thousands of websites devoted to cooking. A google search for "recipes" yields over 29 million hits. Newsstands are full of food magazines. The Food Network has made celebrities out of chefs and is itself a cottage industry for cookbooks. And in recent years, non-food celebrities have jumped on the cookbook bandwagon. This past year, Maya Angelou released a food memoir accompanied by recipes. The American thirst for cookery instruction is, it seems, unquenchable. Despite the cultural phenomenon that is cookbooks, academic have been slow to study them. Women's historians have used cookbooks as sources for years to understand women's roles and activities in American society. But few scholars have concentrated on the history of the cookbooks themselves. In recent years, this situation has begun to change as a few monographs and anthologies on cookbook history have emerged. They include Janet Theophano's Eat My Words (2002) and Anne Bower's edited collection, Recipes for Reading (1997). On the research front, the Michigan State University Libraries has recently created an online collection of historical cookbooks, with scholarly commentary.1 With Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking, historian Jessamyn Neuhaus joins this scholarly conversation. Like many contemporary students of gender in American society, Neuhaus sees value in examining cookbooks as important reflectors and producers of gender norms. In Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking, she examines over three hundred commercial cookbooks published between 1920 and 1963 to gauge their role in advancing gender conventions. [End Page 263] Along the way, she surveys the history of American cookbooks, reacquainting her readers with some of its stars like Fannie Farmer's The Boston Cooking School Cookbook (1896), which innovated exact measurements and explicit instructions; Irma Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking (1931); Craig Claiborne's New York Times Cookbook (1961), which brought gourmet cooking to American audiences; and Peg Bracken's The I Hate to Cook Book (1960). And she introduces a larger number of lesser-known cookbooks, such as A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband with Bettina's Best Recipes (1932) and The Best Men Are Cooks (1941). Neuhaus's central argument is that the gendering of home cookery is a twentieth-century invention, part of what she sees as a larger reinvigoration of domestic ideology in twentieth-century America. Nineteenth-century middle-class homemakers were household managers—they directed servants and cooks rather than doing the household cooking themselves. But over the course of the twentieth century, as ready-made foods became more available and as middle-class women made social gains outside of the home, food preparation took on an increasingly important symbolic role. Convenience foods, electrical appliances, and advanced instruction made cookery simple enough for anyone to master. But instead of shrinking, the expectation that women would be the primary cooks for their households increased over the course of the twentieth century. Early American cookbooks, Neuhaus shows, assumed a basic knowledge of cookery and provided scant instruction to their users. Women, it was assumed, learned how to cook from their mothers (or more accurately, learned how to run a household, for most readers of early-nineteenth-century cookbooks were elite and middle-class women who oversaw servants who did the cooking). These works, Neuhaus suggests, did not necessarily draw an essential connection between gender and cookery but rather assumed, since women ran the house, that they would run...

Gender and Work in Turkey: Case Study on Women Workers in the Textile Industry in Bursa

Over the past 40 years or so historians and social scientists especially the women among them have made a determined attempt to render visible what was hitherto often invisible -- the role of women in history and the part they play in contemporary society. With respect to work this has led to increased interest in several related aspects -- in women and waged work; in the work constituted by the domestic duties that women perform within the home; and in so-called home work work performed in the home for money. The latter sort of work has often been investigated with reference to the production of garments. But the textile industry has been a common point of investigation in the attempt to render visible womens waged work roles and the interconnection between these and the work they do in the home. This study aims to contribute to contemporary debates about women and workplace attitudes in Turkey with special reference to women textile workers in Bursa. It draws upon fieldwork conducted in two big textile firms in 2001 in Bursa. (authors)

Organizing Rural Women: The Federated Women's Institutes of Ontario, 1897-1919 (review)

Reviewed by: Organizing Rural Women: The Federated Women's Institutes of Ontario, 1897-1919 Nancy Mandell Margaret C. Kechnie , Organizing Rural Women: The Federated Women's Institutes of Ontario, 1897-1919. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. Much of Canadian sociology focuses on urban matters, often, neglecting the rich history of rural women's activities. With her detailed account of the formation of the Federated Women's Institutes, one of the earliest rural women's groups in Ontario, Margaret Kechnie draws our attention to the life and times of farm and small-town women in the early 1900s. Using first-hand documents [End Page 379] from meetings, speeches, annual reports and government sources, Kechnie traces the beginnings of the Women's Institutes (W.I.) at a meeting in Stoney Creek in 1897 to its eventual federation in 1919. One question anchors Kechnie's analysis: How is it possible that a group to which farmers were initially so antagonistic and openly scornful could achieve, thirty years later, widespread provincial influence? Her answer is succinct: rural Ontario women "stole" the W.I. from its originators, the Department of Agriculture, and reshaped it to meet their needs. At the turn of the century, Ontario farmers faced many challenges: a crippling depression, depopulation of rural areas, and the application of industrial production methods to farming. The Ontario Department of Agriculture, in cooperation with its agent. The Ontario Agricultural College (OAC), initiated strategies to modernize farming including introducing productivity-enhancing technology, educating farmers on public health issues, and championing a domestic ideology of separate work spheres for men and women. The W.I., Kechnie shows, was an instrument created, funded and managed by the Ontario government in its attempt to professionalize farming and eradicate the "superstitious and stick-in-the-mud" ideas that the government felt characterized much of the thinking within the farm community. Rather than continuing the myth that the W.I. enjoyed widespread grassroots support from its inception, Kechnie reveals the early attempts to organize the W.I. as a failure. Using firsthand materials to support her arguments, Kechnie provides an in-depth look at the early responses to government attempts to regulate the lives of rural women. The 1898 first annual report of the Stoney Creek branch, for example, shows many members bewildered by the aims and objectives of the group while others seemed indifferent and still others overtly hostile. Initially advertised as a "social" group for farm women, the W.I. had a vague name, an overtly patriotic motto of "For Home and Country", and am ambiguous mandate of promoting better living. It had little appeal to farm women struggling daily to eke out a living. It refused to acknowledge farm women's essential income-producing activities, refused to assist them in marketing their produce, and refused to help women cope with their dual roles as homemakers and income experts. Instead, in its early years, the W.I. produced volumes of irrelevant and impractical information. Rather than addressing structural problems that hindered modernization, such as the lack of affordable hydroelectric power, immunization, contagious diseases, emergency health care, and mishaps with farm animals, the W.I. avoided topics of crucial importance to farm women. Although Kechnie does not label it as such, early, state-sponsored organizing by the W.I. represents a bold attempt at moral and social regulation. Take the example of Laura Rose, a single career woman, OAC instructor and dairy [End Page 380] expert. In 1906, in an address to an annual W.I. meeting, Rose's speech entitled "The Womanly Sphere of Woman" articulates the ideology of domesticity. Men, using the latest technology, should carry out agricultural work traditionally done by women, including dairying. The increased profits would allow men to further modernize their operations. Applying time-saving techniques to home and farm would provide women with increased energy and time to enjoy leisure pursuits that would equip them spiritually and emotionally. A healthier and more contented farm population would result if both men and women embraced new ideals and new technology. In her 1911 texbook "Farm Dairying", Rose placed the problems associated with poor dairy problems squarely on the shoulders of the farm women...

Domesticity, Homosociality, and Male Power in Superhero Comics of the 1950s

In any examination of comics of the 1950s, Fredric Wertham and Seduction of the Innocent will inevitably come up, and any discussion of the superhero genre at the time, and its representation of masculinity, must mention Wertham’s most infamous and oft-quoted assertion that Batman and Robin represent a homosexual fantasy. Wertham did correctly identify the possibility of a queer reading of the superhero, albeit as an example of what was wrong with the comics. His attitude indicates the important function of homosexuality in the fifties discourse of heterosexual mascu­ linity to negatively define “normative” masculinity: the mature, responsible, white, heterosexual middle-class professional so strongly associated with the decade. While hardly a true or universal norm, this image of American manhood served as a locus for the popular expression both of “proper” American masculinity and of anxieties that arose from the dominant domestic ideology of the 1950s and its assigned roles of female homemaker, wife, and mother and male breadwinner, hus­ band, and father. Among his examples of signs of homosexuality in Batman and Robin comics, Wertham describes one quality that is less a sign and more an impression of a shared attitude: “The feeling is conveyed that we men must stick together because there are so many villainous creatures who have to be exterminated” (190). FocusMark Best is a Visiting Lecturer in English at the University of Pittsburgh, teaching courses on film and popular culture. He received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana Univer­ sity in 2002, and is currently revising his dissertation, on masculinity and the superhero genre in the post-war era, for publication, as well as working on other projects related to comics and popular culture.

Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel

During the 19th century, as British citizens left England for the New Worlds, hearth and home were moved from the heart of the Empire to its very outskirts. This volume explores how this affected the ways in which Victorians both promoted and undermined the ideal of the domestic woman. Drawing upon works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler and Charles Dickens, it shows how the ideals of womanhood and home promoted by domestic ideology in many ways conflict with the arguement in favour of emigration to imperial destinations. A pattern emerges in almost every Victorian novel that encounters the New Worlds: if an English hero to be happy, he either marries an English angel-wife and brings her with him to the New World, or, abandons thoughts of settling abroad and returns to England to marry. This pattern seems to support the supposedly complementary ideologies of domesticity and imperialism. The literary texts, however, reveal much ambivalence toward this domestic ideal. Female emigrants were desperately needed in the colonies; thus, a woman's imperial duty was to leave England. Yet her womanly duty told her to remain an untainted idol beside an English hearthside.

Fanny Lewald and Nineteenth-Century Constructions of Femininity by Vanessa van Ornam (review)

MLR, 99.3,2004 831 mut Schneider's 'Kleist's Challenge to Enlightenment Humanism', a wide-ranging consideration of Kleist's inversions of Lessing's Nathander Weise. It not only includes a compelling Freudian reading of 'Der Findling' but also identifies far-reaching consequences of questioning humanist assumptions about the transformation of crude nature into culture, of instinct into morality, and of fact into meaning. Schneider's is an essay of substance which offersan explanation for Kleist's texts' resistance to interpretation: they subvert fiction's claim to unite the particular and the universal, as notably in the classical poetic symbol. University of Bristol John Hibberd Fanny Lewald and Nineteenth-Century Constructions of Femininity. By Vanessa van Ornam. (North American Studies in Nineteenth-Century German Literature, 29) New York, Bern, and Berlin: Peter Lang. 2002. x+192 pp. ?60.80. ISBNo8204 -5101-0 (hbk). Fanny Lewald (1811-89), whose work was very widely read in the nineteenth century, has in recent years been 'rediscovered' by feminist critics. In her study Vanessa van Ornam takes up the argument put forward by such critics that, while in her essays and non-fictional works Lewald challenges the conventional ideas of her period about women's role, in her novels and short stories she tends to perpetuate them. Concentrating mainly on Lewald's later, lesser-known, and seemingly more 'conservative' fiction, van Ornam seeks to show that although most of Lewald's heroines aspire first and foremost to be good (i.e. virtuous, submissive, and self-sacrificing) daughters, wives, and mothers, Lewald uses the very conventionality of such figures to justify demands for an improvement in women's rights and status. The framework for van Ornam's discussion of Lewald's fiction is an examination of how femininity was constructed and enforced in the nineteenth century by four extra-literary discourses: medicine, the law, pedagogy, and domestic ideology. Thus she demonstrates that the illnesses of Lewald's heroines, though in keeping with the contemporary medical notion that the female sex was naturally weak and sickly, also afford them power over male figures, and that Lewald portrays women who are vic? tims of unscrupulous men in order to show that the existing law does not provide the vulnerable female sex with sufficient protection. She further argues that, while conforming to the popular opinion that women should be educated primarily forthe sake of the men in their life or to earn a living should they fail to find a husband, Lewald's texts nevertheless underline the importance of increased schooling forgirls, and that, by laying bare the tensions and trials that beset family life, they demystify the prevalent domestic ideal. Van Ornam sheds important light on hitherto neglected works. As well as sup? porting her analysis with relevant biographical information, she anchors it firmlyand valuably in the historical context, though she relies largely on a limited number of se? condary sources to provide this context, and her evaluation of Lewald's fictionmight have benefited from some comparison with writing by other women of the period. Van Ornam's reading of the ways in which conformity can lend weight to a protest is sensitive; she demonstrates convincingly that texts such as 'Das groBe Loos' (1865), in which the worthy Christel can do nothing to prevent her inheritance being squandered by her dissolute husband, or 'Kein Haus' (1865), in which the poor, deserving heroine is driven to suicide because the law prevents her frommarrying her lover and she is ostracized from society, make an emancipatory point. The danger is that she overstates the case. When applied to works such as Liebesbriefe (1850), forexample, in which the heroine does not employ the power her illness lends her to pursue an 'unfeminine' 832 Reviews path, but merely to return to the conventional religious faith she has been persuaded to desert, van Ornam's line of argument demands some qualification. Nevertheless, the study makes an important contribution to our understanding of Lewald's fiction. Birkbeck College, London Anna Richards Ring und Gral: Texte,Kommentare und Interpretationenzu Richard Wagners 'Der Ring des Nibelungen', 'Tristan und Isolde', 'Die Meistersinger von Numberg' und 'Par? sifal'. Ed. by Ulrich Muller and Oswald Panagl. Wiirzburg: Konigshausen...

The Stranger at the Gate: Privacy, Property, and the Structures of Welcome at William Morris's Red House

ince the early 1970s, a succession of critics has sought to describe and decode the Victorian ideology of domesticity. Beginning with such groundbreaking studies of etiquette as Leonore Davidoff’s The Best Circles (1973), this interpretative project has since been extended through the work of, among others, Nancy Armstrong, Mary Poovey, Elizabeth Langland, and George K. Behlmer. Their largely feminist accounts of the household realm have achieved a great deal in refining our understanding of the public-private divide as it developed in nineteenth-century Britain. And yet, despite the existence of so many thorough and insightful studies, important lines of inquiry remain unexplored. Perhaps most surprising is the absence of any sustained analysis of hospitality, both as a concept and as a Victorian ideal. With the notable exception of Peter Mandler, historians of the nineteenthcentury household have made only limited reference to the construction of this important domestic virtue. It is also surprising that scholars of the Gothic Revival have not paid more attention to the movement’s recurrent emphasis on the idea of welcome. The links between socialism and radicalized medievalism—of the kind pioneered first by William Cobbett, and then by William Morris—are well documented. And it is not difficult to see how a preoccupation with sociability formed a bridge between these two positions. It is especially hard, then, to understand why no attempt has been made to explore or to account for the equalitarian strand emerging from the paternalism of antique hospitality. Scholars working in the field of utopian studies have been comparably slow in recognizing this Victorian enthusiasm as an opportunity to explore the formation of an alternative utopian tradition, one that seems to place a premium on openness, tolerance, and pluralism. 1 Even

Legacy Bookshelf

Below is a selected sampling of current books, articles, and dissertations relevant to the study of American women writers from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. Prices unless otherwise indicated are for hardcover editions. Individual Authors Alcott, Louisa May Laffrado, Laura. "'How Could You Leave Me Alone When the Room Was Full of Men?': Gender and Self-Representation in Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches. ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 48 (2002): 71-95. Barnes, Djuna Veltman, Laura J. "'The Bible Lies the One Way, but the Night-Gown the Other': Dr. Matthew OConnor, Confession, and Gender in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood." Modern Fiction Studies 49 (2003): 204-27. Bethune, Mary McLeod Hanson, Joyce A. Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women's Political Activism. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2003. 256 pp. $32.50. Bristow, Gwen Lewis, Nghana. "She'll Take Her Stand: Gwen Bristow's Neo-Agrarianism and Visions of Modernity." Mississippi Quarterly 56 (2002-3): 77-104. Cather, Willa Chaput, Catherine. "Democracy, Capitalism, and the Ambivalence of Willa Cather's Frontier Rhetorics: Uncertain Foundations of the U.S. Public University System." College English 66 (2004): 310-34. Child, Lydia Maria Nerad, Julie Cary. "Slippery Language and False Dilemmas: The Passing Novels of Child, Howells, and Harper." American Literature 75 (2003): 813-41. Chopin, Kate Stein, Allen. "The Kaleidoscope of Truth: A New Look at Chopin's 'The Storm.'" American Literary Realism 36 (2003): 51-64. Dargan, Olive Tilford Ackerman, Kathy Cantley. The Heart of Revolution: The Radical Life and Novels of Olive Dargan. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2004. 232 pp. $29.95. Davis, Rebecca Harding Miller, Jeffrey W. "'A Desolate, Shabby Home': [End Page 259] Rebecca Harding Davis, Margret Howth, and Domestic Ideology." ATQ 17 (2003): 259-78. Dickinson, Emily Heginbotham, Eleanor Elson. Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2003. 300 pp. $47.95 /$9.95 CD. McCromack, Jerusha Hull. "Domesticating Delphi: Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph." American Quarterly 55 (2003): 569-601. Pollak, Viviam R., ed. A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 240 pp. $50.00 /$19.95 paper. Doolittle, Hilda Friedman, Susan Stanford, ed. Analyzing Freud: Letters of H. D., Bryher, and Their Circle. New York: New Directions, 2002. 615 pp. $39.95. Dye, Eva Emery Browne, Sheri Bartlett. Eva Emery Dye: Romance with the West. Corvallis: Oregon State UP, 2004. 192 pp. $24.95 paper. Frankenstein, Irma Rosenthal Steinberg, Ellen FitzSimmons. Irma: A Chicago Woman's Story, 1871-1966. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2004. 252 pp. $49.95 /$19.95 paper. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Knight, Denise D. "'Only a Husband's Opinion': Walter Stetson's View of Gilman's 'The Yellow Wall-Paper'—An Inscription." American Literary Realism 36 (2003): 86-87. Van Wienen, Mark W. "A Rose by Any Other Name: Charlotte Perkins Stetson (Gilman) and the Case for American Reform Socialism." American Quarterly 55 (2003): 603-34. Harper, Frances See Nerad on Child. Hopkins, Pauline Knadler, Stephen. "Traumatized Racial Performativity: Passing in Nineteenth-Century African-American Testimonies." Cultural Critique 55 (2003): 63-100. Hurston, Zora Neale Croft, Robert W. A Zora Neale Hurston Companion. Westport: Greenwood P, 2002. 256 pp. $74.95. Rieger, Christopher. "The Working-Class Pastoral of Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee." Mississippi Quarterly 56 (2002-3): 105-24. Jackson, Helen Hunt Irwin, Robert McKee. "Ramona and Postnationalist American Studies: On 'Our America' and the Mexican Borderlands." American Quarterly 55 (2003): 539-67. Jacobs, Harriet King, Lovalerie. "Counter-Discourses on the Racialization of Theft and Ethics in Douglass's Narrative and Jacobs's Incidents." MELUS 28.4 (2003): 55-82. Taylor, Douglas. "From Slavery to Prison: Benjamin Rush, Harriet Jacobs, and the Ideology of Reformative Incarceration." Genre 35 (2002): 429-47. Larsen, Nella Harrison-Kahan, Lori. "Her 'Nig': Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen's Passing." Modern Language Studies 32.2 (2002): 109-38. Lee, Mary Greenhow Phipps, Sheila R. Genteel Rebel: The Life of Mary Greenhow Lee. Baton Rouge...

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens ed. by John O. Jordan (review)

Reviews as an organizing principle. However, Harris's book is essential reading for anyone interested in the figure of the late Victorian hostess, and is a unique contribution to Victorian studies in general. Natalie Neill York University John O. Jordan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. xxi + 235 pp. Hardback $54.95 Paperback $19.95. The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens begins with an essay on Dickens's Hfe by Graham Smith that is somewhat typical of the thirteen essays that foUow it. It is theoretical, asking the question 'how can one write a biography about what is ultimately a textual construct?' (Dickens through the words in which we know him); it is historical, probing the social, cultural, economic, and poHtical contexts in which the novels were written; and it is grounded in the detaüs of the novels. It might be labeUed new historicist, psychobiography, or poststructural. The Companion includes a wide variety of essays, nearly aU of which mix critical styles. There are chronologicaUy based essays, thematicaUy arranged essays, technical essays, and what might be caUed idiosyncratic essays (Richard L. Stein's fascinating essay on "Dickens and IUustration,"John Glavin's essay on "Dickens and Theatre," andJoss Marsh's essay on "Dickens and FUm"). Most of the essayists combine different methodologies and at least flirt with different ideologies. The essays in the Companion fit nicely together because none of them are primarily defences of those methodologies or ideologies. They are about Dickens and his work. Given the variety of material in the coUection, it is unlikely that the average reader wiU study it from cover to cover. As Dickens appeals to both scholars and an enthusiastic pubHc, so wiU the Companion. But it is more likely that readers, academic or otherwise, wiU select the topic that interests them rather than read the text as fourteen continuous "chapters" (as the essays are fashionably described). Nearly aU of the essays have helpfuUy descriptive titles ("Dickens and Language") for the reader interested in a particular subject. And the subjects are often very particular, demonstrating not only Dickens's interminable interests and energy, but also the vast amount of 1 10volume 30 number 1 Reviews work that has been done on him in the past — which in itself commands new, multidisciplinary approaches. But only the reader with an enormously broad range of specialized interests and abüities could approach the coUection as a unified, consecutive arrangement of chapters. The most notable essays include Smith's "The Life and Times of Charles Dickens," Kate Flint's "The Middle Novels: Chu^lewit, Dombey, and Copperfield" Hüary Schor's "Novels of the 1850s: Hard Times, Uttle Dorrit, and A Tale of Two Cities" Catherine Water's "Gender, Famüy, and Domestic Ideology," and Stein's "Dickens and IUustration." Smith, who admits to being comfortable with some "psychoanalytic probing" (8), ferrets out episodes in the novels having "some relation" to Dickens's Hfe. Positing the "fusion between the Hfe and the times which made up the substance of Dickens's biography" (14), he also attempts "to recreate a sense of Dickens's personal Hfe through the women who occupied important places within it" (11). Because Smith refuses to compartmentalize analytical approaches, his essay wiU not turn away readers of different methodological persuasions. Most of the ensuing essays share this sort of open criticism. Brian Cheadle's basicaUy Marxist approach in "The Late Novels: Great Expectations and OurMutualFriend" for example, is not entirely or dogmaticaUy Marxist he introduces techniques from other schools as weU. Kate Flint borrows from geographical criticism to explore the fiction of the 1840s, focusing on "metaphors of motion" in Dickens's work and seeing in his "resdessness" a "response to modernity" (36). The essay is tight, though it again uses a variety of approaches and takes into consideration a mixture of factors to explain how Dickens dealt with change: biography, economic pressures, social and poHtical histories, and so on. like Smith and Cheadle, whose essays also de-dichotomize intrinsic and extrinsic approaches to the text, Flint does not aUow her methodology to become the topic of her essay: Dickens and his work remain front and centre. H...

Updating the Lyric

ions must be complicated by the messiness of the experience if the law is to continue to adjust to changing practices: this sense, poetry offers the space of contradiction and ambiguity, of improvisation and paradox that privacy depends (xx). Nelson's narrative is immensely complex, braiding a social history of the last fifty years with landmark legal decisions into a framework for a particular kind of autobiographical lyric that is, moreover, evolving differently for women than for men, differently for gays than for straights. Privacy gets redefined after World War II when cold war rhetoric insists that the potency of America was its cultivation of a vibrant and free public discourse but its vigilant protection of private (xiii). But as Nelson explains in her first chapter, this made privacy so important, so politically central, that it fell under government surveillance: for that immensely valuable privacy to be protected, the government had to violate it, to monitor our activities. Not coincidentally, at the same time, new standards for self-disclosure encouraged frank talk, openly airing that which had formerly been held in secret. All at once, there was too much so much now was being divulged in public (in tell-all narratives by movie stars, in sensational concoctions in magazines like Confidential). But there was also too little privacy: everywhere one looked there were coercive government agencies at work (HUAC investigations, the McCarthy subcommittee hearings, the Kefauver commission on organized crime). When the Supreme Court was called upon to clarify a to privacy, what its decisions revealed was not a clear-cut expansion of rights but an ever more finely tuned set of adjustments in which, for example, a woman's privacy in Roe v. Wade depended upon the advice of a physician, or the privacy of homosexuals in Bowers v. Hardwick was not protected at all. Nelson wants this narrative to be fully understood: Because privacy's deprivations belonged primarily to women and its autonomy primarily to men, because privacy offered sanctuary to heterosexuals and only secrecy to homosexuals or other sexually marginalized people, the crisis of the exposure and mediation of these boundaries, fragmented the concept (30). What constitutes a poem, then, varies markedly (but This content downloaded from 207.46.13.172 on Sat, 15 Oct 2016 04:24:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 388 C O N T E M PO R A R Y L I T E RAT U R E predictably) depending upon the gender and the sexual orientation of its speaker. At the end of the nineteenth century, the right to privacy was rarely discussed because it was guarded by a gentlemanly code of self-restraint. That such a code was now faltering can be glimpsed in Lowell's Life Studies, in which, in Nelson's bracingly original reading in her second chapter, reveals the ineffectual dithering of his father, recognizes the brash incursions of his mother, and realizes that he has inherited problems of emasculation that may not be unique to him: even the man / scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, / has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, / and is a 'young Republican.' 7 Nelson sees most sharply when he compulsively divides the sonnets he had first written for Notebook (1970) into the public poems of History (1973) and the private poems of For Lizzie and Harriet (1973): [F]or some he is fundamentally a historical poet, for others essentially a confessional poet. It seems crucial... to hold these two configurations of his career in tension, to resist any attempt to resolve them in favor of one or the other classification (67). Saying little about himself that is damning, giving away little of his own is quick to withhold privacy from others. After leaving Elizabeth Hardwick for another woman, he included verbatim chunks from Hardwick's angry letters in The Dolphin (1973). By penetrating Hardwick's retains a vestige of the authority no longer available to him: Lowell used the absolute 'privateness' of Hardwick's coerced collaboration to secure the publicness of his own voice (73). In two chapters on confessional poetry written by women, Nelson positions their work in a time when the home that the Court viewed so fondly as the man's castle was maintained by the little woman who stayed within it. For women, then, [c]onfessional poetry's contribution to public discourse was dismantling domestic ideology through the act of exposure itself, through the self-disclosure of that which should have been the subject of (77). Poems by Plath (The Other, Eavesdropper) and Sexton (Self in 1958, Live) record such surveillance or expose the coercive aspects in 7. Robert Lowell, Memories of West Street and Lepke, Life Studies (New York: Farrar, 1959) 85. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.172 on Sat, 15 Oct 2016 04:24:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Playing "Theayter": Dramatic Performance in the Late-Victorian Fictional Slum

Playing "Theavter": Dramatic Performance in the LateVictorian Fictional Slum Mary FJ/en Kappler An odd performance is taking place in an Hast rind graveyard. It is 1899, and although the nearby streets and courts are far too cramped and narrow for recreation, a group of ragged slum children gather together in the "buryin' ground," where there is room enough for both boisterous romping and the somewhat more ceremonious, though still lively, "old English games" the children have recently learned from the ladies at the Settlement house. But the favourite pastime here is not Ring-o'-Roses or "rude rough horse-play" - it is "theavter," a game that allows full scope for the energy and imagination of the youthful assembly. The broad church steps provide an excellent acting area with room for a large cast and a varied programme ranging from "step dances, and well-worn music hall sketches," to improvised dramas concocted from a wide range of available material: "[t]he latest play-bill, the Salvation Army meetings, the School Board, the election folk, the penny dreadfuls, and, above all, the police news reports, all made excellent material to 'work up' into original performances" (Kimmins 17-18). This game of "theavter" takes place in Polly of Parker's Rents, a now all but forgotten novel by G. T Kimmins ("Sister Grace"), a Settlement worker in Bermondsev. Kimmins' story of Polly Ryan, an imaginative and audaciously energetic slum girl is just one of a surprisingly large number of late-Victorian fictions that deal with the life of the slums. While the enormous quantity of contemporary documentary writing about the urban poor is well known, the almost equally large body of fiction about the slums, written during the same period, is somewhat Victorian Review (2003) M. Kappler less familiar. George Gissing's and Arthur Morrison's works are still well-known, but few of the other "slum novelists" of the 1880's and 90's are now read. Walter Besant, L.T. Meade, Margaret Harkness ("John Law"), and Israel Zangwill are likely the most still-recognisable writers to have produced novels set in the slums, while Arthur St. John Adcock, David Christie Murray, M. E. Winchester, and many others, including G. T. Kimmins, are probably no longer remembered. For late-Victorian readers, however, "slum novels" formed a distinct and recognisable sub-genre of fiction: Jane Findlater, for example, writing in 1900, offers a taxonomy of five distinct "divisions" within the body of recent and contemporary slum fiction. The prevalence of these narratives suggests something of the powerful influence that the slum exerted on the Victorian imagination. In these novels the slum frequently represents a telling inversion of the more normative tropes of nineteenth-century fiction: the familiar domestic locus takes on a number of diverse and sometimes surprising alternate identities. The fictional slum is variously depicted as labyrinth, sanctuary, tourist destination, arena, prison, playground and erogenous zone. Such representations offer deconstructive readings of nineteenth-century domestic ideology while at die same time suggesting the existence of a new sort of fictional space: the fictional slum provided late-Victorian writers and readers with the possibility of re-configuring or re-imagining some of the most seminal tropes of their social narrative. One of the most striking features of many of these "slum novels" is the extent to which slum life is viewed in essentially performative terms. Kimmins' image of a group of slum children playing "theayter " in a "buryin' ground" is particularly apt: if real Victorian slums were frequently depicted in terms that emphasised fatality and hopelessness , fictional slum-dwellers counter the image — in novel after novel — by transforming their blighted and pestilential neighbourhood into a theatre, the site of exuberant dramatic performance. In a number of novels the slum becomes a place where high spirits abound and where vigorous hi-jinks of all sorts can be enacted. The slum locus serves to dissolve normative notions of decorum and volume 29 number 2 Playing "Theatyer" propriety, allowing a theatrical and rather carnival-like atmosphere to prevail. Somerset Maugham's U%a of Lambeth (1897), for example, opens with an impromptu street dance, which begins sedately enough but which the gorgeously attired Liza Kemp...

Some wild visions: autobiographies by female itinerant evangelists in nineteenth-century America

This book is a study of seven autobiographies by women who defied the domestic ideology of nineteenth-century America by serving as itinerant preachers. Literally and culturally homeless, all of them used their autobiographies to construct, from an array of materials, plausible identities as women and Christians in an age that found them hard to understand.

Fanny Lewald and Nineteenth-Century Constructions of Femininity by Vanessa van Ornam (review)

MLR, 99.3,2004 831 mut Schneider's 'Kleist's Challenge to Enlightenment Humanism', a wide-ranging consideration of Kleist's inversions of Lessing's Nathander Weise. It not only includes a compelling Freudian reading of 'Der Findling' but also identifies far-reaching consequences of questioning humanist assumptions about the transformation of crude nature into culture, of instinct into morality, and of fact into meaning. Schneider's is an essay of substance which offersan explanation for Kleist's texts' resistance to interpretation: they subvert fiction's claim to unite the particular and the universal, as notably in the classical poetic symbol. University of Bristol John Hibberd Fanny Lewald and Nineteenth-Century Constructions of Femininity. By Vanessa van Ornam. (North American Studies in Nineteenth-Century German Literature, 29) New York, Bern, and Berlin: Peter Lang. 2002. x+192 pp. ?60.80. ISBNo8204 -5101-0 (hbk). Fanny Lewald (1811-89), whose work was very widely read in the nineteenth century, has in recent years been 'rediscovered' by feminist critics. In her study Vanessa van Ornam takes up the argument put forward by such critics that, while in her essays and non-fictional works Lewald challenges the conventional ideas of her period about women's role, in her novels and short stories she tends to perpetuate them. Concentrating mainly on Lewald's later, lesser-known, and seemingly more 'conservative' fiction, van Ornam seeks to show that although most of Lewald's heroines aspire first and foremost to be good (i.e. virtuous, submissive, and self-sacrificing) daughters, wives, and mothers, Lewald uses the very conventionality of such figures to justify demands for an improvement in women's rights and status. The framework for van Ornam's discussion of Lewald's fiction is an examination of how femininity was constructed and enforced in the nineteenth century by four extra-literary discourses: medicine, the law, pedagogy, and domestic ideology. Thus she demonstrates that the illnesses of Lewald's heroines, though in keeping with the contemporary medical notion that the female sex was naturally weak and sickly, also afford them power over male figures, and that Lewald portrays women who are vic? tims of unscrupulous men in order to show that the existing law does not provide the vulnerable female sex with sufficient protection. She further argues that, while conforming to the popular opinion that women should be educated primarily forthe sake of the men in their life or to earn a living should they fail to find a husband, Lewald's texts nevertheless underline the importance of increased schooling forgirls, and that, by laying bare the tensions and trials that beset family life, they demystify the prevalent domestic ideal. Van Ornam sheds important light on hitherto neglected works. As well as sup? porting her analysis with relevant biographical information, she anchors it firmlyand valuably in the historical context, though she relies largely on a limited number of se? condary sources to provide this context, and her evaluation of Lewald's fictionmight have benefited from some comparison with writing by other women of the period. Van Ornam's reading of the ways in which conformity can lend weight to a protest is sensitive; she demonstrates convincingly that texts such as 'Das groBe Loos' (1865), in which the worthy Christel can do nothing to prevent her inheritance being squandered by her dissolute husband, or 'Kein Haus' (1865), in which the poor, deserving heroine is driven to suicide because the law prevents her frommarrying her lover and she is ostracized from society, make an emancipatory point. The danger is that she overstates the case. When applied to works such as Liebesbriefe (1850), forexample, in which the heroine does not employ the power her illness lends her to pursue an 'unfeminine' 832 Reviews path, but merely to return to the conventional religious faith she has been persuaded to desert, van Ornam's line of argument demands some qualification. Nevertheless, the study makes an important contribution to our understanding of Lewald's fiction. Birkbeck College, London Anna Richards Ring und Gral: Texte,Kommentare und Interpretationenzu Richard Wagners 'Der Ring des Nibelungen', 'Tristan und Isolde', 'Die Meistersinger von Numberg' und 'Par? sifal'. Ed. by Ulrich Muller and Oswald Panagl. Wiirzburg: Konigshausen...

The making of modern woman: Europe, 1789-1918

Modern woman was made between the French Revolution and the end of the First World War. In this time, the women of Europe crafted new ideas about their sexuaity, motherhood, the home, the politics of femininity, and their working roles. They faced challenges about what a woman should be and how she should act. From domestic ideology to women's suffrage, this book charts the contests for woman's identity in the epoch-shaping nineteenth century.

The contemporary gender agenda of the US public accounting profession: embracing feminism or maintaining empire?

Abstract In this paper we analyze the social relations operating within the contemporary gender agenda of the United States (US) public accounting profession, with the ultimate goal of revealing the role that that agenda plays in the expansion of empire. Competing narratives of globalization are used to support our characterization of the US as a contemporary empire, and to develop the role played by the US profession in that imperial project. A feminist account of the ideology of domesticity serves as a framework to critique the contemporary gender agenda of the US profession, and feminist critiques of globalization and development are used to interpret the gendered nature of the economic agenda that is currently being exported by the US profession and its multinational clients. The analysis leads to conclusions about the involvement of the US profession in facilitating empire and about complexities embedded in the roles held by women in the US public accounting profession.

Wives, Mothers, and Citizens: The Treatment of Women in the 1935 Nationality and Citizenship Act

CLEARLY, male Irish political leaders saw women only in terms. Women were mothers. Women were wives. Women minded hearth and home. (1) Most historians would accept this evaluation of position of women in early years of Irish Free State, but there are a number of dissenting voices. Caitriona Clear rejects idea that there was a domestic ideology in Ireland in first decades after independence; she argues that attacks on women's citizenship and employment rights in Ireland in 1920s and 1930s-substantial as they were--were piecemeal and inconsistent. (2) She proceeds to note that Valera's irritation at feminist opposition to constitution [of 1937] suggests that he did not inhabit a political environment that was entirely indifferent to women's views: indeed, he told late Professor T.P. O'Neill that Ivy Pinchbeck's Women Workers and Industrial Revolution (1933) had had a major impact on his thinking and forced his attention onto protecting Irish women and children from worst effects of what he hoped was Ireland's industrial revolution. The fact that de Valera felt need to invoke a feminist authority for his reference to women in Constitution is indeed significant. (3) This is not only instance where de Valera invoked feminist authority for his actions. In 1934, at de Valera's request, John J. Hearne, legal adviser of Department of External Affairs, sent draft clauses from 1934 Irish Nationality and Citizenship Bill to Mice Paul with a request that she comment on them. Alice Paul was a prominent equal-rights feminist in United States, founder of Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage and National Woman's Party, and author of Equal Rights Amendment, an unlikely point of reference for de Valera or indeed any leading Irish politician at this time. The clauses sent to Mice Paul related to treatment of citizenship in marriages between an Irish citizen, male or female, and a foreigner. The citizenship of women in transnational marriages was a topic of major concern to women's organizations during 1920s and 1930s. In Ireland matter was inextricably linked with efforts by new state to establish that Irish citizenship was not simply a local variant of British nationality but rather a distinct status with international standing. (4) The clauses relating to married women provide new insights into de Valera's attitude toward women, citizenship, and family that may require us to reconsider comparable clauses in 1937 constitution. But first it is important to examine why citizenship of women who married foreigners became such a heated issue in interwar years. I In 1914 it was almost universal practice that a woman who married a citizen of another country automatically lost her citizenship of birth and acquired that of her Under common law, which applied in Britain and Ireland, marriage had no impact on nationality, (5) but in 1870 United Kingdom parliament passed Naturalisation Act, which provided that a British woman who married an alien automatically lost her British nationality, even if she continued to reside in UK. This provision complemented legislation introduced in 1844, providing that an alien woman who married a British subject would be deemed a naturalized British subject with all rights and privileges of a natural-born subject. (6) These laws were consistent with widely held Victorian attitudes toward marriage and family: belief in unity of family and conviction that husband and wife had complementary roles, with woman responsible for private sphere. One legal scholar noted that the rational basis for rule that a woman should assume nationality of her husband was general subjection, under most legal systems, of wife to husband. (7) In Britain provision that a woman who married an alien should automatically lose her British nationality and assume his legal status appears to have first attracted significant criticism during war years of 1914-18, when British-born women who were married to German citizens and living in Britain found themselves subject to Enemy Aliens Act of 1914, which gave home secretary authority to prevent them from leaving state, to restrict their movement within Britain, and to search or intern them. …