Male-authored Texts Research Articles

Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women (review)

Reviewed by: Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women Stephanie Sieburth Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, 223 pp. Lou Charnon-Deutsch’s study is a treasure-trove of information and insight about women’s writing in nineteenth-century Spain. The book starts from the premise that there are profound differences in the ways male and female writers represent women characters. In male-authored texts, it is too often demonstrated that women cannot really be what men need them to be; women are often represented as monstrous and threatening to the male psyche. Charnon-Deutsch looks to the female-authored novel to explore how women have represented what it means to be a woman under the severely confining patriarchal system of the nineteenth century. The book has five chapters. The first one studies novels by Cecilia Böhl de Faber as precursors to the genre of domestic fiction, and then turns to the work of the most prolific and popular of Spain’s domestic novelists, María del Pilar Sinués de Marco. Charnon-Deutsch shows how, although the domestic novel buttresses rather than challenges the ideal of domesticity incessantly propagated in nineteenth-century mass culture, it also constitutes a testimony to the near-impossibility of realizing the ideal of a happy and loving family life. The second chapter follows this up by noting how the characteristics of masochism in psychoanalytic theory parallel the responses called for in the ideal domestic woman. Deutsch studies Böhl de Faber’s Clemencia, Sinués’ El sol de invierno, Angela Grassi’s El copo de nieve, and Pardo Bazán’s Una cristiana and La prueba. Chapter 3 focuses on the novels of Rosalía de Castro, which are antidomestic, and includes a fascinating analysis of female desire in El caballero de las botas azules. The fourth chapter is a brilliant rereading of Los pazos de Ulloa as a questioning of nineteenth-century clichés about motherhood and about women’s connection to nature. The final chapter explores novels from the turn of the century by Pardo Bazán, Dolores Monserdà i Vidal, and Catalina Albert i Paradís. These novels argue for women’s participation in the working world as a way to benefit family and society in general. Deutsch explores how marriage is redefined in Pardo Bazán’s Memorias de un solterón, and how exceptional women can find no man on earth to measure up to their interrelational maturity in Dulce dueño. [End Page 422] This book is full of crucial insights which are sure to redefine the way nineteenth-century fiction is studied. But it also contains some serious flaws. On the positive side, the textual analysis is invariably incisive and illuminating, written with both compassion and humor. Charnon-Deutsch includes illustrations from the popular press that perfectly complement her textual analyses. One of the most important boons of this book is its juxtaposition of male-authored and female-authored representations of women and men. Here Charnon-Deutsch is truly in her element. She explores how various texts by Pardo Bazán answer Doña Perfecta, Tristana, and La Regenta in a way that incisively illuminates the workings of the male psyche as it represents women. The flaws in this book have to do with Charnon-Deutsch’s use of psychoanalytic theory and the awkward combination of this theory with the historical determinants of women’s condition. Especially in the first two chapters, she brings in the words and ideas of Lacanian and feminist psychoanalysis in an attempt to say something about feminine desire even in the extreme case of the domestic novel in which the desires really seem to be coping mechanisms. The theory is dense and arcane, and ultimately reveals less about the novels studied than do the historical determinants and Deutsch’s own insights. The framework of female desire is completely appropriate for Chapters 3 and 5, but seems forced in relation to the other chapters. I found myself wishing, in the first two chapters, that Charnon-Deutsch had compared women’s responses to the radical deprivations to...

“Langage inconnu”: Montesquieu, Graffigny and the Writing of Exile

Over the last fifteen years, Francoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne, the novel about a cultural outsider who exposes the vicissitudes of ancien regime society, notably the constraints it imposes on women, has gradually been incorporated into the literary canon. Following upon the editorial work of English Showalter, Gianni Nicoletti and others, several feminist critics engaged in the revision of the academic canon have initiated a critical reevaluation. This reappraisal has frequently involved the comparison of Graffigny's novel with texts by more illustrious male predecessors and contemporaries, most notably the Lettres persanes, but also Guilleragues' Lettres portugaises, Voltaire's L'Ingenu and Alzire and Condillac's Traite des Sensations. This critical practice raises several questions relating to the processes of canonization and revision. Are hitherto neglected women writers to be accommodated within an existing framework, given a place in the canon--A Woman's Place in the Enlightenment Sun,(1) as Janet Altman suggests in the title of one piece on Graffigny? Does the undoubtedly necessary process of canon revision inevitably depend upon the reception of texts as bearing determinate significations which can be compared and contrasted with those of other texts? I propose here to examine some of the ways in which the process of revision is played out in recent critical approaches to the Lettres d'une Peruvienne, and as a counterpart, to consider a further point of comparison between the Lettres and the work to which they are most often compared, the Lettres persanes. I shall focus on the emergence of a language which is described as unknown, new, foreign or strange, a langage inconnu or langage nouveau which in both texts is tied to the attempt to write about enlightenment, and suggest that this resistant, self-reflexive language constitutes an obstacle to the comparisons established in literary critical discourses. In a recent work, Julia V. Douthwaite considers the binary production of texts about exotic others by male and female writers of the ancien regimen. For example, she discusses Mme de Lafayette in relation to Prevost, and Montesquieu in the light of Graffigny.(2) She interprets the Lettres d'une Peruvienne (1747) as a feminocentric revision or rewriting of the Lettres persanes (1721), both among the many novels of the period in which foreigners lay bare the arbitrary and unstable foundations of French institutions and cultural practices. Her use of the concept of revision clearly reflects a feminist and new-historicist approach, though the move to comparison itself builds upon a long critical tradition which has considered the Lettres d'une Peruvienne as a mere avatar of literary models inaugurated or exemplified by male-authored texts. Broadly speaking, Douthwaite locates the difference between the texts in each pairing in the sexual difference of their respective authors. She reverses the traditional view--that the male authors are more profoundly original or more philosophical than the women--while retaining the basis for this view, i.e. that writing is strongly determined by gender. Douthwaite's account of the feminist revision performed by the later text depends on a representation of the Lettres persanes as a masculine prototype, and on many points this characterization is accurate. The Persian travellers are all men, and the male voice predominates throughout the text. More problematic is the identification of these male characters with Levi-Strauss's ideal of the structural anthropologist, able to suspend the prejudices of his own culture in mid-air and to look beyond the foreignness of the world's societies to perceive their universal similarities and laws of order....This rhetorical strategy--which informs both structural anthropology and its intellectual ancestor, European travel writing--perpetuates the ontological advantage of the dominant European (male) observer over a passive, silent (feminized) Other. …

Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women

In her first book Lou Charnon-Deutsch looked at the representation of women in male-authored texts. This book deals with women-authored texts of the same period. While women are unveiled as monstrous and are chastised or abandoned in male-written texts, novels written by women teach women how to deal with abandonment and undeserved punishment. In approaching her subject, Charnon-Deutsch draws on modern theorists such as Jessica Benjamin, Nancy Chodorow, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Lawrence Lipking, Luce Irigaray, Carol Gilligan, and Teresa de Lauretis. Charnon-Deutsch explores women's domestic fiction as the product of a patriarchal society dependent upon the enforcement of certain sexual arrangements to sustain itself. She contends that the production of sexual identity is crucial to the exercise of power by a conservative patriarchy and that the domestic novel was a particularly productive genre in this regard. At the same time, she argues that feminine desire accommodates itself even within the most repressive power relations that women writers sometimes imagined as fostering rather than hindering feminine maturity. With a recognition of the contradictions inherent in women's fiction, she examines different psychological desires underlying the cult of domesticity. While some desires seem subversive to the ideal of femininity as promoted in Spanish culture, Charnon-Deutsch concludes that most promote sexual arrangements that reinforce repressive norms of feminine conduct.

Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative ed. by Robert R. Edwards (review)

REVIEWS113 The major theoretical problem with Burns' very clever argument is its assumption that fictive discourse by male authors allows for the construction of a female subjectivity—that male writers can write as women, and not just like women. By mostly ignoring orbarely acknowledging contemporarydebates (by Kamuf, Modleski, Culler, Scholes, Fuss, and others) on gender and reader-response theory that examine this vexed question, Burns introduces a troubling essentialism: women, and women medievalists, are neither like Old French heroines constructed by male authors, nor are they Old French heroines. How it is possible for female body parts or characters to speak dialogically in monologically-constructed texts? Equally appropriate might have been an examination of the double-voiced tensón among the lyrics of the Trobairitz, in which a Troubadour responds to a female voice. In her zeal to rationalize a focus on male-authored texts, Burns also ignores those texts written by French medieval women, most especially the Trobairitz, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Marguerite d'Oingt, and Marguerite Porete, and thereby endorses the idea that even female subjectivity—gender identity—must itself be authorized by men—that only their fictionalization of a female discourse validates the construction of the female. Burns explains that after all 'Marie de France' exists in only one manuscript—that there may not even have been a historical Marie—and also that when historical authors like Christine wrote, they often «inscribed the misogyny ofthe cultural, social, and literal practices oftheir day. The reader ofher book may well heed her warning to feminists who read literary texts that 'focus on the metaphorization of women, readings that take no account of the existence of historical women in the Middle Ages, readings that distance the object ofstudy— women— from the female observer/listener': as with her own book, 'all tend to meet resistence...in the body of the woman critic' (pp.248-9). Thus she repeats the very phallocentric taxonomy that she wishes to disengage. What in fact Burns has proven is that antifeminist writers who problematize the female body reinscribe the misogyny oftheAcademy, in its attempt to silence and decapitate the speakingwoman, in their projection oimaU subjectivity onto female characters and their body-parts. JANE CHANCE Rice University Robert R. Edwards, ed. Art and Context in Late MedievalEnglish Narrative. Essays in Honor ofRobert Worth Frank, Jr. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994. xiv, 205. isbn: 0-85991-4070. $63. One of the reasons publishers don't like Festschriften, no matter how distinguished the person to be honored, is that they are difficult to sell. Even the most academic booksellers have no shelf-space between English 101 and Geology for Festschriften. Moreover, they are, for the most part, not books but collections of disparate essays thrust violently together in the hope that theywill somehow coalesce into a marketable entity. The problem is complicated when the designated honorée is a medievalist because medievalists—like the Middle Ages themselves—tend to be so catholic in terms ofgenre, so diverse in terms ofculture and nationality, so various in language, and so undisciplined in terms of discipline (they are often composed of unequal 114ARTHURIANA parts ofphilologist, linguist, historicist, folklorist, theorist, ironist, humorist, editor, paleographer, bibliographer) that all attempts to reflect the interests ofthe honorée and at the same time to impose coherence upon the book end in sputter. (The next paragraph should begin: 'But that is not the case with this book.') But that is not the case with this book. To be sure, since Robert W. Frank, Jr.'s catholicityofinteresr and richnessoflearning (the Festschrift includes his bibliography) are supassed only by his generosity to students and colleagues, we can expect the Art' ofthe title to include poetic, narrative, visual, and architectural art; the 'Context' to be social, linguistic, political as well as literary; 'Late Medieval' to run from the 12th to the 17th century; and 'English' to involve French and Latin, too. But readers should not let that deter them. This book is about Langland and Chaucer. In a marvellously descriptive introductory essay, the editor, Robert R. Edwards, accurately sets forth the twelve important essays that comprise this volume; in the paragraphs which follow I haveas freelyquoted from his...

Laura: uncovering gender and genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell

How do men imagine women? In the poetry of Petrarch and his English successors—Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell—the male poet persistently imagines pursuing a woman, Laura, whom he pursues even as she continues to deny his affections. Critics have long held that, in objectifying Laura, these male-authored texts deny the imaginative, intellectual, and physical life of the woman they idealize. In Laura , Barbara L. Estrin counters this traditional view by focusing not on the generative powers of the male poet, but on the subjectivity of the imagined woman and the imaginative space of the poems she occupies. Through close readings of the Rime sparse and the works of Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell, Estrin uncovers three Lauras: Laura-Daphne, who denies sexuality; Laura-Eve, who returns the poet’s love; and Laura-Mercury, who reinvents her own life. Estrin claims that in these three guises Laura subverts both genre and gender, thereby introducing multiple desires into the many layers of the poems. Drawing upon genre and gender theories advanced by Jean-Francois Lyotard and Judith Butler to situate female desire in the poem’s framework, Estrin shows how genre and gender in the Petrarchan tradition work together to undermine the stability of these very concepts. Estrin’s Laura constitutes a fundamental reconceptualization of the Petrarchan tradition and contributes greatly to the postmodern reassessment of the Renaissance period. In its descriptions of how early modern poets formulate questions about sexuality, society and poetry, Laura will appeal to scholars of the English and Italian Renaissance, of gender studies, and of literary criticism and theory generally.

Environmentalism and Literary Studies

Literary scholarship has long been fascinated with the way that nature has informed and shaped American thought. In the 1970s, the environmental movement brought a new dimension to studies of nature, which was reflected in the work of scholars such as Annette Kolodny and Joseph Meeker. In The Lay of the Land, Kolodny brought together feminism and environmentalism to examine gendered depictions of the land in male-authored texts.' She suggested a connection between language and the domination of women and nature. Meeker, in The Comedy of Survival, turned to ecology and considered the ways that classical literary modes may or may not promote ecologically sound human behavior. Others, such as William Rueckert, who is credited with inventing the term ecocriticism, looked to writers who brought an ecological sensibility to their work. The study of nature in literature assumed a higher profile in the early 1990s, when a group of scholars called for a formal union of environmentalism and literary studies.2 The 1991 MLA convention responded by including a session entitled Ecocriticism: The Greening of Literary Studies. There, Cheryll Burgess Glotfelty defined ecocriticism as an effort to expand literary studies from a focus on the social sphere exclusively, to include the ecosphere. She explained that ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between the material world and human The following year, several hundred environmentalists and scholars formed the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) to support and promote an ecocritical approach to literary studies. Ecocriticism is less a practice associated with a theoretical apparatus as with a sensibility; thus, the task of defining the ecocritical text can be elusive. If one regards ecocriticism as examining the interconnections between the material world and human culture, then the range of topics that may figure as ecocritical include pastoralism, regionalism, agrarianism, feminism, science, and culture. Although the range of works that fall under the rubric of ecocriticism is broad, the efforts of literary environmentalists, thus

Engaging with Shakespeare: responses of George Eliot and other women novelists

In Engaging with Marianne Novy considers the contributions of women novelists in shaping and responding to Shakespeare's cultural presence. Paying particular attention to issues related to gender or to ideologies of gender - especially the ways in which women writers use Shakespeare's plots of marriage and romantic love, his female characters, and the gender-crossing aspects of his male characters and his image - Novy traces a history of women trying to create a Shakespeare of their own. Charting an alternative course to the one emphasised by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic, which portrays the male-authored canon as alienating to women, Novy contends that the responses of women writers to Shakespeare often involve an appropriate creativity, a tradition of reading and rewriting male-authored texts to find their own concerns. After showing that women's fictional experiments as early as the 18th century and Jane Austen enter into dialogue with Shakespeare, Novy considers the engagements of women novelists with Shakespeare over the more than 250 years up to the 1990s. She discusses some women novelists' identification with his female characters, and the more surprising occasional identification with his status as an outsider, as well as the many different novelistic transformations of his plots. She also shows that for many women novelists, beginning with Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, the wide-ranging sympathy associated with Shakespeare could be a congenial ideal - up to a point. Novy demonstrates how Eliot's novels Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, especially, take on new meanings when seen as in dialogue with Shakespeare. She explores the changes between Eliot's responses and those of early 20th century modernists - Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, and Iris Murdoch - and then marks the emergence of more explicit feminist protest in the works of such novelists as Margaret Drabble and Margaret Atwood. Finally, she discusses recent works by Angela Carter, Nadine Gordimer, Gloria Naylor, and Jane Smiley, as well as Drabble, that engage with Shakespeare and contemporary cultural hybridity, thereby repositioning Shakespeare as part of a global multiculturalism. My hope in this book, writes Novy, not only to give women novelists a larger place in Shakespearean cultural studies but also to contribute to a feminist criticism that does not perceive men's writing as monolithic. I am trying to combine two different modes of feminist criticism - the kind that is interested in texts by women as a group, contrasting them with texts by men, and the kind that is interested in breaking down dichotomies between texts by women and texts by men.

Bodytalk: when women speak in Old French literature

Contemporary feminist readers have argued that old French literary representations of women--from the excessively beautiful lady of courtly romance to the lascivious shrew of fabliau and farce--are the products of misogynous male imagination and fantasy. In Bodytalk, E. Jane Burns contends that female protagonists in medieval texts authored by men can be heard to talk back against the stereotyped and codified roles that their fictive anatomy is designed to convey. She investigates key moments in which the words of these medieval dissent from and significantly restructure the conceptions of female sexuality, wifely obedience, courtly love, and adultery that are so often used to define and delimit femininity in the French Middle Ages. Burns provides the feminist reader of medieval literature with a strategy for reinterpreting the female body in its stereotyped, fetishized, and fantasized for. Arguing that the gendered body mattters in our reading of female protagonists, she shows how women characters can rewrite, through their attributed speech, the narratives that define and contain them. Bodytalk is an incisive, polemical, sophisticated, and often witty book about the gender issues that are raised by the very presence of female characters in male-authored texts. It brings recent feminist theory to bear upon the discussion of medieval texts, and contributes significantly to current feminist criticism by offering historically specific accounts of some of the founding moments of western conceptions of love, desire, and sexuality. A volume in the New Cultural Studies series.

Re/dressing histories; or, on re/covering figures who have been laid bare by our gaze

Women! This coin which men find counterfeit! laments Euripedes' Hippolytus.' Why, why, Lord Zeus, did you put them in the world, in the light of the sun? If you were so determined to breed the race of man, the source of it should not have been (11.616-20). Phaedra is, as all women, the counterfeit coin. Her exchange rate is never quite legitimate. She is never quite legitimate. As the gold standard is Man, is Truth, Woman never measures up. She is always found lacking Truth-the Truth that is man-and is thus, like Phaedra, a counterfeit coin. But she is a coin imprinted with His signature, bearing His name, nevertheless. With his imprint, Woman's exchange rate is secured. Like a coin, she changes hands-from father to husband.2 Woman, the counterfeit coin, the site of false words and deeds, is inscribed with guilt; indicted with deception, penned as the Unspeakable and Undiscernible Lie, sentenced to silence. Woman is the text that paradoxically cannot speak but nevertheless speaks in its silence. Her silence is the message; it desires to be read. And now we-as historiographers of maleauthored texts concerning women, as feminists, as proponents of the Discourses of the Other-desire to (re)cover and (re)read Phaedra's, Diotima's, Aspasia's silent message.3 But why? What motivates our desire to read these women? What propels our desire to make these women readable? Are we not, perhaps, attempting to reinvest these women with value? Are we not trying to redeem them from charges of counterfeit? Are we not, then, merely making Woman into a legitimate coin, a proper currency, a respectable asset? Are we not, then, merely increasing her exchange rate, but without questioning the very standard-the phallogocentric standard of Truth-that finds her lacking, that is responsible for her devaluation? It is my argument that our attempts to (re)read women, to (re)cover women, to (re)present women, and to therefore (re)cast history, are insidious acts of (re)appropriation. Everyone knows that the exchange rate of a dog of papered lineage-of legitimate birth-is exponentially greater than that of a mongrel. To provide