Male Narratives Research Articles

Torn Lace and Other Transformations: Rewriting the Bride's Script in Selected Stories by Emilia Pardo Bazán

In three of her tales-El encaje roto (1897), Champagne (1898), and La boda (1909), Pardo Bazain presents her readers with a bride on her wedding day; in each case, and each in her own way, the bride breaks with convention and time-honored tradition on this most anticipated day of her life, only to see her life irrevocably altered-not by the marriage-but by her own actions and decisions. The juxtaposition of these three tales with a fourth later one, La punta del cigarro (1914), the story of a man in search of a wife wherein a male narrator delineates nineteenth-century society's requirements for the ideal wife, illustrates Dofia Emilia's astute subversion of the traditional feminine ideal and her empowerment of female protagonists.

Language and Masculinity

List of Contributors. Acknowledgements. Introduction: Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Sally Johnson (Bradford University and Lancaster University). 1. Theorizing Language and Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective: Sally Johnson (Lancaster University). 2. a Box--outa and a Taxinga : Roger Hewitt (Institute of Education, London). 3. Performing Gender Identity: Young Mena s Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity: Deborah Cameron (University of Strathclyde). 4. Power and the Language of Men: Scott Fabius Kiesling. 5. Masculinity in a Multilingual Setting: John Pujolar (Lancaster University). 6. a One--at--a--Timea : The Organization of Mena s Talk: Jennifer Coates (Roehampton Institute). 7. Do Men Gossip?An Analysis of Football Talk on Television: Sally Johnson and Frank Finlay (Lancaster University). 8. The Role of Expletives in the Construction of Masculinity: Vivian de Klerk (Rhodes University). 9. a Aceptarlo con hombriaa : Representations of Masculinity in Spanish Political Discourse: JoAnne Neff van Aertselaer (Universidad Complutense). 10. a Randy Fish Boss Branded a Stinkera : Coherence and the Construction of Masculinities in a British Tabloid Newspaper: Mary M. Talbot (Odense Universitet). 11. a The Object of Contempt is the Object of Desirea : Representations of Masculinity in Straight to Hell Magazine: John Heywood (Lancaster University). 12. a The Most Important Event of My Life!a A Comparison of Male and Female Written Narratives: Ulrike Hanna Meinhof (Bradford University). Bibliography. Index.

Laws of Desire? Race, Sexuality, and Power in Male Martinican Sexual Narratives

In Martinique, both homosexual and heterosexual narratives of sexual desire reveal the centrality of an orthodox masculinity as a hegemonic force in public articulations about social relations and identity. Race also figures prominently in these narratives, but no straightforward correlative relations exist between race and other sociological categories such as class or education. In this article, I argue for the necessity of recognizing the influence of Martinique's neocolonial relationship with France. This relationship continues to affect cultural and political ideologies. I also demonstrate the influence of context in determining identity choices in narrative constructions, {homosexuality, heterosexuality, race, masculinity, Martinique]

Latimer's complaint: masturbation and monomania in george eliot's the lifted veil

Critical analysis of The Lifted Veil has traditionally tended to draw on biographical details from Eliot's life in order to explain the construction and actions of Latimer, her male narrator. Such an approach, however, closes off other avenues of investigation. It is appropriate, therefore, to consider the construction of Latimer without automatic reference to the life of his creator, whilst retaining a consciousness of the discourses within which Eliot is likely to have participated.Through her contact with freethinkers, scientists and pseudo-scientists, as well as through her work as editor of The Westminster Review, Eliot was ideally placed both to participate in contemporary thought on science and spirituality, and to appropriate their discourses in her fiction. Ostensibly a narrative about clairvoyance, The Lifted Veil may with equal ease be read as a medical text, which examines the pathology of monomania, delusion and masturbatory insanity through the first person narrator, Latimer. This article will consider the symptomatology of Latimer's unnamed medical condition with particular reference to the mid-Victorian debate on masturbation and insanity. The article will make reference to a variety of medical writings from the period. These will include those by British physicians William Acton, whose important work The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs was published in 1857, as well as those by James Copland and Henry Maudsley, and the influential continental specialist Samuel-Auguste Tissot.

Playing Backwards

Playing Backwards

Frankenstein's Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction Alyson R. Buckman Jane Donawerth. Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1997. xxvii + 213 pp. Jane Donawerth, who has previously written and edited works on women and science fiction, contributes a sense of continuity—both in history and in theme—to the study of women writing science fiction. In her introduction, Donawerth uses Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to establish both a maternal literary heritage and a model of study that controls the presentation of material in her book. Frankenstein, Donawerth argues, provides women writing science fiction with not only a female progenitor but also with the central constraints of the genre for these women: the male narrator, science as a male preserve and its objectification of women, and the construction of woman as alien. The rest of the book is organized according to these three central constraints. Chapter 1, “Utopian Science in Science Fiction by Women,” discusses how female writers create a utopian science that constructs women as subjects rather than objects. Women authors break with contemporary science in their creation of female scientist-heroes, technologies that utilize female experience, new origin stories and definitions of science, and changes in the relationship of humans to nature. In chapter 2, “Beautiful Alien Monster-Women—BAMs,” Donawerth describes the reconstruction of the female alien within science fiction. While the BAM has traditionally been depicted by male authors as marginal, dangerous, and sadomasochistic, women authors reclaim and revise the female alien, empowering her. The male narrator is so entrenched within science fiction that he has become a generic convention. In chapter 3, “Cross-Dressing as a Male Narrator,” Donawerth discusses four techniques women authors use when dealing with the established convention of the male narrator: cross-dressing as a male narrator, converting or punishing male narrators, constructing androgynous or transvestite narrators, and using multiple narrators. These techniques destabilize the authority of the [End Page 491] male as narrator and open the text to female voices and experience, allowing the movement of women from the margin to the center of the text. While Donawerth is concerned with twentieth-century American and English writers in the majority of her text, the epilogue presents a different field of inquiry: non-Western women writers of science fiction. “Epilogue: Virtual Women in Global Science Fiction” briefly presents the question of how the conventions of science fiction and the revisions of Western women writers have affected the science fiction writings of other cultures. Jane Donawerth is clearly well read in science fiction written by women and in the critical works of feminist psychology, science theory, literary theory, and gender and cultural studies. She skillfully interweaves the insights of these fields with analyses of texts by both well-known and lesser-known artists. It would be useful, however, for Donawerth to discuss the audience for women writing science fiction. How is the work of women writing science fiction received within the audience of a genre catering traditionally to men? Who reads these female-authored texts and what is the response to them? Although Donawerth’s focus is the way in which female authors have revised the conventions of science fiction, it would be enlightening to know how these revisions have been received. In addition, while Donawerth mentions the need to deal with race, sexuality, and class as well as gender in science fiction texts, her analytic lens remains firmly fixed upon gender. Gender does not explain all in analyzing these works. For instance, Octavia Butler’s work is clearly influenced by racial, economic, and sexual factors as well. Donawerth also resists the insights of postmodern theory in her text, largely on the basis of its potential pessimism, although her discussions of the challenges to the authority of the narrator and to the value of individualism as well as her analyses of the constructedness of definitions of history and science and the performativity of gender in these texts suggest links with postmodern theory. This is problematic; as Marleen Barr reveals in Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, the recognition of the postmodernist elements of what she terms “feminist fabulation” can lead to the recognition and empowerment of female authors...

Black Voices, White Bodies: The Performance of Race and Gender in How Long Brethren

WOMEN STANDING BY THEIR MEN, SUPPORTING THEIR MEN'S EFFORTS to effect reform, never claiming their own rights: this is the dominant image of womanhood that Barbara Melosh discerns in plays staged by the Federal Theatre Project from 1935 to 1939. In her comprehensive study, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater, Melosh argues that the Federal Theatre Project participated in the containment of feminism evident in New Deal liberalism. Although she cites the plays' celebration of domesticity as a specifically female form of activist citizenship, she argues that this idealization of domesticity precluded any acknowledgment of the conditions that restricted women's full participation in the public sphere. Melosh concludes that the Federal Theatre cast women in revised roles but retained them as supporting players in male narratives

“The busy daughters of clio”: women writers of history from 1820 to 1880[1

This article deals with the lives and works of some British women historians writing and publishing between 1820 and 1880. It aims to show how a group of women could work within, negotiate with, exploit and evade the restrictions of a predominantly patriarchal society. The first part of the article opens with an examination of their domestic backgrounds and educational opportunities, before considering their access to sources and their relations with scholars, writers and publishers. In this assessment of how these women came to be historians, both the drawbacks of their gender and the assistance given by male mentors are highlighted. In the second part of the article, the problems of personal identity experienced by women historians are examined; an outline of the (apparently) marginal historical fields in which they specialised follows. Their achievements as pioneers in the areas of social, cultural and art history and the challenge they presented to traditional male historical narratives are also considered.

The Alexandria Quartet: The Homosexual as Teacher/Guide

The tendency has been to unsex Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet without acknowledging that Durrell fully grounded the novel in sex, not merely as theme but as valorizing substructure. For example, in an otherwise careful analysis of the enigmas surrounding Justine's attitudes toward her 'lovers' and the motives for Pursewarden's suicide, Walter Creed so carefully avoids any mention of deviant sexuality and its role in shaping the differing views of Darley's sources that we may falsely conclude that Durrell's insistence in giving homosexuality voice is, at worst, gratuitous (Kelly 60) and, at best, comic (Steiner 22, Godshalk passim, or Fertile, Scobie 51). At the same time, neither Michel Pharond nor Sharon Spencer, both of whom have discussed Durrell's use of dysfunctional sexuality, has adequately incorporated this sexuality into discussion of normal sexuality to explain why Durrell focused so sharply on the homosexuality of Darley's mentors. Although the Leonards make an interesting, provocative comparison between Durrell's and Paul Scott's treatments of the homosexual's role as a daimon in explaining the truth (92), they have not explored how this role shapes the first-person narrator's view of himself. In fact, Durrell's grounding of the text in sexualities may provide paradigm for rereading maleness in novels with male narrators usually associated with unquestioned, overt heterosexism - those social structures that prescribe heterosexual behavior as the only acceptable expression of sexuality. We should examine how Durrell shapes heterosexual identity by mirroring it through homosexual lenses. The first narration, Justine,(1) immediately inscribes the narrator's heterosexist presumption, but Durrell has Darley identify himself through an almost Beckettian bifurcation so that we immediately perceive him in terms of irreconcilable oppositions. Physically, his body is untrained and soft, though he phallocentrically projects himself as hard(en) and masculine. Mentally, he is torn between memories of past but desired delusion of romantic love in Egypt and the awareness of present but unwanted reality of lovelessness in the Cyclades. Of course, these oppositions directly affect his writing. On the artistic level, he has already heard Pursewarden's advice, but he dislikes his rival author and will not listen to that which could enable him to become the writer he desires to be. Although he wants to become writer (presumably writer of fiction), he is a romantic with noticeable tendency towards self-dramatization (Rieger-Pratt 361). In novel filled with novelists and writers, he cannot divorce himself from his own factual past: Simultaneously, he wants objectivity to recreate the past (the writing of Justine based on diaries, his own memories, and Nessim's papers) but longs for the subjectivity of reliving his memories (the confusion recognized by Balthazar, who questions whether Justine is supposed to be fiction or truth). On the personal level, Justine has already jilted him. He obviously suffers from her cutting him out of her life, symbolic castration, and at the same time, he sets out to immortalize his affair with her as if the affair itself marked the culmination of manly activity. Unlike the sexually deviant Balthazar, he cannot accept sexual physicality without glossing it as something it is not (sentimentalized spiritual joining of kindred souls), even while he is obsessed with its fleshiness. Put another way, Darley may want to be hedonist but only if he can qualify hedonism by making it spiritual. When Darley tries to comprehend his experience with Justine by confusing her with the Claudia of Arnauti's psychoanalytic novel, he (unknowingly to himself) obscures his own emotional experience and (on Durrell's part knowingly for the reader) adds to the original, perhaps humorous, misdirection of the Quartet. In interpreting Justine as case, he intellectualizes and sanitizes sex; that is, in remembering their affair, he sublimates her into fetish and overlooks the actual sexuality that he shared with Melissa. …

‘Gendered Citizenry’: new feminist perspectives on education and citizenship

AbstractThis paper describes the recent development of feminist analyses of the role of education in creating ‘inclusive’ democratic citizenship. Four discrete feminist perspectives on citizenship are outlined: a theoretical critique of citizenship as a modern male narrative; a socio‐historical perspective on women's struggle for equal citizenship through education; deconstruction of the discourses of citizenship used by contemporary teachers and their gendered dimensions; and an emerging educational perspective on the gender principles which should affect education for citizenship in democratic societies. These four perspectives on citizenship offer opportunities to reflect critically on the past and continuing struggle of women for equality. They suggest, too, the complex issues which now face any programme of education for citizenship for the next century. More than one masculinised democratic discourse, it seems, would need to be transformed for women to achieve full political integration.

Canonical "Orphans" and Critical Ennui : Rereading Edgeworth's Cross-Writing

Canonical "Orphans" and Critical Ennui:Rereading Edgeworth's Cross-Writing Mitzi Myers (bio) Jane Austen demonstrably learned much from the Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) and highly praises her predecessor's tales in both Northanger Abbey and personal letters, but Edgeworth would never have given a novel-aspiring niece Austen's advice: "You are but now coming to the heart & beauty of your book; till the heroine grows up, the fun must be imperfect" (Le Faye 275).1 Far from it: Edgeworth revels in children, and they figure prominently in all her work, often playing pivotal roles in stories marketed primarily for adult readers. But, as this volume's introduction notes, it is not just the traffic between child and adult inside and outside her tales that identifies Edgeworth as a cross-writer, for she negotiates numerous borders—national, historical, and generic, as well as generational. She enjoys literary crossdressing as a male narrator in addition to cross-writing for hybrid audiences, and virtually everything she produced is highly intertextual with literary, cultural, and Revolutionary political history, as well as with the events of her own life. The 1989 French Revolution bicentenary witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of scholarship and criticism, significantly challenging and revising our thinking about the meaning of that event for literary, historical, and cultural studies. Far more than the American Revolution, the French Revolution has provided the model for what we think of as revolution. Issues of gender surfaced repeatedly in this body of revisionary scholarship, often in troubling ways. It has been argued, for example, that French Revolutionary rhetoric quickly contained and erased the universalistic implications of citizenship—that it relegated women to a "private" and domestic sphere of noncitizenship and thus underwrote the binary opposition of public and private that still organizes our thinking about men, women, and social life. The approaching bicentenary of the 1798 Irish Rising is unlikely to receive anything like the scholarly attention lavished on French [End Page 116] events, although it will certainly be commemorated and debated. Because Irish historiography, like Irish studies in general, remains unusually masculinist and adultist, it is unlikely that even heated discussions among historians and literary critics will devote much attention to issues of war and gender in representing and interpreting the "year of the French" invasion. Women's and children's wartime experiences have elicited little scholarly attention until very recently, yet in civil turmoil there is no boundary between battlefront and home front. Even more than in most internal strife, Irish women of all classes and ages had a strong sense of war's realities, not just in 1798, but also in the years that produced and succeeded that traumatic summer. The disciplinary measure of "free quarters," for example, meant that women would be intimately involved with soldiers stationed in or pillaging from their homes; they saw the house burnings and torture that led to the outbreak, and they wrote about the politics that produced those measures in letters and journals. Women lived with the war's results as well, extending their significant social commentary into the decades following 1798, during which Ireland was effectively governed by martial law. The "protected" domestic space of family homes was fortified like a military outpost for many of those years, yet the patriarchal tradition that women have nothing to say on war persists, rendering invisible what women did say. Political, social, and literary histories typically erase women's war and peace work because they limit what counts as "war" to combat experience and political decision-making alone. Because the 1798 Rising so quickly became a site of masculine mythology and romantic martyrology, women's participation in and representations of 1798 have scarcely been noticed, yet women (and children), as both early accounts and more recent histories emphasize, were everywhere present. They traveled with the insurgents, they often fought, many died by fire or pike, quite a few were raped or robbed, many witnessed murder and searing brutality, hundreds grieved, and a good number wrote personal accounts—some factual, some fictionalized. The best known and probably the first woman writer to consider the events of the 1798 Irish Rebellion and the politics of the decades...

Faire rêver le lecteur. Saturation et indétermination dans quelques nouvelles d'Edgar Poe : Bérénice, Morella, Ligeia, Eléonora

Saturation and Indeterminacy in Edgar Allan Poe's Berenice, Morella, Ligeia, and Eleonora. A male narrator describes what seems a metaphysical quest, his relation to a woman who dies ; but each narrator turns out unreliable and his narrative unin- terpretable, a « story which pretends not to be a fable ».

Coyote Country: Fictions of the Canadian West (review)

Reviewed by: Coyote Country: Fictions of the Canadian West Dick Harrison Arnold E. Davidson. Coyote Country: Fictions of the Canadian West. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. x + 223 pp. Davidson begins with an overview of western Canadian fiction, “Re-inventing the West,” advancing a theory he then applies to selected innovative texts. His point of departure is the popular American western which “casts its tall, lanky shadow over the Canadian West,” but he reverses the normative tendency of the American example by characterizing [End Page 161] the absence of a Canadian frontier tradition not as lack or deficiency but as a literary advantage. Saved by history from the tyranny of a “received” story of their West, Canadians have access to multiple stories: “as authors dispense with in fiction the frontier they never had in fact, they free themselves and their readers into a play of textuality and intertextuality.” They are thus free to “re-invent” the West, parodying and subverting the narratives that have defined “West” and, like the Coyote of the title, drawing into question the authority of all narratives, including their own. The Indian trickster god stands as a symbol of their narrative strategies and the world they create: multiple, ambiguous, elusive, fictive, and indeterminate. While Davidson’s explicit focus is on how his authors have “inverted and subverted the basic tropes, metaphors, ideologies, gender contracts, and racial hegemonies” of the classic western in order to tell a different story of a different West, he makes it clear that they are also deconstructing the Eurocentric, patriarchal master-narratives that pervade both Wests. Beneath their practice of “unnaming” he detects an amorphous search for a myth of origins, but he does not trace that search systematically. If his authors found such a unifying myth, of course, they would lose the freedom he claims as their distinction. As Davidson goes on to analyze the postmodern and postcolonial characteristics of selected novels, his theory effects a certain revision and updating of the canon, extending from Howard O’Hagan and Sheila Watson to Beatrice Culleton and Thomas King. O’Hagan’s Tay John is pivotal to his argument that the decentering fiction of the Canadian West has long been receptive to a play of textuality. Published in 1939, the novel is unexpectedly postmodern in its undermining of European history and myth and its self-consciousness about “the fictive quality of all versions of reality.” Davidson provides a resourceful, insightful, and lucid explication of the novel’s narrative and textual ambiguities and the tensions between the story told and untold, between naming and unnaming, utterance and silence. His readings of Watson’s The Double Hook and Robert Kroetsch’s Badlands similarly stress their postmodern indeterminacy and parodying of the quest myth and attendant symbols of transcendence in male narrative. In his sections entitled “Feminist Revisions” and “Native Affairs,” Davidson argues that Canada’s decentering and multiple tradition has [End Page 162] produced non-frontierist dialectics between white and Indian, male and female. With reference to the long-standing prominence of women writers in Canadian literature, he contends that the literary gender war Jane Tompkins describes in her West of Everything “had no particular relevance for Canadians.” Women writers, he says, have nonetheless created the most striking reversals of the western formula; some, such as Anne Cameron’s The Journey, by merely executing a gender reversal of male patterns of violence and domination; others, such as Aritha van Herk’s Judith and The Tent Peg, by challenging patriarchy in more complex ways. Davidson offers a persuasive Lacanian analysis of van Herk’s castration imagery as a strategy for resisting the law of the fathers by dephallicizing the penis. Davidson contends that in Canadian fiction the typical symbolic role of the Indian has been as natural alternative rather than antagonist (a generalization that has to be applied very selectively before 1970) but acknowledges that any concept of “Indian” is “a construct that serves white interests.” White writers such as W. O. Mitchell (The Vanishing Point), Peter Such (Riverrun), Philip Kreiner (Contact Prints, People Like Us), and Joan Clark (The Victory of Geraldine Gull) may struggle gamely to privilege the Native “other” but can achieve only “an...

Car Wrecks, Baseball Caps, and Man-to-Man Defense: The Personal Narratives of Adolescent Males

i s soon as Tim Flanagan skipped the second class of the semester, had him pegged as a problem to be endured rather than a student to be taught. Hey professor (he missed the day when asked them to call me by my first name), Professor, you're probably wondering where was Thursday? Third row tickets to U2 Wednesday night. You couldn't expect me to give that up, could you? should have asked right then Wednesday night had to do with Thursday morning or joked about lowering his grade for not getting me a ticket to the concert or said that, yes, did expect him to give it up if he couldn't make it to class otherwise. But, for some reason, just shrugged, smiled sickly, and muttered, No, guess not. did decide on a strategy for dealing with Tim: would just ignore him, plow ahead, and make him the first volunteer in my personal struggle to stem grade inflation. I asked you to bring in your first drafts of your personal narratives. Would anyone be willing to read your essay aloud so we can discuss it in a workshop? To my surprise, Tim was the only one who raised his hand. didn't think that he had even written an essay. I'll read mine but ... [here he paused to smile] ... is it OK if my essay is about something illegal? responded with that same inarticulate shrug, mumbled I guess, and waited for another of those male narratives that have come to hate-another why should be admired for getting drunk and getting into a near-fatal car crash or what was so funny about that time me and my friends played a great Halloween prank on the class nerd. And, sure enough, my first impression of the opening paragraph of Tim's narrative about his success as a shoplifter was that it seemed self-congratulatory, vaguely anti-social, and stylistically Hemingwayesque; that is, it seemed embarrassingly male:

Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France, and: Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (review)

Reviewed by: Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France, and: Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations Felicia McCarren (bio) Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. xiii + 295 pp. $49.95, $19.75 paper. Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. xii + 327 pp. $29.95. Ventriloquized Bodies is two books in one: a welcome feminist rereading of nineteenth-century French novels (including the less-read work of women writers Louise Colet and Rachilde) in relation to the contemporary history of gynecology, and a more problematic presentation of medical texts that influenced and absorbed them. Beizer notes in her introduction that this book both is and is not about hysteria: although she understands the medical and cultural slipperiness of the term, she focuses exclusively on the “uterine theory,” which connects hysteria to the womb from Hippocrates through the nineteenth century. Using anatomy as the model for all nineteenth-century medical science (Foucault oblige!), Beizer critiques the essentialism and misogyny of the medical establishment—caricaturing Charcot, for example (in a misreading of a late remark), for his attribution of hysteria to “la chose génitale.” The qualifying “dans des cas pareils” (“in such cases”)—Charcot was referring to a particular case of frigidity in marriage—escapes Beizer’s usually sharp eye. The misreading is telling. Beizer is at her best when tracing the metaphoric and metonymic links, in fiction, between hysteria, the female sex, reproduction, fluids, fetish, voice, and irony. Hysteria is thought to be provoked by, and expressed as, a pathological femininity. It is a “ventriloquized” discourse in which the hysteric’s body is separated from her voice, and dubbed by a male narrator. Focusing on the aestheticization of hysteria in the novels of the age, which she calls “hystericization,” Beizer finds that distinctions between fiction and medical texts disappear. She [End Page 125] argues that narrative developments in French writing of the period, in particular the impersonal “free indirection” of Flaubert, find support in the ventriloquism embodied by the hysteric. Narrative and medical texts resemble one another as both express a pervasive ideology located in an invisible but all-controlling narrator. The book’s focus on the connection between body and discourse in the writing of hysteria is both its most original and its most limiting factor. Beizer’s intriguing move from anatomy to discourse could be fleshed out: her argument about the overlapping of female genitalia and the larynx in the cultural imagination relies heavily on the visual resemblance between them in one anatomical drawing published in 1865. No contemporary medical illustration of the genitalia is offered for comparison, and there is no discussion of the problem of visual resemblance in medical representations of the period. Many of the medical illustrations from this period that I have seen—for example, in the pages of Le progrès médical, the journal of the Paris École de Médecine—looked like something else. The connections Beizer is making between medicine, culture, and image need to be explored further. Rather than attributing meaning to the hysteric’s silent semiosis of gesture and symptom (as did “surrealists and doctors”), Beizer believes the nineteenth-century hysterical body is the mute mouthpiece of male-dominated culture and medicine. But if the “hyperbolically loquacious” hysterics are silenced in Beizer’s text, it is partly because she has chosen neither to include interviews and testimony of Salpêtrière patients, nor to valorize as a language their somatic code, and the way in which medicine, itself a science of interpretation, attempted its decoding. The crucial question here—who validates hysterical expression and why—is unfortunately relegated to a footnote: whose hand turns the faucet through which hysterical discourse pours? “This is admittedly not an easy hand to find. Does it represent language? Culture? Power? Are all three the same thing?” (p. 54). This is at the very heart of Beizer’s investigation, and yet her book ultimately says little about the confluence of language, culture, and power in medicine; nor about the practices, instruments, and institutions that make it, in Bruno Latour’s term, a...

'Manning the World': The Role of the male narrator in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cousin Phillis

So writes Paul Manning, the narrator of Elizabeth GaskelFs novella Cousin Phillis (1864). He never refers to this incident again, nor explicitly connects his offence against his father's sense of right with the events in the story he tells. Most critical analyzes of Cousin Phillis read the text in terms of a pastoral/anti-pastoral love story, as the retelling of the Eden story contrasting nostalgic rural idyll and modern industrial fall, or as the tale of a young girl's first romantic and sexual awakening. Few take into account the narrator, Phillis's cousin Paul, other than to dismiss him as onlooker, the consciousness through whom the story is told, or as socially inept and unmanly.1 Paul, however, is far from naive or inept, although he might appear so from his actions in the story. It is an older, wiser Paul who controls the retrospective account. In writing Phillis's story he is able to obscure his own role in her life and to construct a truth which confines and silences her. Paul's overt concern is to record an important time in the life of his cousin ? it is about cousin Phillis that I am going to write. However he inscribes Phillis's life through his own subjectivity. Not merely a detached narrator, he plays an active part in her story (it takes him two pages even to get to the point of mentioning she is the subject of his narrative), and in telling that story, he tells something of his own life, his

Accounting for violence: An analysis of male spousal abuse narratives

Abstract Domestic violence is pervasive in the United States. In addition to the immediate damage caused to victims, abuse is also often transmitted cross‐generationally. Because abusers’ perceptions can reinforce and justify violent behavior, understanding how abusive men perceive their abuse is important. Interviews with 15 abusive males focusing on the accounts of abuse from the male's perspective were conducted. The results from the analysis are divided into three areas: (a) attributions about self and other, (b) types of accounts about the abusive situation, and (c) an analysis of an entire narrative from one of the men. The implications of these results for practitioners of treatment for battering males is discussed.

Sexual-Textual Politics: The Transparency of the Male Narrative in "Der Butt" by Gunter Grass

Sexual-Textual Politics: The Transparency of the Male Narrative in "Der Butt" by Gunter Grass

The Education of Cousin Phillis

In "Cousin Phillis" Elizabeth Gaskell shows Phillis Holman's love experience to be inseparable from her education. Gaskell's male narrator naively supposes that having a male education makes Phillis "more a like man than a woman"; however, the male supervision of her studies and the lessons of her readings in classical and foreign literature confirm instead the constraints of Victorian womanhood. Gaskell's allusion to the Phillises of Virgil, Ovid, and the Renaissance pastoral tradition implies demeaning and self-destructive models for her heroine and, more broadly, a critique of the representation of women in literary texts. Phillis Holman's abandonment and collapse repeat the patterns of her classical namesakes, but ultimately she eludes their reductive definitions of womanhood and establishes her individuality in the will to live.

Preempting the Patriarch: The Problem of Pa's Stories in Little House in the Big Woods

Preempting the Patriarch:The Problem of Pa's Stories in Little House in the Big Woods Ann Romines (bio) When I was a little girl reading the Little House books, the first one, Little House in the Big Woods (1932), was my least favorite. Although an avid fan, I was tempted to skip the long stories from Pa that were set into this book, for I was always eager to get back to the absorbing autobiographical narrative of Laura, with whom I identified strongly. So, many years later, I was surprised to learn that Laura Ingalls Wilder considered those paternal tales her richest material. In 1937, she said that Pa's stories were the part of her childhood that she remembered most vividly and "loved best, " and she concluded, "I have always felt they were too good to be altogether lost" ("Laura's Book Fair Speech," Sampler 216-24). Now, when I look again at the stories Pa tells in this first book, it seems to me that they articulate some of the most pressing issues of the series. Both Wilder and her collaborator, Rose Wilder Lane, were loving, dutiful writer-daughters who had no brothers and no sons.1 They were the heirs of their fathers, and they were the heirs of a patriarchal tradition that valued and articulated male stories far more than female ones. Yet the Little House series is preeminently a narrative of girls' experience. Thus Little House in the Big Woods proposes crucial questions about gender priorities, questions with which its authors would wrestle repeatedly. Was their purpose to preserve a body of male narrative or to inscribe a girl's story? If the Little House series was to continue after this first book, Wilder had to find a way out of Pa's stories and into her own. As I have argued elsewhere, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Euro-American women's culture had encouraged Wilder to think of writing as a woman's prerogative, and in the teens and twenties, Lane had urged her mother toward the frank professionalism of the enfranchised New Woman. But in the Depression years, when most of the Little House books were written, there was widespread hostility to such professionalism, especially in rural agricultural communities such as Wilder's Missouri home, which began in the early twenties to experience "an agricultural depression that preceded the general 1930s depression by nearly ten years" (Fink 46). In this climate, women's writing often seemed justifiable only if it served the priorities of traditional domesticity and maternity. According to historian Barbara Melosh, as the Depression widened and more "men lost their jobs, wage-earning women became the targets of public hostility and restrictive policy. One slogan exhorted, 'Don't take a job from a man!'"(1). In many ways, Big Woods reflects these conditions. Ma Ingalls never speaks of her teaching career and her relative affluence before her marriage; now she is unremittingly domestic and would never "take a job from a man. " Much of the narrative is plotted to assure us that the Ingalls daughters too will never infringe on the priorities of patriarchy. Thus, although the book is presented as autobiographical fiction inscribed by a woman, its centerpiece is men's tales, told in Pa's voice. Big Woods is a primer in the gendered division of labor and culture, and Pa's stories provide some of that primer's most important lessons. His tales are largely classic accounts of male adventure, clearly and conventionally plotted. The protagonists are Pa as a child and young man, his father, and his paternal grandfather. These mythic inset stories bring the (male) past into the present, making it seem continuous with the world that young Laura and Mary inhabit. In the first story, for example, Grandpa Ingalls breaks a taboo of the Big Woods, venturing into the forest without the protective attribute of his maleness, his phallic gun. There he is beset by an antagonist, a hungry panther, with a terrifying scream "like a woman" (41). On horseback, Grandpa barely makes it to the safety of his house; as he slams the door, the panther leaps "on the horse's back" (42...