Male Predecessors Research Articles

Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation

Anne Varty’s Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation is an essential guide for both academics and general readers to four contemporary women poets: Carol Ann Duffy, former Poet Laureate for the UK; Gillian Clarke, former National Poet of Wales; Liz Lochhead, former Scots Makar; and Paula Meehan, former Ireland Chair of Poetry. Rather than constructing a complex theoretical framework, Varty analyzes how such essential elements of poetry as subject matter, thematic concerns, symbols, and language greatly reinvigorate ideas of feminism and nationality. Central to Varty’s argument is that rather than subverting the patriarchal poetic tradition, these four women poets write within the tradition, constantly appropriating what is logocentric and London-centric, fusing the feminine with the masculine, the regional with the national, and the peripheral with the central. Meehan, for example, takes the American male beat poet Gary Snyder as her mentor, using the I Ching, astrology, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead as sources (78). Duffy also acknowledges her indebtedness to male predecessors, as Varty notes: “Robert Browning provides the template for her dramatic monologues, Shakespeare her love sonnets and Larkin her lyric poetry” (128).

Rewriting Trauma: The Legacy of W.B. Yeats in Marina Carr’sBy the Bog of Cats . . .

AbstractWhile a most original and creative playwright in contemporary Ireland, Marina Carr is still unmistakably influenced by her male predecessors. This article will argue that her most renowned workBy the Bog of Cats . . .(1998) is a bold rewriting of W. B. Yeats’sPurgatory(1938). Like Yeats’s play,BytheBogofCats . . .focuses on abandonment, betrayal, and murder as its main sources of trauma. While Carr’s play is a direct descendant fromPurgatoryin terms of its theme, plot, and symbolism, Carr rewrites Yeats’s pathetic, shiftless Old Man into a daring, strong, and responsible woman who may be embittered by her domestic trauma, but instead of escaping, she eventually faces up to her own guilt and crime. Hester is not a flat, helpless victim but a complex, well-rounded woman full of agency, passion, and honesty as well as vices. This way, Carr rewrites both the stereotypical stage image of Irish women and the unredeemable Old Man.

Cross-situational Consistency of Female Politicians’ Language Use

This article seeks to study political discourses of American female politicians, specifically Madeleine Albright, the first female United States Secretary of State in the history of the United States of America, from 1997 to 2001, Condoleezza Rice, the 66th United States Secretary of State, and Hillary Clinton, the 67th United States Secretary of State. Different in age, ethnicity, political views, educational and social backgrounds, they reveal that in order to succeed in the political arena, women are bound to hide their female personality. Examples in question are Madeline Albright and Condoleezza Rice, recurrent users of such male discursive features as rhetorical questions, logical order of arguments, conceptual metaphors of war, sports, and hunting. Gender-marked female discourse is characterized by hesitation, use of standard speech, cognitive, social words, and hedges. Research shows that Hilary Clinton is a typical example of the female-marked political discourse. This has enabled her to pursue, among others, a feminist agenda, which has proved an efficient communicative tactic. Drawing on the socialization specifics of Albright, Rice, and Clinton, the paper explains why Albright and Rice tend to have a male-marked discourse and Clinton a female-marked discourse, as the first female Secretary of State, Albright simply had no female role models, with only male predecessors before her. She seeks to make her speech as neutral as possible, just at times exploiting female discursive patterns. Condoleezza Rice, Albright’s successor, uses characteristically male discourse the most. It can be attributable to the fact that she belongs to two ‘minority’ groups: women and African Americans. Sounding femalish might have weakened her chances to stay the strong Secretary of State that the geopolitical situation would demand. It is noteworthy that female politicians can, or have to, switch between male-marked and female-marked discourses in order to achieve certain goals and preserve their current status.

Gender novelty and personalized news coverage in Australia and Canada

Are female government leaders more likely than their male counterparts to see their gendered identities and personal lives profiled in news coverage of their ascents? Are non-novel women leaders—those who are the second in their jurisdiction to achieve the top political job—less likely to experience media personalization than did the women who preceded them in office? By analyzing newspaper coverage of 20 Australian and Canadian premiers, ten women and their immediate male predecessors, our study establishes that female premiers were more extensively personalized in news coverage than were male premiers, particularly in the Australian context. However, gender novelty and other factors proved significant. The proposition that an increased presence of women in leadership roles diminishes the salience of private lives and personal characteristics is supported by our study, suggesting that gender stereotyping of female political leaders will decrease over time as more women exercise political power.

Sacrifice, Ethics, and Alinesitoué: Human Rights and Ritual Discourse in a Revolutionary Prophetic Movement

Abstract Alinesitoué Diatta pioneered forms of ritual practice that codified moral protest against French colonialism in Senegal. Her rise to prominence reflected conditions in which men left their homes as migrant laborers to earn cash to pay colonial taxes. Under the French, women prophets thus replaced their male predecessors. Rather than offer an ethical deontology of protest, Alinesitoué enacted a ritual critique. She forbade the use of non-Jola rice in sacrifices as well as the planting of peanuts as a cash crop, thereby confronting the economic demands of the French who championed the cultivation of peanuts for export. More importantly, she brought rain, equating the French presence with environmental catastrophe: a drought that had been plaguing Jola farmers. She was eventually arrested and exiled, but Robert Baum's study of her life and work resurrects her critique, revealing ritual as a sophisticated, innovative source for ethical discourse.

Styles of political leadership of democratically elected presidents in Latin America: a study using probabilistic models/Estilos de liderazgo político de las presidentas elegidas democráticamente en Latinoamérica: un estudio usando modelos probabilísticos

En el siglo pasado las mujeres alcanzaron un rol sobresaliente en América Latina. Esto puede percibirse en el acceso al mercado laboral y a la esfera política. El primer logro se observa a través del incremento de la tasa de mujeres que acceden a un trabajo remunerado, y el segundo se percibe en la paulatina adquisición de derechos políticos como: el derecho al sufragio y el derecho a la posibilidad de acceder a puestos públicos. El presente estudio busca contribuir en la identificación del liderazgo ejercido en el ámbito político, tomando concretamente como objeto de estudio las seis primeras mujeres que ocuparon el cargo presidencial en países latinoamericanos: Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, Mireya Elisa Moscoso, Michel Bachelet, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Laura Chinchilla Miranda y Dilma Vana Rousseff.

Gender-inclusive Gatekeeping: How (Mostly Male) Predecessors Influence the Success of Female CEOs

Male-typed leadership schemas have been widely acknowledged as barriers to women’s success in leadership roles. We explore how local organizational agents and contexts enable women leaders to overcome these barriers and achieve success at the highest levels in firms. Specifically, we focus on chief executive officer (CEO) succession events and study how several facets of predecessor CEOs and the succession context combine to influence incoming women’s post-succession performance. We conduct a qualitative comparative case study of all CEO successions that involved female successors between 1989 and 2009 across the largest corporations in the United States. Our findings suggest that women’s success occurred when a confluence of local firm-level factors and attributes of the (mostly) male predecessors promoted gender-inclusive gatekeeping during succession. Our qualitative comparative analysis approach reveal three recipes for female success: “handing over the legacy,” “partnering the legacy,” and “turning a...

Sisters in Arms: The Gendered Process of Identification with Columbine

Since the Columbine attack, school shootings along with their perpetrators have had significant impact on later occurrences. Research has shown that school shootings are primarily a male phenomenon aimed at an assertion of and reowning of masculinity. However, female school assailants provide an interesting target for research that has been poorly understood up to now. The purpose of the current study is to analyze the biographical backgrounds, motivation, and the behavioral orientation of female school shooters from the perspective of socialization theory. Two attempts of school rampages in Germany, which were committed by female perpetrators, will be analyzed by qualitative comparative analysis of individual cases. A methodological approach has been chosen that enables the reconstruction of subjective perspectives of female perpetrators as well as the latent meaning of their behavior. The empirical basis is the personal testimonies of the perpetrators as well as judicial and investigational materials. The analysis shows that each female perpetrator appropriated a cultural script of school shootings, but since one of the perpetrators identified with the Columbine attackers as did her male predecessors, the other young woman added a new element to the already existing script, that is, a concept of violent femininity. Since the present comparative case analysis aims at a deep understanding of cases, the generalizability of the study is limited. Complementary methodological approaches are finally discussed. Language: en

Parodies de dandies : travestissement et transgression des genres au music-hall

Why did some Victorian and Edwardian music-hall acts, namely the swell song and male impersonations, choose the dandy, of all cultural icons, to debunk it as a symbol of decadence, and what was the part played by female artists in this exposure ? This paper will focus on those protean artists known as male impersonators, as they depart in many respects from their male predecessors, the lions comiques, who used to mock London’s bohemian upper classes in a crude yet gentle way. Male impersonators (Nellie Power, Vesta Tilley, Ella Shields...) portray dandy characters in a more subtle and ambivalent manner. This performance, in which women mimic effete young lords, is a far cry from the breeches parts of Restoration plays. It is also poles apart from slapstick comedy and the dames and principal boys of the Drury Lane pantomimes, as it blurs the line between the genders. Reviving the myth of the androgyne by making it both plausible and likeable is quite a feat, at a time when music-hall was under pressure from middle-class moral reformers. Thus, in the context of the Social Purity Crusades and against a background of hostility to music-hall culture, it is hardly surprising that male impersonations should arouse deep anxiety. But if there is no denying that those music-hall acts transgress social and sexual norms, one may wonder whether they are meant to convey a feminist message of political significance.

Aurora Leigh's Radical Youth: Derridean Parergon and the Narrative Frame in "A Vision of Poets"

Aurora Leigh's Radical Youth:Derridean Parergon and the Narrative Frame in “A Vision of Poets” Stephanie L. Johnson (bio) With the publication of Aurora Leigh in 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning not only offered readers a poetic work that rivaled Wordsworth's The Prelude in innovation of form and content but also identified this work as the pinnacle of her career. In the dedication to her cousin John Kenyon, she describes it as "the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered."1 Following her lead, critics since the 1970s have often either discounted her shorter and earlier poetry or considered it merely as a foundation for the greater work to come. Much recent criticism maintains this view of Aurora Leigh as the height of Barrett Browning's career as well as the corresponding view that her earlier work is less "mature." In Steve Dillon's consideration of her tropic use of crying, singing, and breathing, for example, he claims to follow the lead of Linda M. Lewis, Dorothy Mermin, and Marjorie Stone in arguing for an "apprentice to master" story of Barrett Browning's career.2 Published in Poems of 1844, "A Vision of Poets" seems to hold a secure position within this critical narrative of progression because it anticipates Aurora Leigh's concern with the relationship of a female poet to the male poetic lineage. Lewis, while only briefly mentioning "A Vision of Poets," connects it to other poems of 1844 that affirm "the gospel of Suffering and the gospel of Work," representing the second stage of Barrett Browning's religious quest; Aurora Leigh embodies the final stage in which the poet preaches the gospel of "divine love and divine truth" (p. 13). Mermin characterizes Barrett Browning's progression in feminist terms and compares "A Vision of Poets" both to the earlier "A Vision of Fame" and "The Poet's Vow" and to the later works that concern the poetical position of women. Its "conclusions are unstated but obvious," she claims; "women can be poets, and women's lives can be their theme," which prompts us to think of the later novel-poem in which this conclusion becomes explicit (Mermin, pp. 87-88, 115). Stone gives credence [End Page 425] to Harold Bloom's six phases of poetic progress as paradigmatic even as she critiques his patriarchal model, and she places "A Vision of Poets" at the turn to Barrett Browning's "later phases of 'poetic incarnation,'" which culminate in the mastery of Aurora Leigh (pp. 93, 154). Additionally, Helen Cooper asserts that "A Vision of Poets" begins to reconfigure the classical relationship between the male poet and his female muse, an effort that "is consummated in Aurora Leigh."3 Finally, Dillon does not consider "A Vision of Poets," perhaps because its "breath[ing] back" the music of God's blessing works against his argument that breath is a later representation of poetic voice for Barrett Browning, following her early use of the cry and the song.4 Rather than continue the conversation about progression and the full scope of Barrett Browning's work, this study examines one complication of its trajectory. It follows Linda Shires' argument that certain female poets of the nineteenth-century, including Barrett Browning, were critiquing the male tradition and experimenting with form as early as the 1830s.5 "A Vision of Poets" presents a female poet who is more adversarial toward her male predecessors than has been recognized, positioning this poem as itself adversarial within Barrett Browning's oeuvre. While "A Vision of Poets" considers women's potential for poetry in the vein of Aurora Leigh, it does not wage the same battle to open the male tradition to the female poet. In the relationship between these two works, published twelve years apart, the later poem qualifies and tempers the earlier, more radical feminist position, problematizing any critical impulse to identify Barrett Browning's maturation as a steady progression toward feminist self-autonomy. The subversiveness of "A Vision of Poets" stems from its narrative of the death of the male poetic tradition and the survival of the independent female voice; independence is...

This Is No Humbug!

This Is No Humbug!

The Empress Theodora: Partner of Justinian, and: Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (review)

Reviewed by: The Empress Theodora: Partner of Justinian, and: Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium Mary A. Valante (bio) The Empress Theodora: Partner of Justinian by James Allan Evans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002, 172 pp., $29.95. Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium by Judith Herrin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002, 320 pp., $29.95. Very little has been written about Byzantine empresses recently. For example, despite the appeal of Theodora, due to the scandalous way she is presented in the primary sources, no monograph has been written about her in English for more than 20 years. That said, Evans's work is by far the more satisfying of the two. Despite what is implied by the title, Herrin's monograph is not an investigation of the roles of Byzantine empresses; instead, it is about three empresses in the eighth and ninth centuries, two of whom reigned and one who did not, and especially their contributions to the debate on iconoclasm which was raging in the East at the time. Herrin identifies the military and church as the most important concerns of Byzantine emperors during this period. She focuses on iconoclasm and the Church because, she says, female rulers, like their male counterparts could order generals to lead armies, but they had little ability to influence the Church unless they insisted on taking such powers for themselves. Since there is in fact a long tradition of women influencing the Church—founding churches and monasteries, becoming powerful [End Page 218] abbesses, influencing important secular or ecclesiastical men—this supposition cannot be maintained. However, the impact of at least two of the empresses in question on iconoclasm in the East is clearly demonstrated, even if it was well known before this work. Like Herrin, Evans argues that Theodora's most important contribution was ecclesiastical. His grasp of the sources is impeccable, as demonstrated by his refusal to fall into the traps of other scholars—reviling Theodora as did the contemporary historian Procopius or elevating her to the emperor's co-ruler. Instead, here is a balanced portrait of a lowborn woman with questionable background who rose to power and influence during a crucial period of history. He is always careful to analyze the agendas of the primary source authors. For example, the famous Nika revolt—for which Theodora is often credited with saving Justinian's throne—is downplayed, as is Theodora's supposed influence on foreign policy. The empresses Herrin discusses are Irene, Euphrosyne, and a ninth-century Theodora, not the same one discussed by Evans. Irene was married to the iconoclast emperor Leo IV, who died in 780. Irene then took over rule of the empire on behalf of her nine-year-old son, Constantine. At first she was his regent and co-ruler, and when Constantine came of age Irene refused to allow him to rule. He was able to displace her, though after two years he was forced to bring her back to court. A few years later she overthrew her own son, had him blinded, and once again began to reign, this time alone. Interestingly, it is not these power struggles that Herrin sees as Irene's most valuable contribution to the definition of empress. Instead, it is her involvement in the Seventh Ecumenical Council that Herrin views as Irene's most lasting contribution. Because the Council declared iconoclasm a heresy and restored the worship of icons to the Eastern Church, Irene effectively overthrew the policies of her three male predecessors. The next empress, Euphrosyne, is the least well known of the three, and for good reason. Herrin herself admits that there is very little mention of her in any of the sources for the period. Euphrosyne is Irene's granddaughter who marries into a later dynasty to help legitimize it. But she never rules in her own right, is never regent, and her role in the anti-iconoclast movement is very unclear. Her stepson, the next emperor, is another iconoclast who marries a woman named Theodora. Theodora's mother is usually credited with teaching a love of icons to the next generation, but Herrin argues that Euphrosyne did so first. However, there...

Rediscovering Women Philosophers: Philosophical Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy (review)

Reviewed by: Rediscovering Women Philosophers: Philosophical Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy Karen Green (bio) Rediscovering Women Philosophers: Philosophical Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy. By Catherine Villanueva Gardner. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Catherine Gardner's book contains five studies, each discussing a different feminist philosopher. They are linked by the theme that the moral philosophy of these women has been neglected because its articulation fails to conform to [End Page 221] the dominant model of philosophical theorizing. Thus the question of genre becomes significant. Gardner's book partly develops a plea for extending the domain of philosophy to include letters, novels, and works of other genres. Is genre to blame for the neglect of women's moral theorizing? Women's treatises and discourses are equally neglected. Christine de Pizan wrote The Book of the Body Politic (1994) in 1407 and the Livre de la Paix (1958) between 1412 and 1414; Gabriel Suchon published a Traité de la Morale et de la Politique (1693); Damaris Masham published A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696); and Anne Conway published The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1996) in 1690. Evidence of published works in standard philosophical genres can also be found in Mary Astell (1996); and Margaret Cavendish (1994) also published works in standard philosophical genres. All are largely unstudied. Male authors are remembered because male scholars have chosen to edit, comment on, and explicate the works of their male predecessors. Women's philosophy has been deemed unworthy of study. Women's philosophy, not having had a comparable army of female exegetes, has languished unread, unedited, and unrecognized. It is gender, not genre, that explains the neglect of women's moral theorizing. Gardner's discussion is, furthermore, in danger of falling into anachronism. It seriously underestimates the range of genres that have historically constituted philosophy, implying that the academic journal article has been the historical norm. Despite my disagreement with Gardner's overarching argument, I found these essays to be valuable introductions to the ethical thought of the women thinkers studied. The first concentrates on Catherine Macaulay's Letters on Education, and calls for serious study of Macaulay's unjustifiably neglected philosophy. Here Gardner argues that this neglect came about because the epistolary form is not "the 'standard' form of a work of philosophy" and because "the expectations raised by the epistolary form—especially when it is written by a woman—link it firmly to the private sphere and, more particularly, to 'feminine' discourse, i.e. non-philosophical discourse" (24). Given current assumptions, this may be true. From an eighteenth-century perspective, however, things look different; at that time, the letter was a common philosophical genre, with antecedents stretching back to the letters of Epicurus and Cicero. There is no reason to see this genre as marginal to philosophy. The "epistle" is a genre occasionally adopted by Christine de Pizan, the subject of Gardner's next essay. She used it in her "Letter to the Queen of France" (1984), and, much modified, in the "Letter of Othea to Hector" (1990). However, Gardner does not discuss Pizan's "letters" but concentrates on her allegorical Book of the City of Ladies (1983) and argues that modern readers have difficulty in recognizing the allegorical form as part of the content of de Pizan's work. This is as may be. The difficulty flows from the fact that de Pizan used a now [End Page 222] unfamiliar genre, but it has little to do with her being a woman. The form had great prestige and popularity in her time, and anyone wanting to study the philosophy of this period needs to take this into account. Discussing Mary Wollstonecraft, Gardner similarly overestimates the extent to which novels constitute a genre excluded from philosophy. At one level she develops an argument with which I heartily agree: that Wollstonecraft should not be read as simply an "Enlightenment rationalist" (82). Gardner links this argument with the need to read Wollstonecraft's novels as part of her philosophical oeuvre, which is surely true. However, a number of philosophers, for example, Jean Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin, Jean-Paul Sartre, and most notably Simone de Beauvoir have chosen to...

Jean Toomer and Okot p'Bitek in Alice Walker's "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens"

By writing In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Alice Walker hopes to fulfill a twofold purpose: to create a sense of literary continuity among black women by saving writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Phillis Wheatley from oblivion and, as Felipe Smith has written, to provide wisdom of the past both to ensure the continuity of the folk ethos and to serve as a blueprint for personal and communal survival for those who require artistic models (438).(1) Less straightforward, however, is her handling of the work of two black male predecessors: the epigraph to the essay is taken from the Avey chapter of Jean Toomer's Cane, and later on Walker adapts a passage from Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino. Both Toomer in Avey and Walker in her paraphrase of p'Bitek comment on women's creative potential, but Toomer is not as positive, or the paraphrase of p'Bitek as negative, as the may at first assume. The paraphrase, for example, although a cry of unfulfilled potential, is in harmony with Walker's point that black women were creative in singing hymns, quilting, and growing flowers despite impediments that cut them off from the possibility of art on a grander scale. Exploring Walker's handling of the material from Toomer and p'Bitek, then, will take us deeper into In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens and provide a firmer grasp on the essay's intricacies. Bloom's anxiety theory has sparked contrasting views on influence among black female writers. According to Barbara Christian, a contemporary woman writer of color covers over more profoundly than does the white writer her ambivalence about matrilineage, her own misreading of precursors, and her link to an oral as well as a written (Black Woman Artist 116). What Bloom calls clinamen, or a swerving away from the parent work, may exist in masked form among black female writers (Anxiety 14). Deborah E. McDowell offers a contrasting view: Bloom's linear theory of the oedipal war between literary fathers and sons does not obtain among black woman writers, many of whom reverently acknowledge their debts to their foremothers. Unlike Bloom, see literary influence, to borrow from Julia Kristeva, in the intertextual sense, each text in dialogue with all previous texts, transforming and retaining narrative patterns and strategies in endless possibility. (148) Walker's own statement on literary influence in Beyond the Peacock is closer to reverent acknowledgement and transforming dialogue than to Christian's sense of ambivalent misreading: I believe that the truth about any subject only comes when all the sides of the story are put together, and all their different meanings make one new one. Each writer writes the missing to the other writer's story. And the whole story is what I'm after (Search 49). We could easily substitute the word reader for the word writer, for both contribute missing parts to previous works. Walker is to Hurston, Wheatley, Woolf, and other writers as the is to the essay and the allusions within it. As Walker's own emphasis on completion suggests, her relationships with her literary foremothers cannot be properly characterized by misprision proper (Anxiety 14). Walker does not carve out a project for herself by misreading and thus defeating a literary foremother. Instead, as in McDowell's model, Walker engages in a wholistic act of completion by seeking connections with literary foremothers. This is the realm of Bloom's tessera, in which a writer antithetically `completes' his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough (14). As Diane Sadoff observes, `In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens' transforms Woolf's model of the white female tradition by inserting in brackets the black equivalents for Woolf's exemplary writers and issues: instead of `Emily Bronte,' `Zora Hurston'; instead of `wise women,' `root workers' (121). …

Writing the Ending: Simone de Beauvoir's Tout compte fait as testament

Writing the Ending: Simone de Beauvoir's Tout compte fait as testament Susan Bainbrigge TOUT COMPTE FAIT, THE FOURTH VOLUME of Simone de Beauvoir 's autobiographical œuvre, would seem to serve as final word on her autobiographical writings, as the author reviews her whole life, writing about the years covered in the earlier volumes, but this time using a broadly thematic framework rather than a chronological one.' Indeed in this volume the author affirms: "Aujourd'hui ma vie est faite, mon œuvre est faite" (157). This process of rewriting has puzzled critics, who question the place of this volume within the traditional conventions of the genre. Terry Keefe has argued that "insofar as autobiography, as Philippe Lejeune has argued, is essentially about the formation of a personality, this may go a long way towards explaining why Tout compte fait is a very unsatisfactory work of autobiography."2 Where Jean-Marie Domenach insists on its classification as "compte" in the sense of a "compte rendu,"3 Toril Moi describes it as "a lifeless ghost of an autobiography, a mere chronicle of official duties, rather than an exploration of lived experience."4 Other critics have appropriated the volume into the feminist autobiography camp, by placing emphasis on the entry of Sylvie Le Bon into the text, and by drawing attention to the feminist stance Beauvoir adopts at the end of the volume.5 Yet such attempts to classify the volume would seem to limit readings of the text. I would suggest that Tout compte fait merits further attention as far as the autobiographical act itself is concerned. How does the autobiographer solve the problem of concluding, bringing together the four volumes of her autobiography in this rewriting and reconstruction of a life? How does Beauvoir express the desire for an impossible totalization of experience? Philippe Lejeune, in his exploration of epilogues with respect to Sartre, touches on the ending of La Force des choses. Tout compte fait is not discussed here as his attention is drawn to the critical year 1963 when Sartre and Beauvoir found themselves writing endings for Les Mots and La Force des choses respectively.6 Unlike the previous volume, La Force des choses, where the portrayal of an aging, physical self culminates in the famous "flouée" conclusion, the narrator in Tout compte fait dispenses with discussion of her embodied self, choosing to focus on her "intellectual" Vol. XL, No. 1 79 L'Esprit Créateur self, often borrowing the essay mode of Le Deuxième sexe as writing style (in contrast with the exploration of her own aging body in La Force des choses, her mother's in Une mort très douce, or of Sartre's as revealed in La Cérémonie des adieux). I would suggest that Beauvoir's representation of herself in Tout compte fait, first and foremost as an intellectual in the public domain, is used to "tie up the loose ends" of the autobiographical œuvre (the disparate narratives and fragmented genres), conceptualising the life as complete in a paradoxical positioning of the narrator as voix d'outre-tombe. In this analysis of Tout compte fait as final "adieu," the ambiguous relationship of Beauvoir's text to the autobiographical canon might be usefully explored within the context of the autobiographical act as literary testament. This opens up the question of the death-drive in writing, in all its possible manifestations . Indeed, the writing of autobiography as desire to preserve the self for posterity in the face of death certainly places Beauvoir within a well-established canon. Does Beauvoir's desire to universalize her experience place her in line with male predecessors such as Montaigne, Rousseau, or Stendhal?7 In Tout compte fait, Beauvoir's mode of writing as intellectual essayist can be contrasted with the search for a place where the private self might also find a voice. Further comparisons could be drawn from within Beauvoir's "literary family," as the autobiographical practices of Jean-Paul Sartre and Violette Leduc, beyond "existentialist" classifications,8 might shed light on the various author-reader and mentoring relationships which underlie various narrative threads.9 The principal question raised here is whether this autothanatographical act might...

George Eliot and the Production of Consumers

In 1866, George Henry Lewes wrote that is a pity that [Felix Holt] isn't quite ready for publication just in the thick of the great reform discussion so many good quotable 'bits' would be furnished to M.P.s (Eliot, Letters 8: 374). The absence of George Eliot quotations from that debate has been more than compensated for by their ubiquity in other venues. Before her death, excerpts from Eliot appear in an anthology, on a calendar, in four schoolbooks, on an army officers' examination, in a sermon, in one reader's copy of the New Testament, and as epigraphs to a socialist treatise and an abridgment of Boswell's Life of Johnson. In the years immediately following, her works are excerpted in a Zionist tract, provide chapter mottoes for at least one novel, and appear in anthologies ranging from booklets for the pocket to albums for the sofa-table (see Zionism). Readers' fondness for quoting Eliot can ultimately be traced to the structure of her own narratives, punctuated with epigraphs and self-contained digressions. But it originates more directly in the publishing venture of one of her fans. In the year in which Middlemarch appears, the publisher Blackwood also brings out a daintier volume-the Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Works of George Eliot--edited by a sycophantic young Scotsman named Alexander Main. Three more editions follow over the next eight years, updated each time a new book by Eliot herself appears. Meanwhile, at the end of 1878, in time for Christmas presents, Main assembles a new series of quotations for the George Eliot Birthday Book, a diary decorated with a thought from George Eliot for every day of the year.' The fact that every new book by Eliot prompts a new edition by Main means that Daniel Deronda and the Impressions of Theophrastus Such are both written in the expectation of being excerpted. And because buyers of the Sayings and Birthday Book constitute only a fraction of the readers who know of their existence, Main's anthologies shape the way Eliot's work is perceived even by those who refuse to read her at less than full length. This article examines the effect of that awareness on George Eliot--and on her readers, reviewers, and critics. Anthologies redefine the genre of Eliot's oeuvre and the gender of its author in contradictory ways: they sanctify the novel by classifying Eliot as a poet, and bracket her with male predecessors while marketing her to women. In training their readers to sift Eliot's reusable wisdom from her ephemeral plots, anthologies replace the novel's difference from other genres by a gendered difference within its own public. Nineteenth-century reviews and twentieth-century criticism characterize Eliot's work more explicitly as peculiarly quotable, even as-like Eliot herself-they question the ethics of appropriating

The Imperial Dryden: The Poetics of Appropriation in Seventeenth-Century England

John Dryden (1631-1700) was first great poet, observed W.J. Bate, to labour under the burden of past. Over years, he read, wrote about, and adapted or translated an extraordinary number of European writers; these in turn formed textual ground from which his own art emerged. In The Imperial Dryden, David B. Kramer shows how Dryden used other writers' works not to save himself trouble of making but to make anew. Tracing course of poet's career, Kramer focuses first on Dryden's approach to French poet and critic Pierre Corneille, who had developed a subversive strategy of misquoting his predecessors - a strategy Dryden soon learned to use against Corneille himself. He then explores Dryden's more open plundering of secondary French poets: this tactic constituted a kind of literary imperialism that echoed England's own imperial ambitions regarding foreign wealth. Finally, Kramer shows how, after Revolution of 1688, Dryden's poetic persona shifted from that of plundering male to vulnerable neuter to, at moments, a disenfranchised female wishing to be seized and impregnated by spirits of her great male predecessors. Kramer's study extends beyond works of Dryden himself into several larger questions of literary history: effect of dynastic changes and national revolutions upon poetic alliances and ruptures; manner in which a poetic sensibility defines itself in concert with, and in opposition to, shifting groups of writers and schools; and ways in which personal reverses may alter gender identification. Demonstrating how poets' relations with their predecessors can modulate from agonistic struggle to uneasy but productive truce, Kramer proposes a series of frameworks for discussing effects of political and cultural circumstance upon poetic production. An original contribution to Dryden scholarship, this book should also attract any scholar interested in relationship between authors and their literary forebears.

“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. …

Virtue and Venom: Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance by Glenda McLeod

REVIEWS GLENDA McLEOD. Virtue and ri>nom: Catalogs a/Womenfrom Antiquity to theRenaissance. Women and Culture Series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Pp. vii, 168. $24.95. Glenda McLeod's Virtue and ri>nom: Catalogs ofWomenfromAntiquity to the Renaissance, part of the University of Michigan Press's Women and Culture Series, is an informative, interesting, and highly readable book. McLeod examines a literary genre important for the study of the nature of women, real and fictional, and thus she contributes to our understanding of the classical and medieval misogynist traditions. A study of the social and historical contexts of this genre, this book also discusses issues of poetics, such as the role of the narrators as compilers and readers of literary authority. Chapter 1, "A Fickle Thing Is Woman," traces the development of the catalog (found in many different genres) and its gradual association with the florilegium genre during the classical period. While Virgil, Plutarch, Juvenal, and Ovid's Herozdes are her main focus in this chapter, McLeod also discusses briefly Hesiod, Homer, and Semonides, giving us a much fuller picture of the classical traditions used by later authors. In these catalogs women are isolated from their social and historical contexts, creating a definition of "femineity" that centers on women's sexuality-a definition that becomes authoritative. Chapter2, "Woman's Peculiar Virtue," focuses on the early Christian and medieval authors and works: Jerome, Walter Map, sermon literature, and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose. Jerome's Adversus ]ovinianum "com­ pletes the evolution [of the catalog] toward the florilegium" as well as illustrating "how a compiler can manipulate his sources without that manipulation being apparent to general readers" (p. 35). His concern for chastity as the indicator of feminine conductleadsJerome to continue the catalog's interest in female sexuality, and within a Christian context "women's virtuedependson thesuccessfulrestraintof their nature" (p. 39). Chapter 3, "TheMulier Clara," discussesBoccaccio's De clans mulierzhus and De casibus virorum zilustrz·um as popular and important sources for later authors. These florilegia show the compiler calling attention to his sources at the same time he works within a scholarly, humanist tradition: "Boccaccio's role as writer often involves an ongoing revelation of his role as reader" (p. 79). Unlike his predecessors, Boccaccio often focuses on the women's "deeds rather than their nature" (p. 68), and he praises women artists and writers. On the whole, however, he continues the earlier misogy­ nistic patterns. 175 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Chaucer's Legend of Good Women is the focus of chapter 4, "'Al of Another Tonne' " - a work that highlights the role of the compiler as both reader and writer. McLeod discusses both the F and the G prologues because both resemble the forms of prologues to academic works that state the author's subject, method, intent, and utility. She argues against the critical notion that Chaucer abandoned this project because he was bored; instead, she argues that the abandonment is part of the narrator's fiction, that "we have the final legend of the series even if we do not have a complete ensemble" (p. 105). Chaucer's poem, like Ovid's Heroides, shows the compiler commenting on literary authority. The final chapter, "The Defense of Gender, the Citadel of Self," is an analysis of Christine de Pizan's Cite des dames as a revisionist catalog, not merely a translation of:Soccaccio'sDe clans mulien'bus (a common criticism of Christine's work). Unlike her male predecessors, Christine "doesn't transmit tradition but investigates and redefines it" (p. 114); her defense of womenbecomes a process of self-definition- by placing women back into social and historical contexts, Christine comes to an understanding of her own identity. This work also looks forward to the Renaissance querelle des femmes, a subject that McLeod discusses briefly in her conclusion. McLeod's attention to the development of the catalog genre is most profitable in the last two chapters; herargumentsabout both Chaucer's and Christine's works are original and most compelling. In earlier chapters she perhaps relies too heavily on material from a single critic (such as Anderson onJuvenal or Mazzotta on Boccaccio), but this...

Goals of male and female college students: Do traditional sex differences still exist?

Importance ratings of reasons for attending college were obtained from male and female undergraduates. Responses were compared for sex differences and were compared to the responses of subjects in the Constantinople (1967) study. The picture of college students that emerged is very different from those of previous studies. Current females did not emphasize career goals less, nor social goals more, than males. Current males were more interested in social aspects of college than were their male predecessors. Male and female concepts of success seemed to differ. To females challenge and accomplishment were most important; to males, complying with parental pressures and economic success were most important.