Showing papers in "Tulsa studies in women's literature in 2016"

Maria Edgeworth on Citizenship: Rousseau, Darwin, and Feminist Pessimism in Practical Education

Abstract: This essay challenges prevailing assumptions about the particular stance toward gender equality that emerges in Maria Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798), a matter of importance as the treatise is now being used to shed light on the political nuances of Edgeworth’s fiction. Despite countering Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762) on logistical and feminist grounds with accounts of her family’s home-schooling methods, Practical Education is neither the simple rejoinder to Rousseau nor the simple affirmation of Edgeworth’s feminism that critical consensus suggests. Rather, it is a densely written set of exploratory essays in which Edgeworth tests a gender-neutral ideal of civic training against the conflicting imperatives of early and adolescent education. Her investigations reflect her understanding of Emile as a work of political philosophy in which Rousseau imagines the education of the ideal citizen; centrally she endorses Rousseau’s contention that communities are best served by members who have grown up with a robust sense of self-worth. She supplements Rousseau’s political theory with principles of cognitive and behavioral psychology set out by Erasmus Darwin in Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life (1794, 1796). Darwin likewise urges the importance of self-reliance to individual and social health. He additionally offers a gender-neutral model of learning that Edgeworth cites extensively in her descriptions of the enlightened classroom, where individuals’ aptitudes take precedence over gender and where girls and boys alike are encouraged to view themselves as contributors to civil society. Thus Edgeworth’s synthesis of Rousseau and Darwin sets the conditions for a complete overhaul of gendered epistemology and ethics. Edgeworth’s final chapters, however, implicitly cast doubt on the possibility of extending her most cherished pedagogic and civic ideals to the later education of adolescent girls. Therefore, an analysis of Edgeworth’s Rousseau-Darwin dialogue simultaneously raises the stature of Practical Education as a work of ideas and complicates its relevance to the thread of feminist satire running throughout her novels

Mourning and Melancholy: Literary Criticism by African American Women

Abstract: Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and bell hooks use their “writing about writing,” a special genre that returns to the origins of what they have authored, to find ways to encounter personal, familial, and cultural histories of loss, suffering, and trauma. The result is a tradition of literary criticism that aligns with what Sigmund Freud called the work of mourning; both practices are about memory and preservation, taking inventory, distinguishing what has value and what can be relinquished, elevating, idealizing, discarding, and forgetting. These women writers read their way into becoming writers, and in the process, they name predecessors and identify sources and inspirations, producing, in effect, a literary legacy that produces them. The literary and psychological labor of canon formation is embedded in the language and imagery of creativity and connectedness that puts the dead to rest in order to make room for the living

Paper Bodies: Letters and Letter Writing in the Early American Novel

Abstract: This article suggests that in early American novels, the letter served as a kind of paper body, a contested space where women writers and their readers vied for control over the female form, symbolizing the broader cultural struggle in which women were enmeshed during and shortly after the American Revolution. Using Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism, and the letter-writing manuals that informed these novels, this article argues that epistles in early American fiction function less like scenery and more like characters with rules of propriety governing their construction, delivery, reception, and response. While letters offered a certain amount of agency to women as paper bodies that could travel long distances unaccompanied into the private rooms of men, they could also pass out of their writers’ control. Men and women could intercept, change, misinterpret, redirect, and generally manipulate epistles as they saw fit. In these novels, no matter what choice a woman makes—write or avoid writing, read or avoid reading—her agency is as easily destroyed as the paper on which her words are written.

The Pregnant Body and Utopian Social Organization in Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl

Abstract: This paper examines how Communist Party writer Meridel Le Sueur brings together personal narrative and political ideology as a way of writing the woman’s body and experiences into Depression-era class struggle. Le Sueur’s novel The Girl , written during the 1930s but not published until its 1978 rediscovery by feminists’ recovery efforts, offers an antidote to capitalism’s pervasive commodity fetishism and reification. The novel imagines an alternative social model: an interdependent society patterned on the pregnant woman’s body. By using allegory to connect the individual story of one woman to the larger economic and social problems facing working-class people during the Depression, Le Sueur’s novel demonstrates that the experiences of an individual can embody, communicate, and educate readers about stark political and economic realities. Le Sueur attends to the bodies, hungers, desires, and shared experiences of working-class women in order to counter the individualism and competition fostered by Depression-era society. Reading the novel allegorically, this paper proposes that Le Sueur offers a new way to educate and inspire a working class readership to support the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) cause—one that goes beyond didactic summaries of Marxist texts or the assumption that members of the working-class can intuit Marxist ideas by interpreting their conditions of oppression.

Viewing Feminist Autobiography through a Spatial Lens: A Comparative Approach to Seyran Ateş's Große Reise ins Feuer

Abstract: This paper compares Gloria Anzaldua’s seminal autobiographical work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) with Seyran Ates’s autobiography Grose Reise ins Feuer: Die Geschichte einer deutschen Turkin (2003; Long journey into fire: The story of a German Turk) as a way of illuminating both the national differences in minority feminist autobiography as well as the similarities found in the content and form of both texts. Experiences of physical and psychic pain, trauma, and exclusion spur both authors to seek freedom; both do so by laying claim to spaces of representation, albeit from divergent political positions. Written fifteen years apart, the similarities in the techniques that give each narrative shape (such as an interest in pain and space) and the differences in national political application show feminist autobiography to be an extremely plastic genre with strategic use in performative identity-based struggles.

"I got self, pencil, and notebook": Literacy and Maternal Desire in Sapphire's PUSH

Abstract: This essay examines themes of black motherhood and literacy in Sapphire’s controversial novel PUSH (1996) through an analysis of its central character, a poor black teenage mother named Precious. PUSH was published in a social and political moment characterized by intensified scapegoating of poor black mothers, and the novel invokes the controlling image of the “welfare queen” in order to reimagine the subjectivity and citizenship of this denigrated racialized figure. Throughout the novel, Precious draws on her desire to give birth to and mother her children as motivation to learn to read and write. Literacy provides opportunities for Precious to escape the social silence and invisibility imposed upon her by her race, class, and gender, exemplifying a tradition in black women’s fiction that links literacy, motherhood, and resistance. In addition, Sapphire’s novel uses intertextual references to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) to encourage readers to consider how motherhood conceived through rape and incest can be reclaimed for black women characters. The portrayals of disturbing themes of sexual abuse and the experimental narrative structure of the novel have contributed to its marginalization within criticism. This essay seeks to provide alternative interpretations of the novel in order to revive critical interest in its politics and aesthetics.

"Só para mulheres" (Just for women): Alfonsina Storni's and Clarice Lispector's Transgression of the Women's Page

Abstract: This article considers the contributions of Argentinean poet Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938) and Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) to the women’s column of newspapers and journals in their respective countries. The women’s column or page was a section entirely dedicated to women’s concerns, addressed specifically to a female readership, and generally authored by a woman or a female persona. As such, it operated under specific parameters of form and content. This article argues that both writers’ transgression of this discursive space can be seen as resignifying gender meanings and potentially transforming readers’ perception of female subjectivity. Analyzing selected pieces from the various columns authored overtly or covertly by Storni and Lispector, the article draws on Judith Butler’s reflections on the performativity of gender and Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on double-voiced discourse to focus on the “acting out” of gender as a means of subverting the presuppositions underlying the rigidly codified space of the women’s page. This article explores a corpus that has gone largely unnoticed until recently and generates new understandings of both women’s works.

"Counterfeit Colour": Making Up Race in Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam

Abstract: Hailed as the first drama published by an English woman writer, Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) has garnered a great deal of attention from critics in the past decade. The publication of Margaret Ferguson and Barry Weller's edition of the play in 1994 and the inclusion of the text in subsequent anthologies (including excerpts in the Norton Anthology of English Literature) have helped canonize the play as represen tative of "women's writing" in the early modern period.1 Critics of women's writing often ground their readings in biography, and the critical history of The Tragedy of Mariam proves no exception (Ferguson and Weller print their edition of The Tragedy of Mariam alongside The Lady Falkland Her Life, a biography written by one of Cary's daughters). Less biographical readings of the play tend to focus on the text as it relates to "woman's" virtue or rebellion.2 Although, as Stephanie Wright notes, "disseminating information about a woman author can only improve her prospects of canonical (re)instatement," and women's writing is certainly an appropri ate site for feminist work and intervention, both biographical and gender centered approaches can tend to essentialize gender, assuming in overt or less overt ways that, as Chris Weedon explains, "female authorship of texts is their most crucial aspect and that they are the product of a specifically female experience and aesthetic."3 Privileging gender as a category of analysis can help illuminate some women's lives and experiences, but it can also flatten out differences among and between women, as it obscures likenesses or alliances between men and women of the same race, class, or religion.4 Although a number of critics have begun to examine the complex inter connections between race and gender in early modem literature, these kinds of analyses occur less frequently in work devoted to texts written by women.5 When they do occur, race often becomes a way of talking about gender. Dymphna Callaghan's seminal essay, "Re-reading The Tragedie of Mariam," the first to discuss race as part of the "manifest content" of the play, did much to bring to light some of the complex workings of racial dif ference, particularly in relation to the play's central female characters.6 For Callaghan, race functions primarily as a way of troubling categories of "vir

Domesticating Palestine: Elizabeth Champney's Three Vassar Girls in the Holy Land

Abstract: This article examines the 1892 novel Three Vassar Girls in the Holy Land , showing how it presents a model of cross-cultural encounter and women’s international activism, which the article terms “global domesticity.” Written by the largely forgotten author Elizabeth W. Champney, Three Vassar Girls in the Holy Land is the final volume of a popular series of fictional travelogues that trace a number of Vassar girls’ travels through Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Conceptualizing the world as their household, the Vassar “girls” become “women” as they gain a sense of the United States’ place in the world and learn to embrace their roles as global social housekeepers. In this sense, the Vassar girls extend the boundaries of “Manifest Domesticity” beyond the home and nation, immersing themselves in foreign cultures and geographies and assimilating the foreign into an American world order. In Three Vassar Girls in the Holy Land , Palestine serves as a site for rewriting the foundational mythology of the United States and for assimilating Jews and Judaism into the nation. By exporting American domesticity to the Near East, the Vassar girls lay claim to Palestine as part of an extended American household. Ultimately, Three Vassar Girls in the Holy Land promotes the college girl not only as a new model of American womanhood but also as a new paradigm for an emerging American globalism.

Unsold Peony: The Life and Poetry of Daoist Priestess-Poet Yu Xuanji of Tang China

Abstract: This article takes an interdisciplinary approach to a comprehensive examination of the life, poetry, and subjectivity of the Daoist priestess-poet Yu Xuanji of Tang China. It begins with a philological study and textual analysis that reconstructs Yu’s life and psychological experience. Through close readings of her poems, interpretations of their images and symbols, and analyses of their syntax and structure, the article then undertakes a nuanced interpretation of Yu’s works that reveals her strong subjectivity and acknowledges her poetic achievements. By situating her work within its cultural-religious contexts and applying a feminist and gender critical lens to her writings, the article also foregrounds Yu’s gender awareness and agency as a Daoist priestess and dispels the false label of “courtesan” placed on her by discourses of later ages.

"Shut your rhetorics in a box": Gwendolyn Brooks and Lyric Dilemma

Abstract: Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1949 long poem Annie Allen can be read as an example of midcentury modernist poetry that favors inductive assemblage to the totalizing operations of linear narrative, joining other midcentury poems such as Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, and H. D.’s Trilogy. Annie Allen is frequently read as the last major work Brooks undertook before her break with European and Anglo modernist forms, when she aligned her aesthetics with the revolutionary poetics of the Black Arts movement. More significant than the shift in poetic practice that the book signals, however, is the way in which lyric speech in Annie Allen reveals ideologies of literary innovation. This essay argues that Brooks’s long poem dramatizes the intersection of competing narratives of experimentalism and politics for African American poetics, for modernism, and, in a broader sense, for an understanding of what it means to write poetry as social critique

The Ethical Laboratory of Beauty in Zadie Smith's On Beauty

Abstract: This paper presents the issues addressed in Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty (2005) through the prism of ethical categories or, more precisely, through the prism of the relationship between beauty, goodness, and truth. The analysis is carried out from the perspective of a laboratory, allowing the author to conduct experiments on the meanings of these concepts and to test their sense in the constantly changing circumstances of the world represented in the novel. The analyses show that the beauty-goodness-truth triad is seldom maintained and that circumstances destabilize and modify its unity by reformulating its elements. Although the article reveals the relative instability of this triad, it argues for its ultimate unity as evidenced by the Belsey marriage.

Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity by Simone C. Drake

Abstract: These consistent flashes of fresh perspective and creative close readings run throughout Simmons’s book and prove that even the most studied literary examples have renewed scholarly potential given a compelling analytical frame. This renewal is perhaps what Simmons’s work does best; she gives us a reason to reconsider examples of migratory black women’s first-person narratives not for the merits of “authenticity of experience” or to recuperate lost voices but rather as a way to “unsettle the very notion of cohesive diaspora and unsettle our critical strategies and theoretical certainties” (p. 144).

"A tangled web of mindfuck": Andrea Dworkin and the Truth of Pornography

Abstract: This essay argues that Andrea Dworkin’s much derided argument against pornography may still prove productive if read in relation to her fiction. Taking note of the fact that Dworkin’s own novels have been accused of being pornographic according to her criteria, the essay explores the possibility that her radical feminist anti-porn stance, inevitably described as something of a moralistic backlash by sex-liberals, could be seen as a continuation of the pornographic imagination it so vehemently protests. Through critical readings of Dworkin’s novels Ice and Fire and Mercy , as well as her autobiographical works and theoretical writings on pornography, the essay demonstrates that the contradictions that beset her writings echo the contradictions inherent in our contemporary understanding of pornography. Much like the pornography she would resist, Dworkin’s writings invite a solipsistic mode of reading, the experiential rewards of which are not so much of an interpretive as of a sensual nature. In so doing, Dworkin’s fiction paradoxically proves an invaluable point of entry into the pornographic imagination, making evident its essentially monologic nature. While this circumstance may be damaging for her status as an agitator, it points to her continued—if as yet largely unacknowledged—importance as a writer.

Mary Wollstonecraft, "Ithuriel," and the Rise of the Feminist Author-Ghost

Abstract: This essay considers the ways in which pioneering eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft has been imagined as speaking from beyond the grave. It considers what the undead Wollstonecraft means—and has meant—to the histories of literature and feminism. Examining representations of Wollstonecraft alongside those of other eighteenth-century author-shades, the essay demonstrates that Wollstonecraft’s ghostly renderings have important resonances with those of her male literary predecessors as well as implications for how and why modern feminists came to be “haunted” by her. The last section of the essay examines an unpublished 1798 fictional manuscript, “Ithuriel,” located among the papers of historical novelist Jane Porter. “Ithuriel” depicts Wollstonecraft as a speaking spirit in conversation with other celebrated dead women. This previously unknown text (published as an appendix to this essay) shows us the instantiation of Wollstonecraft’s specter, born out of a particular moment in the late eighteenth-century development of professional authorship and literature and at a watershed moment for early modern feminism.

Victorian Sélams and Talking Bouquets: Phallic Invasion of the Feminine/Floral Order

Abstract: The partnership of femininity and flowers is deeply rooted in the cultural imagination and in the symbolic economy of patriarchy. This partnership is temporarily violated, however, in Victorian narrative fiction when male lovers insert written notes inside their love object’s nosegay to advance their own desire-driven plots. Not only does this activity involve a symbolic crossing of gender lines—logos in the garden—it also reshuffles the signs encoding female space, leaving floral/feminine agency subordinated in its own sphere to the written word. This article traces the origins of the trope of hiding notes in flowers to Orientalist tales of clandestine lovers communicating through floral codes (selams); it then turns to representations of flowers in nineteenth-century literature to show that, while associated imaginatively with feminine codes—gentle, pure, passive—flowers actually function as resistant agents to hegemonic forces. Flowers serve female interests in advancing an alternative language system that privileges felt knowledge (feminine) over fixed meaning (masculine).

The Submerged Plot and the Mother’s Pleasure from Jane Austen to Arundhati Roy, by Kelly A. Marsh

Abstract: twentieth-century revisions) and of an Indian mother and young son who were traditionally (and probably erroneously) identified as Pocahontas and her son with John Rolfe, Thomas, in the so-called “Sedgeford Hall Portrait” (ca. 1800). In chapter three, Rex argues that the fictional authornarrator of the anonymously authored The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield (1767), whose backstory is evidently inspired by Pocahontas, uses her status as a hereditary Indian princess to establish a voice that transcends patriarchal confinement. In chapter four, she suggests that the marginalization of Charles Hobomok Conant (the son of Indian Hobomok and Mary Conant) in Lydia Maria Child’s novel Hobomok (1824), like the relative effacement of Thomas Rolfe, demonstrates the challenge in assimilating “biracial males” into “the discourses concerning American identity” (p. 167). I would have liked to see Rex more fully countenance indeterminacy. For example, I was never quite sure that the “Native figure in the center” of the 1672 “Cambridge Cut” of the Massachussets seal—which adorns the book cover—was “a woman” (p. 26). For me, the appearance of a “pleated skirt” and “fully exposed” breasts were counterbalanced by the bow and arrow and the words of the “Macedonian man” to create a figure of uncertain gender (pp. 28, 29). In chapter three, I would have liked to see more discussion of the problem of including a book, The Female American, whose actual author—as opposed to its fictional one—may have been neither Anglo-American nor a woman. And in chapter four, I wondered about the use of negative evidence: to what extent can we draw conclusions from the relative absence of pictorial and textual representation of Thomas Rolfe? Rex’s suggestive argumentation would have been more effective if it had been couched more speculatively. These points of critique aside, I found Anglo-American Women Writers and Representations of Indianness to be a well-conceived, innovative study, one that I expect to continue to draw on in my teaching of early American literature.