Showing papers in "Tulsa studies in women's literature in 2018"
TL;DR: The authors investigates the modest retail spaces of haberdasheries as places of economic self-sufficiency and emotional support for women shopkeepers in Frances Burney's Cecilia (1782) and The Wanderer (1814).
Abstract: This article investigates the modest retail spaces of haberdasheries as places of economic self-sufficiency and emotional support for women shopkeepers in Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782) and The Wanderer (1814). Eighteenth-century haberdashery was a flexible trade that required less capital and skill than other wearing apparel professions; female haberdashers evaded the sexual stereotypes that plagued milliners and dressmakers. In these novels, haberdasheries constitute feminized spaces that turn attention toward women’s economic production as opposed to the dangers they faced as consumers and in sexualized trades—being conflated with goods for sale, mistaken for sex workers and thieves, stalked, and placed at risk of accruing social and monetary debts. Burney’s “haberdasher’s plot” interrupts the gendered economy of debt made visible across her novels, creating narrative and commercial alternatives to the marriage plot. Together Cecilia and The Wanderer demonstrate the financial and individual rewards of modest retail spaces, even if the romance of small trade provides only temporary shelter from the inescapable risks of the marketplace. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/709808
3 citations
TL;DR: This article explored the practice and triumph of unconventional gender expression that were central concerns of Abby Williams Hill's writing from the American West, particularly from 1902 to 1906, and argued that Hill pursued a contradictory project in her daily life and personal writing, documenting the work of resisting social expectation from within an idealized space.
Abstract: This article explores the practice and triumph of unconventional gender expression that were central concerns of Abby Williams Hill’s writing from the American West, particularly from 1902 to 1906. Hill, a professional landscape painter, created romantic representations of the wilderness to fuel the popular fantasies of American frontier life. This essay turns to her unpublished journals and letters to argue that Hill pursued a contradictory project in her daily life and personal writing, documenting the work of resisting social expectation from within an idealized space. Hill understood that one does not escape the overlapping ideologies of gender, sexuality, race, and social class in the West, yet the voluminous diary entries and letters that she produced during her travels reveal that she also recognized the natural world as a site in which cultural formations might be more malleable and thus more open to revision. This article contends that Hill claimed for herself and her children the transformative potential of that exclusionary space. More so than her western landscape paintings, Hill’s personal writing models an alternative mode of engagement with the natural world as a space to critique and revise the status quo
3 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a close reading of Mary Wordsworth's 1820 Continental travel journal is presented, which reveals a sophisticated and imaginatively creative mind, one that was an equal participant in the coterie of the tour's writers, including Henry Crabb Robinson and Dorothy Wordsworth.
Abstract: Through a close reading of Mary Wordsworth’s 1820 Continental travel journal, this essay challenges her peripheral status in studies of the Wordsworth writing circle. It offers a formalist analysis of the text, demonstrating the qualities and aspects of Mary’s writing that contribute to the importance of her journal in relation to the other literary endeavors of the tour. Mary’s writing, with its elliptical style and panoramic descriptions, reveals a sophisticated and imaginatively creative mind, one that was an equal participant in the coterie of the tour’s writers, including Henry Crabb Robinson and Dorothy Wordsworth. This essay seeks to free the journal from its critical relegation to a mere resource for William Wordsworth’s Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, instead approaching the journal on its own terms. The analysis calls for further consideration of Mary’s journals in relation to contexts of travel writing, romantic narrative, and women’s writing
2 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the ways in which female characters respond to patriarchy in two novels by Indian women writers: Samina Ali's Madras on Rainy Days (2004) and Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting (1999).
Abstract: This essay examines the ways in which female characters respond to patriarchy in two novels by Indian women writers: Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days (2004) and Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting (1999). It argues that although the term “patriarchy” is less used in contemporary feminist scholarship than other terms and concepts like “gender,” it is still useful for analyzing family power dynamics in many parts of the world. Ali focuses in Madras on Rainy Days on the patriarchal control of female sexuality, while Desai in Fasting, Feasting emphasizes the patriarchal restrictions on female autonomy. Both novels portray older women as mostly complicit with patriarchy and younger women as victims who react in various ways, from the resentful resignation of Uma in Fasting, Feasting to the final escape of Layla in Madras on Rainy Days. Although the focus is mostly on the young female protagonists, both novels hint at the ways in which young men can also be oppressed by patriarchy
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TL;DR: The False Friend as discussed by the authors is an alternative model of femininity, allowing a divorcee, Miss Stanley, to take the position of a scribe of women's narratives, in which Robinson rejects the marriage plot altogether and instead suggests a solitary life of the mind as a more fulfilling option for women.
Abstract: Mary Robinson’s first and penultimate novels, Vancenza (1792) and The False Friend (1799), both center on orphaned daughters, who appear doomed to replicate the fate of their fallen mothers. For Vancenza’s Elvira and The False Friend’s Gertrude, this replication involves incestuous desires; Elvira falls in love with her brother while Gertrude obsessively desires her own father, driving them both to madness and premature death. Furthermore, even the women who exist on the periphery of Elvira’s and Gertrude’s stories find that the romance plot is a delusive promise. A consideration of how The False Friend extends Vancenza’s bleak vision of the dangers of sexual desire sheds light on Robinson’s increasing disillusionment with the idea of romantic love and the institution of marriage and her attempts to devise a new script for female identity. In The False Friend, Robinson posits the independent woman as an alternative model of femininity, allowing a divorcee, Miss Stanley, to take the position of a scribe of women’s narratives. One hundred years before the New Woman novelists, Robinson rejects the marriage plot altogether and instead suggests a solitary life of the mind as a more fulfilling option for women.
2 citations
TL;DR: The first time I visit someone's home, I make a beeline for their bookshelves and do not bother to do so surreptitiously, either.
Abstract: The first time I visit someone’s home, I make a beeline for their bookshelves. I do not bother to do so surreptitiously, either. It was a distinct pleasure, then, to stay at the cottages on the premises of Weaver Press, a long-standing literary press in Zimbabwe run by Irene Staunton. Each cottage has a well-stocked library, great for perusing, a rehearsal for the Harare City Library, which is downtown on Rotten Row, a short but trafficky drive away. I was in Zimbabwe on a Fulbright fellowship to study literary publishing and was also touring places significant to the life and writing of Doris Lessing, who spent most of her childhood and young adulthood in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia). I visited Macheke (Mashopi in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, 1962), Mutare (Umtali of her memoirs), and Harare (known as Salisbury in her youth). In African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992), Lessing describes several visits she made to newly independent Zimbabwe after her lifetime ban from Rhodesia—on the basis of her political organizing—was canceled by the new government. In this prelude to her memoir work, Lessing is keen on exploring both the Rhodesia she had known and the Zimbabwe that was coming into being. Attempting to explain the contrast to her own Rhodesian reading career, Lessing describes the Zimbabwean libraries from the vantage point of 1989: “Perhaps the idea is, better any books than none at all. . . . Yet even the big libraries in Harare and Bulawayo are short of funds. If you send them books, you may get a letter: I am sorry, please don’t send any more, we cannot afford the Customs duties.”1 Lessing further details the eclecticism of Zimbabwean libraries in her monograph Why a Small Black Child in Zimbabwe Stole a Book on Advanced Physics (2004), reporting that they often own pricy textbooks, protected by being uncirculated, as well as
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that Wollstonecraft's tactical use of animal metaphors should be understood in the context of species thinking, a mode of thinking that starkly differentiates humans from other animals in order to champion the soul, reason and language as quintessentially human faculties.
Abstract: This essay examines how Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman charts women’s vexed relationships to the conceptual categories of the human and the animal in eighteenth-century writing. It argues that Wollstonecraft’s tactical use of animal metaphors should be understood in the context of “species thinking,” a mode of thinking that starkly differentiates humans from other animals in order to champion the soul, reason, and language as quintessentially human faculties. The analysis foregrounds how—as Wollstonecraft draws from the modern species concept in order to make a progressive argument about gender equality—she relegates animals to an inferior moral status.
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TL;DR: Wollstonecraft suggests that the reasonable widow disciplines her desires, in part, by internalizing a vision of her dead husband's gaze as mentioned in this paper, and she envisions a widow who welcomes her husband's eyes with a performative flair before asserting the authority of her own gaze.
Abstract: In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft promotes her case for women’s education by contrasting a profligate, coquettish widow with her reasonable, self-controlled counterpart. Wollstonecraft suggests that the reasonable widow disciplines her desires, in part, by internalizing a vision of her dead husband’s gaze. This article provides an overview of the literary history of the dead husband’s eyes and English property law regarding widows before placing Wollstonecraft’s widow alongside eighteenth-century theories about the internalized gaze. Prior to Wollstonecraft, the dead husband’s surveillance was usually imagined by male authors who assumed a prescriptive tone, wielding the gaze as a panoptic device. Wollstonecraft’s revision of earlier treatments complicates that dynamic. She envisions a widow who welcomes her husband’s eyes with a performative flair before asserting the authority of her own gaze. In the process, Wollstonecraft transforms a degrading cultural imperative into an impetus for the widow’s empowerment.
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TL;DR: The authors investigates intersections among childhood pet keeping, maturation, maternity, and sentimental mourning practices in Grace Greenwood's History of My Pets (1851), a collection of vignettes that traces its author's development into womanhood as she experiences her pets' deaths.
Abstract: This essay investigates intersections among childhood pet keeping, maturation, maternity, and sentimental mourning practices in Grace Greenwood’s History of My Pets (1851), a collection of vignettes that traces its author’s development into womanhood as she experiences her pets’ deaths. Greenwood’s stories illustrate how a young girl’s pet keeping enables her maturation into a respectable middle-class woman by introducing her to the transformative symbolic and bodily processes connecting maternity with mortality. As pet keeping helps Greenwood learn the gendered responsibilities she is expected to fulfill in adulthood, it also helps her communicate a distinctly personal sense of self. Ultimately, History of My Pets emphasizes pet keeping’s ability to familiarize girls with the cultural rituals they will be expected to perform as adults; more importantly, it celebrates pet keeping as an experiential practice that enables young women to take ownership of the social narratives their bodies tell.
TL;DR: The authors examines Sandra Cisneros's experience as a Latina writer in the Iowa Writers' Workshop during what Mark McGurl calls the Program Era, through readings of her 1984 The House on Mango Street and her 2015 autobiographical book A House of My Own, which complicates standing theorizations of Program Era affects and emotions in order to develop a deeper understanding of the program era as a period of literary history.
Abstract: This essay examines Sandra Cisneros’s experience as a Latina writer in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop during what Mark McGurl calls the Program Era. Through readings of her 1984 The House on Mango Street and her 2015 autobiographical book A House of My Own, this essay complicates standing theorizations of Program Era affects and emotions in order to develop a deeper understanding of the Program Era as a period of literary history. Integrating affect theory and other scholarship on emotion with Cisneros’s writing, the essay lays out the variety of textured feelings and attachments related to the Program Era experience, especially for writers of color and women writers. Readings of The House on Mango Street elucidate in particular Cisneros’s theory and aesthetics of esperanza—an understudied, wistful sort of hope conceptualized in the character of Esperanza. Through esperanza, Cisneros forges a mode of creative practice that nourishes hope, even amidst structural harm.
TL;DR: In this article, a new method for characterizing the Irish national tale genre based on female union rather than the typical marriage allegory is presented, where the authors introduce a little-known feminist text, Sarah Isdell's The Irish Recluse (1809), then use this text to re-examine the novels of Sydney Owenson and Maria Edgeworth, the history of absenteeism, and the Act of Union.
Abstract: This article presents a new method for characterizing the Irish national tale genre based on female union rather than the typical marriage allegory. It introduces a little-known feminist text, Sarah Isdell’s The Irish Recluse (1809), then uses this text to re-examine the novels of Sydney Owenson and Maria Edgeworth, the history of absenteeism, and the Act of Union. Through its radical imagination, or fancy, The Irish Recluse idealizes feminocentric societies in order to reconceive Irish nationalism, exposing the patriarchal social order as antithetical to good governance in Ireland. Unlike other political narratives at the time, Isdell’s novel argues that the problem with Ireland is its paternal, imperial structures and that women’s influence would foster the best relationship between Ireland and Great Britain amidst debates on if and how they should be unified. Isdell’s fictive, microcosmic Ireland envisions the perfect union through female social support rather than heterosexual marriage, resulting in a definition of Irish national identity that thrives on a matriarchal structure—a concept reiterated in Edgeworth’s and Owenson’s later novels. Criticism might better classify the national tale as a feminist dialectic, which emerged much earlier in history than is typically imagined.
TL;DR: Mina Loy's engagement with dance in her writings exemplifies how a writer can use this corporeal art as a means to articulate a feminist sensibility as discussed by the authors, arguing that Loy draws on dance to interrogate and experiment with the ways meaning is made with the body and how the body can be part of the meanings of language.
Abstract: Mina Loy’s engagement with dance in her writings exemplifies how a writer can use this corporeal art as a means to articulate a feminist sensibility. In a period when dance was undergoing similar seismic shifts to those transforming the written and visual arts, Loy drew on the expressive kinesthetics of ballet and modern dance to examine the gender politics of the dancing body and explore the performative energies of the written word. This article examines Loy’s published and unpublished work—from early poems on Italian futurism to her long poem on the dancer Isadora Duncan—and the dancing that inspired them. It argues that Loy draws on dance to interrogate and experiment with the ways meaning is made with the body and how the body can be part of the meanings of language.
TL;DR: In this article, a corrective to scholarly focus on themes of racial authenticity and Thomas's grief in Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah (1986), instead recovering the section on beulah from the gendered sequestration that is marriage and domesticity.
Abstract: This article offers a corrective to scholarly focus on themes of racial authenticity and Thomas’s grief in Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (1986), instead recovering the section on Beulah from the gendered sequestration that is marriage and domesticity. The essay reads Beulah’s subjectivity through queerness, first by acknowledging that her characterization elides the gendered politics of black heterosexuality and then in exploring Beulah’s longing for her own self as a black female—and queer—erotic. Beulah’s nonnormative genderedness is represented by an aesthetic of emergence that is signaled by the section title (“Canary in Bloom”) and that resonates with the black feminist coupling of ontology with creativity. The artfulness of Beulah’s becoming is evident in the negotiation of voice between the narrator and character; that is, the book’s queer erotics become structural in the collaboration between the narrator and Beulah, a mix of direct and free-indirect narration that permits a female camaraderie as the narrator’s authority is used to sustain Beulah’s limning
TL;DR: In this article, the authors interpret Zadie Smith's novel NW (2012) as an attempt to link E. M. Forster's famous dictum "only connect" with Paul Gilroy's concept of "conviviality".
Abstract: This article interprets Zadie Smith’s novel NW (2012) as an attempt to link E. M. Forster’s famous dictum “only connect” with Paul Gilroy’s concept of “conviviality.” NW’s representation of two friends who are constituted by boundaries of class, race, and ethnicity but who also contest those limits points to the difficulties faced by many contemporary European minorities. In NW, the idea of race collaborates with that of ethnicity and class to form a strongly racialized logic through which the immigrant’s upward mobility is subtly yet decisively affected. NW suggests that Gilroy’s convivial society is only possible with Forsterian, interpersonal connections. Only after Leah and Natalie, the novel’s central characters, rekindle their friendship, can they set in motion the novel’s closing act of justice.
TL;DR: The Gertrude Stein First Reader (1946) as mentioned in this paper is a book that plays with the form of the nineteenth-century literacy textbook and was originally pitched to an educational children's publisher, but is more productively understood as disrupting the reading practices of adults than as a work of children literature.
Abstract: This article argues that The Gertrude Stein First Reader (1946), a text that plays with the form of the nineteenth-century literacy textbook and was originally pitched to an educational children’s publisher, is more productively understood as disrupting the reading practices of adults than as a work of children’s literature. The long-neglected First Reader articulates the value of a queer reading practice rooted in the ambiguous notion of childishness, a concept distinguished here from childlikeness. Stein’s unorthodox pedagogy and her First Reader’s celebration of such “childish” reading practices as error, unmastery, incompetence, and ignorance are put into dialogue with theory’s recent rejection of suspicious, symptomatic, and paranoid models of reading. This critical turn began with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s articulation of a queer “reparative reading” and has developed into a broader attack on critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion. The present article locates in Stein’s work the connections between childishness, queerness, and reparative practices and identifies childishness as an important trope for thinking through contemporary styles in criticism and pedagogy, a trope which allows readers to keep in view the specifically queer origins of the reparative turn