Early Fiction and the Frightened Male
TL;DR: In our literary era of anti-heroes we may yearn for the days before Portnoy, when men were men, when Tom Jones grandly conceals the fact that he's broken an arm in rescuing his beloved Sophia, whom he treats with flawless respect until it becomes legal, thus moral, to take her to bed.
Abstract: In our literary era of anti-heroes we may yearn for the days before Portnoy, when men were men, when Tom Jones grandly conceals the fact that he's broken an arm in rescuing his beloved Sophia, whom he treats with flawless respect until it becomes legal, thus moral, to take her to bed. How clear it all is as we recall it, this classic fiction: Squire Allworthy can't tell the good people from the bad, but the reader has no trouble at all. Sometimes a hero (Peregrine Pickle, for example) or a heroine's consort (say Squire B. in Pamela) requires educating before he earns his happiness, but happiness is a foregone conclusion. The hero suffers his conflicts, internal and external, without agonies of introversion; moreover, we can expect him to end up with the money and the girl. Do money and girl satisfy his needs, is that what the heroes (and for that matter the villains) of eighteenth-century novels truly want? In fact a certain murk lies beneath the clarity of many early English novels, buried in each hero the shadow, the anti-hero, within many a villain the hidden sufferer. There are surprising ambivalences in this fiction, ambivalences particularly of sexual feeling, partly concealed, structurally important in the shaping of story tensions. Eighteenth-century fiction appears to work with simple dichotomiesseducer versus upright citizen, good woman versus bad-and to find infinite excitement in the movement between opposite poles: will Lovelace reform before it's too late? will Tom be ruined by his lustfulness? But what exactly it means to be a seducer or a man of feeling is often strikingly complicated. The complications most often derive from the diverse meanings of sexual interchange, which usually involves money (elaborate financial settlements sometimes seem the real substance of eighteenth-century marriage) and which always demands physicality (even the supernaturally chaste Clarissa comments often on the superiority of Lovelace's "person" to that of her other suitor). In an era when sex led almost inevitably to procreation, it is emphatically a social as well as an individual concern, containing dynastic possibilities or threatening the destruction of family stability. Sexual relationship implies emotion and raises loudly the century's question of how emotion should properly be expressed and controlled. Novels deal with all these matters-money, bodies, families, feelings. They also reveal the problem of power which underlies them. "Both sexes," Clarissa's cousin Morden observes, "too much love to have each other in their power: yet he hardly ever knew man or woman who was very fond of power make a right use of it." Power is-as Chaucer and Boccaccio
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01 Jan 1992
TL;DR: A series of protest dramas at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket between 1730 and 1737 were staged by Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Charke, and others as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Staging works unaccepted by and unacceptable to the establishment, Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Charke, and company produced a series of protest dramas at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket between 1730 and 1737. The playwrights deliberately ruptured theatric traditions and boldly presented plays challenging not only the mainstream theatre, but the current social system. Negating the doctrine that tragedy properly concerns the great man, and comedy reviles the low-born, the playwrights at the Little Theatre in both their tragedies and comedies enlarged the province of the drama to include the ordinary human with real problems. By this means, they displaced the aristocratic concept of theatre based on class distinctions and brought in its place a realistic appraisal of the systematic exclusion by class and gender. Although critics have singled out Fielding as a precipitator of the Licensing Act, they have dwelled on his dramas as political commentary and have ignored him as part of a protest movement. He, along with Haywood and the others, go to extremes to prove that "social” and "moral" are unfortunately identical terms. While their characters vary considerably in makeup and in life experiences, one element is fundamental to them all:
34 citations
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore Defoe's nature of subjectivity construction through a close analysis of his novels and conclude that both the text and self are deconstructed through a process of degenderization becoming new spaces outside the definable boundaries of language thus outside the research scope of any linguistically determined study.
Abstract: The aim of this study is to explore Daniel Defoe’s nature of subjectivity construction through a close analysis of his novels. To read Defoe’s novels chronologically is to witness the gradual and unconscious psychological journey of a writing subject from Lacanian Symbolic (patriarchy) towards deterioration of gender boundaries (androgyny). The idea running through the chapters of this dissertation is to separate, categorize and analyse Defoe’s entire novelistic output to illustrate how his fiction, unlike his non fiction, mark a departure from the dominant patriarchal tradition he wrote in. This process corresponds to Lacan’s tripartite model (Symbolic/Imaginary/Real) of subjectivity construction. Theoretically this means that Defoe’s fixed masculine subjectivity (Symbolic) gave way initially to a fluid feminine subjectivity (Imaginary / Semiotic) and eventually to androgyny or total a/subjectivity (Real). Applying psychoanalytic feminist theory this study analyses, in three parts, the psychodynamics of Defoe’s female characters to extract his engagement in a similar process of self definition. Part I discusses how, as a Lacanian subject under the impact of the Symbolic Order, Defoe’s voice in his four early novels is a public voice advocating the Law of the Father. Defoe’s gaze in Robinson Crusoe, Memoirs of a Cavalier, Captain Singleton, and A Journal of the Plague Year is predominantly male, his attitude gendered and his authorial perspective patriarchal. He writes as the male Self to fix the female Other in place. Part II illustrates how, as a Kristevan subject under the impact of Semiotic, Defoe practises the maternal Chora in his two later novels Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack. Here, the repressed feminine within him alters his gendered perspective and he emerges as a subject-in-process/on-trial with a private voice. Part III analyses how Defoe breaks the boundaries of subjectivity as well as gender by achieving androgyny through the Lacanian Real. In his final novel Roxana he steps beyond subjectivity experiencing the jouissance as well as the trauma of the Real through a homeless authorial voice. The project concludes that both Defoe’s text and Self are deconstructed through a process of degenderization becoming new spaces outside the definable boundaries of language thus outside the research scope of any linguistically determined study.
10 citations
References
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01 Jan 1992
TL;DR: A series of protest dramas at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket between 1730 and 1737 were staged by Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Charke, and others as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Staging works unaccepted by and unacceptable to the establishment, Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Charke, and company produced a series of protest dramas at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket between 1730 and 1737. The playwrights deliberately ruptured theatric traditions and boldly presented plays challenging not only the mainstream theatre, but the current social system. Negating the doctrine that tragedy properly concerns the great man, and comedy reviles the low-born, the playwrights at the Little Theatre in both their tragedies and comedies enlarged the province of the drama to include the ordinary human with real problems. By this means, they displaced the aristocratic concept of theatre based on class distinctions and brought in its place a realistic appraisal of the systematic exclusion by class and gender. Although critics have singled out Fielding as a precipitator of the Licensing Act, they have dwelled on his dramas as political commentary and have ignored him as part of a protest movement. He, along with Haywood and the others, go to extremes to prove that "social” and "moral" are unfortunately identical terms. While their characters vary considerably in makeup and in life experiences, one element is fundamental to them all:
34 citations
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore Defoe's nature of subjectivity construction through a close analysis of his novels and conclude that both the text and self are deconstructed through a process of degenderization becoming new spaces outside the definable boundaries of language thus outside the research scope of any linguistically determined study.
Abstract: The aim of this study is to explore Daniel Defoe’s nature of subjectivity construction through a close analysis of his novels. To read Defoe’s novels chronologically is to witness the gradual and unconscious psychological journey of a writing subject from Lacanian Symbolic (patriarchy) towards deterioration of gender boundaries (androgyny). The idea running through the chapters of this dissertation is to separate, categorize and analyse Defoe’s entire novelistic output to illustrate how his fiction, unlike his non fiction, mark a departure from the dominant patriarchal tradition he wrote in. This process corresponds to Lacan’s tripartite model (Symbolic/Imaginary/Real) of subjectivity construction. Theoretically this means that Defoe’s fixed masculine subjectivity (Symbolic) gave way initially to a fluid feminine subjectivity (Imaginary / Semiotic) and eventually to androgyny or total a/subjectivity (Real). Applying psychoanalytic feminist theory this study analyses, in three parts, the psychodynamics of Defoe’s female characters to extract his engagement in a similar process of self definition. Part I discusses how, as a Lacanian subject under the impact of the Symbolic Order, Defoe’s voice in his four early novels is a public voice advocating the Law of the Father. Defoe’s gaze in Robinson Crusoe, Memoirs of a Cavalier, Captain Singleton, and A Journal of the Plague Year is predominantly male, his attitude gendered and his authorial perspective patriarchal. He writes as the male Self to fix the female Other in place. Part II illustrates how, as a Kristevan subject under the impact of Semiotic, Defoe practises the maternal Chora in his two later novels Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack. Here, the repressed feminine within him alters his gendered perspective and he emerges as a subject-in-process/on-trial with a private voice. Part III analyses how Defoe breaks the boundaries of subjectivity as well as gender by achieving androgyny through the Lacanian Real. In his final novel Roxana he steps beyond subjectivity experiencing the jouissance as well as the trauma of the Real through a homeless authorial voice. The project concludes that both Defoe’s text and Self are deconstructed through a process of degenderization becoming new spaces outside the definable boundaries of language thus outside the research scope of any linguistically determined study.
10 citations