BiblioVault - Books about Women in literature

The Idea of Indian Literature

Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method

Preetha Mani

Northwestern University Press, 2022

Winner of the 2023 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies

Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature, written in as well as against English. Examining canonical Hindi and Tamil short stories from the crucial decades surrounding decolonization, Mani contends that Indian literature must be understood as indeterminate, propositional, and reflective of changing dynamics between local, regional, national, and global readerships. In The Idea of Indian Literature, she explores the paradox that a single canon can be written in multiple languages, each with their own evolving relationships to one another and to English.

Hindi, representing national aspirations, and Tamil, epitomizing the secessionist propensities of the region, are conventionally viewed as poles of the multilingual continuum within Indian literature. Mani shows, however, that during the twentieth century, these literatures were coconstitutive of one another and of the idea of Indian literature itself. The writers discussed here—from short-story forefathers Premchand and Pudumaippittan to women trailblazers Mannu Bhandari and R. Chudamani—imagined a pan-Indian literature based on literary, rather than linguistic, norms, even as their aims were profoundly shaped by discussions of belonging unique to regional identity. Tracing representations of gender and the uses of genre in the shifting thematic and aesthetic practices of short vernacular prose writing, the book offers a view of the Indian literary landscape as itself a field for comparative literature.

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Imagination Transformed

The Evolution of the Female Character in Keat's Poetry

Karla Alwes

Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

From the mortal maidens of 1817 to the omnipotent goddesses of 1819, Keats uses successive female characters as symbols portraying the salvation and destruction, the passion and fear that the imagination elicits. Karla Alwes traces the change in these female figures—multidimensional and mysteriously protean—and shows that they do more than comprise a symbol of the female as a romantic lover. They are the gauge of Keats’s search for identity. As Keats’s poetry changes with experience, from celebration to denial of the earth, the females change from meek to threatening to a final maternal and conciliatory figure.

Keats consistently maintained a strict dichotomy between the flesh-and-blood women he referred to in his letters and the created females of his poetry, in the same way that he rigorously sought to abandon the real for the ideal in his poetry. In her study of Keats’s poetry, Alwes dramatizes the poet’s struggle to come to terms with his two consummate ideals—women and poetry. She demonstrates how his female characters, serving as lovers, guides, and nemeses to the male heroes of the poems, embody not only the hope but also the disappointment that the poet discovers as he strives to reconcile feminine and masculine creativity. Alwes also shows how the myths of Apollo, which Keats integrated into his poetry as early as February 1815, point up his contradictory need for, yet fear of, the feminine. She argues that Keats’s attempt to overcome this fear, impossible to do by concentrating solely on Apollo as a metaphor for the imagination, resulted in his eventual use of maternal goddesses as poetic symbols.

The goddess Moneta in "The Fall of Hyperion" reclaims the power of the maternal earth to represent the final stage in the development of the female. In combining the wisdom of the Apollonian realm with the compassion of the feminine earth, Moneta is more powerful than Apollo and able to show the poet who does not recognize both realms that he is only a "dreamer," one who "venoms all his days, / Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve."

Because of Moneta’s admonishment, Keats becomes the poet capable of creating "To Autumn." In this final ode, Keats taps the transcendent power inherent in the temporal beauty of the earth. His imagination, once attempting to leave the earth, now goes beyond the Apollonian ideal into the realm of salvation—the human heart—that connects him to the earth. And because of his poetic reconciliation between heaven and earth, Keats is ultimately able to portray an earthly timelessness in which "summer has o’er-brimmed" the bees’ "clammy cells," making for "warm days [that] will never cease."

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Impressionist Subjects

Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fiction in England

Tamar Katz

University of Illinois Press, 2000

Exploring the intersection of ideas about woman, subjectivity, and literary authority, Impressionist Subjects reveals the female subject as crucial in framing contradictions central to modernism, particularly the tension between modernism's claim to timeless art and its critique of historical conditions. Against the backdrop of the New Woman movement of the 1890s, Tamar Katz establishes literary impressionism as integral to modernist form and to the modernist project of investigating the nature and function of subjectivity. Focusing on a duality common to impressionism and contemporary ideas of feminine subjectivity, Katz shows how the New Woman reconciled the paradox of a subject at once immersed in the world and securely enclosed in a mysterious interiority. Book chapters feature discussion of modernists including Walter Pater, George Egerton, Sarah Grand, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf.

Sophisticated and tightly argued, Impressionist Subjects is a substantial contribution to the reassessment and expansion of the modernist fiction canon.

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In Contempt

Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature

Kristin Kalsem

The Ohio State University Press, 2012

In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature, by Kristin Kalsem, explores the legal advocacy performed by nineteenth-century women writers in publications of nonfiction and fiction, as well as in real-life courtrooms and in the legal forum provided by the novel form.

The nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented reform in laws affecting married women’s property, child support and custody, lunacy, divorce, birth control, domestic violence, and women in the legal profession. Women’s contributions to these changes in the law, however, have been largely ignored because their work, stories, and perspectives are not recorded in authoritative legal texts; rather, evidence of their arguments and views are recorded in writings of a different kind. This book examines lesser-known works of nonfiction and fiction by legal reformers such as Annie Besant and Georgina Weldon and novelists such as Frances Trollope, Jane Hume Clapperton, George Paston, and Florence Dixie.

In Contempt brings to light new connections between Victorian law and literature, not only with its analysis of many “lost” novels but also with its new legal readings of old ones such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Rider Haggard’s She (1887), and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). This study reexamines the cultural and political roles of the novel in light of “new evidence” that many nineteenth-century novels were “lawless”—showing contempt for, rather than policing, the law.

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In Science's Shadow

Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women

Patricia Murphy

University of Missouri Press, 2006

The Victorian era was characterized by great scientific curiosity—as exemplified by the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man—as well as by new questions regarding the place of women in society. Patricia Murphy now explores the tenuous interplay of gender and science to show how the era’s literature both challenged and reinforced a constrictive role for Victorian women. Focusing on a specific body of literature involving women intensely associated with scientific pursuits, and examining selected noncanonical writings—both fictional and nonfictional representations of scientific women—Murphy demonstrates how these works informed the “Woman Question” by reinforcing or rejecting presumed truths about gender and science.

Some of these texts offer lucid insights into the ways in which women were defined, marginalized, and excluded. In his novel Two on a Tower, Thomas Hardy presented science as a masculine realm threatened by female intrusion, while Wilkie Collins in Heart and Science depicted a woman interested in science as a villainous schemer who falls far short of the Victorian ideal of femininity. And although Charles Reade’s novel A Woman-Hater was more sympathetic in its portrayal of a female physician, it continued to reinforce Victorian stereotypes.

In contrast, Murphy also shows us the poetry of science enthusiast Constance Naden, who used the language of the discipline to reflect its marginalization of women. Murphy also uses the travel memoirs of botanical painter Marianne North, which reveal her attempts to achieve a gender-neutral voice to position her work within the Victorian scientific realm. Through the words of these women, Murphy shows how popular notions of women’s inferiority and marginality were internalized and addressed.

These close readings further elucidate the status of women in late-nineteenth-century England and show how prejudices about women’s intellectual inferiority infiltrated popular culture. In Science’s Shadow makes new inroads in the study of gendered scientific discourse while introducing readers to some little-known, but most revealing, literary works

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IN THE PRESENCE OF AUDIENCE

THE SELF IN DIARIES AND FICTION

DEBORAH MARTINSON

The Ohio State University Press, 2003

As a diary writer imagines shadow readers rifling diary pages, she tweaks images of the self, creating multiple readings of herself, fixed and unfixed. When the readers and potential readers are husbands and publishers, the writer maneuvers carefully in a world of men who are quick to judge and to take offense. She fills the pages with reflections, anecdotes, codes, stories, biographies, and fictions. The diary acts as a site for the writer’s tension, rebellion, and remaking of herself.

In this book Martinson examines the diaries of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Violet Hunt, and Doris Lessing’s fictional character Anna Wulf, and shows that these diaries (and others like them) are not entirely private writings as has been previously assumed. Rather, their authors wrote them knowing they would be read. In these four cases, the audience is the author’s male lover or husband, and Martinson reveals how knowledge of this audience affects the language and content in each diary. Ultimately, she argues, this audience enforces a certain “male censorship” which changes the shape of the revelations, the shape of the writer herself, making it impossible for the female author to be honest in writing about her true self.

Even sophisticated readers often assume that diaries are primarily private. This study interrogates the myth of authenticity and self-revelation in diaries written under the gaze of particular peekers.

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Intelligent Souls?

Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

Samara Anne Cahill

Bucknell University Press, 2019

Intelligent Souls? offers a new understanding of Islam in eighteenth-century Britain. Cahill explores two overlapping strands of thinking about women and Islam, which produce the phenomenon of “feminist orientalism.” One strand describes seventeenth-century ideas about the nature of the soul used to denigrate religio-political opponents. A second tracks the transference of these ideas to Islam during the Glorious Revolution and the Trinitarian controversy of the 1690s. The confluence of these discourses compounded if not wholly produced the stereotype that Islam denied women intelligent souls. Surprisingly, women writers of the period accepted the stereotype, but used it for their own purposes. Rowe, Carter, Lennox, More, and Wollstonecraft, Cahill argues, established common ground with men by leveraging the “otherness” identified with Islam to dispute British culture’s assumption that British women were lacking in intelligence, selfhood, or professional abilities. When Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she accepted that view as true—and “feminist orientalism” was born, introducing a fallacy about Islam to the West that persists to this day.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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Intimate Commerce

Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy

By Victoria Wohl

University of Texas Press, 1997

Exchanges of women between men occur regularly in Greek tragedy—and almost always with catastrophic results. Instead of cementing bonds between men, such exchanges rend them. They allow women, who should be silent objects, to become monstrous subjects, while men often end up as lifeless corpses. But why do the tragedies always represent the transferal of women as disastrous?

Victoria Wohl offers an illuminating analysis of the exchange of women in Sophocles' Trachiniae, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and Euripides' Alcestis. She shows how the attempts of women in these plays to become active subjects rather than passive objects of exchange inevitably fail. While these failures seem to validate male hegemony, the women's actions, however futile, blur the distinction between male subject and female object, calling into question the very nature of the tragic self. What the tragedies thus present, Wohl asserts, is not only an affirmation of Athens' reigning ideologies (including its gender hierarchy) but also the possibility of resistance to them and the imagination of alternatives.

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Intimate Relations

Social Reform and the Late Nineteenth-Century South Asian Novel

Krupa Shandilya

Northwestern University Press, 2017

Intimate Relations remaps the discussion on gender and the nation in South Asia through a close study of the domestic novel as a literary genre and a tool for social reform. As a product of the intersection of literary and social reform movements, in the late nineteenth century the domestic novel became a site for literary innovation and also for rethinking women’s roles in society and politics. Krupa Shandilya focuses primarily on social reform movements that negotiated the intimate relations between men and women in Hindu and Muslim society, namely, the widow remarriage act in Bengal (1856) and the education of women promoted by the Aligarh movement (1858–1900). Both movements were invested in recovering woman as a “respectable” subject for the Hindu and Muslim nation, where respectability connoted asexual spirituality. While most South Asian literary scholarship has focused on a normative Hindu woman, Intimate Relations couples discussion of the representation of the widow in bhadralok (upper-caste, middle-class) society with that of the courtesan of sharif (upper-class, Muslim, feudal) society in Bengali and Urdu novels from the 1880s to the 1920s. By drawing together their disparate histories in the context of contemporaneous social reform movements, Shandilya reflects on the similarities of Hindu and Islamic constructions of the gendered nation.

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Inventing Womanhood

Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing

Tara Williams

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

In Inventing Womanhood, Tara Williamsinvestigates new ideas about womanhood that arose in fourteenth-century Britain and evolved throughout the fifteenth century. In the aftermath of the plague and the substantial cultural shifts of the late 1300s, female roles expanded temporarily. As a result, the dominant models of maiden, wife, and widow could no longer adequately describe women’s roles and lives.

Middle English writers responded by experimenting with new ways of representing women across a variety of genres, from courtly poetry to devotional texts and from royal correspondence to cycle plays. In particular, writers coined new terms, including “womanhood” and “femininity,” and refashioned others, such as “motherhood.” These experiments allowed writers to develop and define a larger idea of womanhood underlying more specific identities like wife or mother and to re-imagine women’s relationships to different kinds of authority—generally masculine and frequently religious.

By exploring the medieval origins of some of our most important gender vocabulary, Inventing Womanhood defamiliarizes our modern usage, which often treats those terms as etymologically transparent and almost limitlessly capacious. It also restores a necessary historical and linguistic dimension to gender studies, providing the groundwork for reconsidering how that language and the categories it creates have determined the ways in which gender has been imagined since the Middle Ages.

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Invisible Presence

The Representation of Women in French-Language Comics

Catriona MacLeod

Intellect Books, 2022

In this groundbreaking study of French-language comic strips, Catriona MacLeod looks at the representation of women across three distinct categories: as main characters and as secondary figures created by male artists, and as characters created by women artists. Drawing from feminist scholarship, especially well-known film and literary theorists, the book asks what it means to draw and depict women from within a phallocentric, male-dominated paradigm as well as how the particular medium of bande dessinée (the French-language graphic novel) has shaped dominant representations of women.

MacLeod’s exploration focuses on the representation of female characters in French comics across genres, artistic styles, and time periods. Until now, these characters and their creators have received relatively little scholarly attention, or have only been considered individually, rather than within wider patterns of female representation; this book aims to correct that.

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Isabel Rules

Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power

Barbara F. Weissberger

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

A deconstruction of the strategies used to shape the image of a powerful woman ruler. As queen of Spain, Isabel I of Castile (known to history as Isabella the Catholic, 1474-1504) oversaw the creation of Europe's first nation-state and laid the foundations for its emergence as the largest empire the West has ever known--nearly a century before the better known and more widely studied Elizabeth I of England. What we know of this remarkable ruler is typically gleaned from hagiographic texts that negate her power and accept her own propagandistic self-fashioning as legitimate heir, pious princess, devoted wife, and heaven-sent healer of the wounds inflicted on Spain's body politic by impotent kings, seditious nobles, and such undesirable others as Jews, Muslims, and sodomites. Isabel Rules is the first book to examine the formation of the queen's public image, focusing on strategies designed to cope with the ideological and cultural dissonance created by the combination of her gender and her profoundly patriarchal political program for unifying and purifying Spain. Barbara Weissberger identifies two primary and interrelated strategies among the supporters of the queen--often writing in her employ--and her critics. Her loyalists use Marian imagery to portray Isabel as a pious, chaste, and submissive queen consort to her husband Ferdinand, while her opponents imagine the queen as a voracious and lascivious whore whose illicit power threatens the virility of her male subjects and inverts the traditional gender hierarchy. Weissberger applies a materialist feminist perspective to a wide array of texts of the second half of the fifteenth century in order to uncover and study the masculine psychosexual anxiety created by Isabel's anomalous power. She then demonstrates the persistence of the two sides of the propagandistic construction of the Catholic queen, reviewing modern treatments in Francoist schoolbooks and in the fiction of Juan Goytisolo, Alejo Carpentier, and Salman Rushdie. Barbara F. Weissberger is associate professor of Spanish at the University of Minnesota.

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Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative

Susan Hardy Aiken

University of Chicago Press, 1990

Although Isak Dinesen has been widely acclaimed as a popular writer, her work has received little sustained critical attention. In this revisionist study, Susan Hardy Aiken takes up the complex relations of gender, sexuality, and representation in Dinesen's narratives. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist theories, Aiken shows how the form and meaning of Dinesen's texts are affected by her doubled situations as a Dane who wrote in English, a European who lived for many years in Africa, and a woman who wrote under a male pseudonym within a male-centered literary tradition.

In a series of readings that range across Dinesen's career, Aiken demonstrates that Dinesen persistently asserted the inseparability of gender and the engendering of narrative. She argues that Dinesen's texts anticipate in remarkable ways some of the most radical insights of contemporary literary theories, particularly those of French feminist criticism. Aiken also offers a major rereading of Out of Africa that both addresses its distinctiveness as a colonialist text and places it within Dinesen's larger oeuvre.

In Aiken's account, Dinesen's work emerges as a compelling inquiry into sexual difference and the ways it informs culture, subjectivity, and the language that is their medium. This important book will at last give Isak Dinesen's work the prominence it deserves in literary studies.

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