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Stowe's Truths: Privacy, Privation, and The Mob

Katherine Adams

in Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women's Life Writing, 1840-1890

This chapter examines mid-19th-century U.S. privacy discourse in its dystopian aspect, where privacy is a force that threatens to invade the ... More

This chapter examines mid-19th-century U.S. privacy discourse in its dystopian aspect, where privacy is a force that threatens to invade the public sphere and destroy free democratic association. The argument focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe's portrayals of Sojourner Truth in her 1856 novel Dred and her 1863 Atlantic Monthly essay “Sojourner Truth: The Libyan Sibyl.” It shows how Stowe operates within a pattern of representation that poses blacks as figures of privation—that is, as subjects enslaved by their own bodies, incapable of self-containing self-government—through which white Americans deflected the problem of their own surplus embodiment and the failures of free labor and market idealism that produced it. The chapter demonstrates that Stowe uses Truth to engage this national crisis of uncontained bodies and, in so doing, to negotiate the embodied limits of her own female authorship.Less

Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes and the Beautiful Dead

Matthew Head

in Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany

Women composed and published music far more freely in the late eighteenth century than would have been predicted by the now conventional prohibition hypothesis, that is, the idea they were “not ... More

Women composed and published music far more freely in the late eighteenth century than would have been predicted by the now conventional prohibition hypothesis, that is, the idea they were “not meant” to do it. The meaning of female composing is nonetheless difficult to recover. A case study of Minna Brandes-a singer and actress whose music was published as a posthumous memorial after her death, at 23, in 1788-suggests that composing was at the boundary of virtue and vice. On her death, Minna Brandes’s father and her teacher, Hönicke, stressed that she sought neither fame nor fortune from her compositions. Brandes’s memorialization shared with the novels of Goethe a topos of the female dead in which the corpse (or its representation) was exhibited as a beautiful artifact. Her activities as a composer were set within a framework of bourgeois femininity. However, such representations were misleading. Her collected works suggest she was working toward a published collection of strophic German songs and toward the composition of operatic music for her own performance. The idealizing tropes of the memorials are also challenged by Johann Christian Brandes’s later memoirs in which his daughter’s turn to composition is situated in what he described as her multiple breaches of deferential daughterly conduct.Less

Introduction: Onna Monogatari

Irene González-López and Michael Smith

in Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity

The introduction presents an overview of Tanaka’s life and career vis-a-vis the history of twentieth-century Japan, emphasising how women participated in and were affected by legal, political and ... More

The introduction presents an overview of Tanaka’s life and career vis-a-vis the history of twentieth-century Japan, emphasising how women participated in and were affected by legal, political and socio-economic changes. Through Tanaka’s professional development, it revisits the evolution of the Japanese studio system and stardom, and explains the importance of women as subjects within the films, consumers of the industry, and professionals behind the scenes. This historical overview highlights Japan’s negotiation of modernity and tradition, often played out through symbolic dichotomies of gender and sexuality. By underscoring women’s new routes of mobility, the authors challenge the simplified image of Japanese oppressed women. The second part of the introduction posits director Tanaka as an outstanding, yet understudied, figure in the world history of women filmmaking. Her case inspires compelling questions around labels such as female authorship, star-as-author, and director-as-star and their role in advancing the production and acknowledgement of women filmmaking.Less

Conclusion

Robin Roberts

in Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American Popular Culture

The conclusion provides an overview of the analysis of individual texts and explains their connections. The continuation of the tradition appears in a brief discussion of the female ghost in Natashia ... More

The conclusion provides an overview of the analysis of individual texts and explains their connections. The continuation of the tradition appears in a brief discussion of the female ghost in Natashia Deón’s recent novel, Grace. The persistence of the female ghost in popular culture over a long time period and in many genres suggests that this figure provides an effective outlet for deep cultural concerns. The narratives covered in The Untold Story reveal that, although the female ghost is by definition disembodied, she encapsulates the feminine body, especially the power of the maternal body. The female ghost confronts issues of narrative control and language, with the figure presenting an alternative to male-dominated discourse. Relationships between women living and dead develop, promoting the idea of feminine solidarity. And male characters are educated, usually against their will, into an understanding of alternative paths to knowledge.Less

Afterword

Hero Chalmers

in Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689

This afterword briefly examines the modulations of royalist female authorship into the later 17th and early 18th centuries. Although there are definite strands of continuity — in, say, the Behn-like ... More

This afterword briefly examines the modulations of royalist female authorship into the later 17th and early 18th centuries. Although there are definite strands of continuity — in, say, the Behn-like eroticised image of Delariviere Manley or the importance of friendship and exile in the work of Jane Barker — the greater emphasis on moral and sentimental notions of femininity emphasises the degree to which the political climate of the decades around the Restoration provided royalist women writers with exceptional conditions for authorial self-assertion and literary experimentation.Less

Redefining the Maternal Tradition

in Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences

This chapter, which examines the general pattern of female authorship in the sciences in Victorian England, discusses the different routes taken by these women to scientific authorship and describes ... More

This chapter, which examines the general pattern of female authorship in the sciences in Victorian England, discusses the different routes taken by these women to scientific authorship and describes their appeal to readers. It also investigates how these women writers experimented with literary formats in order to reach their readers, and analyzes their responses to the views of scientific naturalists on the implications of evolutionary theory for understanding the role of Christianity and of women in Victorian society.Less

What a Woman Wants? Nancy Meyers’s The Intern

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz

in Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers

This chapter focalises on Nancy Meyers, arguably the most successful woman filmmaker of all time. It shows how Meyers’s carefully composed mise-en-scène and the portrayal of privileged women ... More

This chapter focalises on Nancy Meyers, arguably the most successful woman filmmaker of all time. It shows how Meyers’s carefully composed mise-en-scène and the portrayal of privileged women protagonists contribute to a critical alignment between the director and her films, and at the same time how they are used to demonstrate Meyers’s lack of credibility as an auteur (a reading strategy which often impacts other women directors, such as Sofia Coppola, as analysed in Ch. 5). This analysis is framed within the broader discussions of auteurism, the generic conventions of the romcom and the so-called feminisation of mass culture (Husseyn 1986, Hollows 2005), as well as the cultural, critical and industrial gendering of genres. The remainder of the chapter offers an examination of The Intern (2015). The film has been dubbed as ‘a romantic comedy without the romance’, and it indeed draws on several of its generic conventions: romance’s narrative stages, the presence of the ‘wrong partner’, the sense of ‘belonging together’, and bromantic elements which allow for a rethinking of the gendering of genres. The detailed analysis of the film reveals Meyers’s self-reflexive strategies – rich discursive histories engendered by the presence of stars Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, among others – that invoke issues of central importance in this book: the question of female authorship in a male-dominated film industry, and the heritage and evolution of genre in the Hollywood context.Less

Kinuyo and Sumie: When Women Write and Direct

Ayako Saito

in Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity

Female authorship is the subject of this chapter, which concentrates on Tanaka’s third film, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955). This was her first collaboration with scriptwriter ... More

Female authorship is the subject of this chapter, which concentrates on Tanaka’s third film, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955). This was her first collaboration with scriptwriter Tanaka Sumie, and the chapter reveals the negotiation between two very different women of the same generation who worked together to articulate female subjectivity. Examining their distinct life experiences and approaches to the depiction of women (and female sexuality in particular) works to position Tanaka in the history of Japanese women’s cinema and melodrama. An exhaustive analysis of screenplays, shooting scripts, interviews, and contemporary reviews renders visible Tanaka’s authorial voice as a woman and her visual translation and intervention in Sumie’s script. The chapter makes a case of Tanaka’s creative directorial worth, while exposing why both the film industry and film studies may have hitherto overlooked her directed works.Less

‘Scriptrix Narrans’: Digital Documentary Storytelling’s Radical Potential

Gail Vanstone

in Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity and Activism

Drawing on Agnès Varda’s feminised cinécriture, in tandem with works by the video-artist cum activist Sharon Daniel, the author studies Indigenous people’s voice making in different cultural media. ... More

Drawing on Agnès Varda’s feminised cinécriture, in tandem with works by the video-artist cum activist Sharon Daniel, the author studies Indigenous people’s voice making in different cultural media. In finding the auteur’s unique gaze missing in Inuit filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s work the author instead talks of an unbounded form of storytelling through the interactive documentary format and scriptrix narrans. This method, typical of female authorship, melds the filmed-filmer and the viewer, devoting less attention to the individual auteur.Less

From Visceral Style to Discourse of Resistance: Reading Alka Sadat’s Afghan Documentaries on Violence Against Women

Anna Misiak

in Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity and Activism

This essay explores the director’s documentary tactics of granting the voice to the oppressed women through a number of visual and textual distancing strategies. It also shows that Sadat’s films ... More

This essay explores the director’s documentary tactics of granting the voice to the oppressed women through a number of visual and textual distancing strategies. It also shows that Sadat’s films offer multi-layered analyses of reasons behind violence against women in the country along with the lamentable powerlessness of Afghan women’s rights activist. The author concludes, that Sadat at the same time manages to convey the complexity of the gender situation in her country in order to” resist the Eurocentric approaches that essentialise Afghan culture”.Less

Mary Robinson and the Wreath of Fame

Melissa Sodeman

in Sentimental Memorials: Women and the Novel in Literary History

This chapter explores Mary Robinson’s attempt to simultaneously capitalize on her notoriety to sell books and to triumph over her damaged reputation. Infamous in the 1780s for her highly public ... More

This chapter explores Mary Robinson’s attempt to simultaneously capitalize on her notoriety to sell books and to triumph over her damaged reputation. Infamous in the 1780s for her highly public sexual liaisons, Robinson later leveraged her renown and literary talent into a reputation as a female genius. Her bid for literary fame, however, ran into trouble as popular sentimental literature slipped out of emerging notions of literary canonicity. As the transience of her particular mode of female genius became apparent, Robinson used her fiction to reflect on the ephemerality of sentimental form and the short-lived nature of women’s literary fame. Her novels link the decline of female genius and the passing of sentimental literature to consider what these twin losses mean for women’s literary history.Less

‘The complex and antagonistic forces that constitute one soul’: conflict between societal expectations and individual desires in Clemence Housman’s The Werewolf and Rosamund Marriott Watson’s ‘A Ballad of the Were-wolf’

Carys Crossen

in She-wolf: A cultural history of female werewolves

The nineteenth century was a significant one in terms of literature featuring female werewolves. Not only did the female werewolf make her first appearance in written fiction, but it was also the ... More

The nineteenth century was a significant one in terms of literature featuring female werewolves. Not only did the female werewolf make her first appearance in written fiction, but it was also the first century that saw female authors appropriate the figure of the female lycanthrope for their works of literature. This chapter focuses on Clemence Housman’s ‘The Werewolf’ and Rosamund Marriott Watson’s ‘A Ballad of the Were-wolf’ to explore gender anxieties and changing social roles at the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on theorisations of female authorship, it posits the female werewolf as the Gothic ‘dark double’ and suggests a reading of this figure as the external embodiment of authors’ rebellious and active tendencies. However, the chapter also suggests that the paradoxical sense of irresolution in these examples of late Victorian literature, arguing that there appears to be no way to reconcile the more mutinous elements of femininity to society expectations in these lycanthropic tales.Less

Margaret Cavendish: Nature and Originality

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

in Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry and Culture 1640-1680

This chapter examines Margaret Cavendish's early works, including the philosophical poetry of Poems, and Fancies, and the esoteric essays of The Worlds Olio. As she starts her literary career, ... More

This chapter examines Margaret Cavendish's early works, including the philosophical poetry of Poems, and Fancies, and the esoteric essays of The Worlds Olio. As she starts her literary career, Cavendish frequently claims to have read nothing. She shuns bookish learning for an ideal of originality which is organic and spontaneously productive. It is argued that Cavendish's denials of reading are not simply feminine modesty or defensiveness, but show her embracing ideals of modernity; parallels emerge with thinkers including Thomas Hobbes, and poets like William Davenant who were championing originality over imitation as their literary ideal. The chapter traces Cavendish's witty critique of the blazon tradition in which women are described through a catalogue of natural objects. She upturns this Petrarchan and Cavalier tradition in two ways, through science and through poetic genre. These witty connections challenge our conception of women's relationship to science at the birth of the Royal Society.Less

Constructing an Intimate Sphere Through Her Own Female Body: Naomi Kawase’s Documentary Films

Wakae Nakane

in Female Authorship and the Documentary Image: Theory, Practice and Aesthetics

The majority of Naomi Kawase’s documentary films are based on her own life experiences, leading to conclusions that they are entirely self-reflexive. The author argues that ‘they instead show an ... More

The majority of Naomi Kawase’s documentary films are based on her own life experiences, leading to conclusions that they are entirely self-reflexive. The author argues that ‘they instead show an alternative way of constructing relationships among people’. She also claims that indicate a possibility to ‘go beyond the binarism between ‘individual’ and ‘society’’ by creating an ‘intimate sphere’ which transcends the general idea of societal discourse.Less

Navigating Nationhood, Gender, and the Robinsonade in The Dreams of Myfanwy

Siwan M. Rosser

in Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade: New Paradigms for Young Readers

This chapter argues that The Dreams of Myfanwy, written by Welsh writer Moelona and concerned with the experiences of the female author writing in a minority language, negotiates an intriguing ... More

This chapter argues that The Dreams of Myfanwy, written by Welsh writer Moelona and concerned with the experiences of the female author writing in a minority language, negotiates an intriguing relationship with, and offers perspective on, the patriarchal, imperial ideologies traditionally associated with imitations of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The chapter contends that the didactic impulse of this particular Robinsonade is to inculcate within its young readers a sense of Welsh national and cultural difference; like many other popular adventure novels written in Welsh from the 1910s to the 1930s, Moelona’s novel is specifically designed to entice readers and to instil a sense of pride in their cultural and linguistic distinctiveness. The chapter concludes by arguing that this text is a teaching tool that embodies the tension between creativity and didacticism, and which ultimately allows its young readers to navigate an understanding of what it meant to be a young Welsh adolescent in early 20th-century Britain.Less

Charlotte Smith’s Literary Exile

Melissa Sodeman

in Sentimental Memorials: Women and the Novel in Literary History

This chapter traces how the literary transformations of the later eighteenth century shaped how Charlotte Smith imagined her way into authorship. Alienated from established literary coteries and ... More

This chapter traces how the literary transformations of the later eighteenth century shaped how Charlotte Smith imagined her way into authorship. Alienated from established literary coteries and doubly dispossessed by copyright and coverture, Smith casts herself as a literary exile whose poverty and dispossession forces her to repeatedly take up the difficult circumstances of her life in her books. Smith’s fiction clarifies how her mimetic representation of exile, rooted in her own experience, understands that experience as one of unoriginality properly represented through copying. Telling her story through others’ words suggests how profoundly she feels dispossessed—not even her history is hers to tell—and simultaneously indicates that she understands her novels as bound to copy out literary relations that serve the interests of male, property-owning authority.Less