ENGL 8354 Fall 2019

I have finally discovered the source of my previous inability to post to the blog. Hurrah!

I went into the research process knowing that I wanted to look into conceptions of maternity and motherhood, as Maria is so focused on this role. It’s likely, too, that I was particularly affected by the trauma of having one’s newborn torn from them and then likely killed via neglect or malice; as a mother myself, stories in which a child is lost or taken have a profound impact on me. It was interesting, too, that Maria was so focused on re-uniting with her child—not because it’s unusual for a mother to want to be with their child but because, in much of literature, children are somewhat of a trap for women characters. Literary children limit their mother’s autonomy even more than it already is, foreclose on avenues of freedom and self-sufficiency, and generally seem to represent a terrible burden that, ironically or paradoxically, also seem capable of exciting deep attachment and love.

As I researched Maria, however, I found that many of the articles were returning to this conversation about breastfeeding and Wollstonecraft’s general feminist philosophy. It was for this reason that I selected three texts, spanning roughly the last quarter-century, that sought to critique or redeem Wollstonecraft’s apparent focus on breast-feeding as something that could somehow grant women both the benefits of gendered femininity and the benefits of a less gendered citizenship or companionship. As my future research plans heavily incorporate women writers’ depictions of female relationships—motherhood, sisterhood, daughter…hood?—I am intrigued by the notion of seeing how the expectations and performance of motherhood evolved from its 18^th century roots into the present. I may, then, attempt to build on this research by seeking to read more texts that discuss woman as a maternal figure; I’m not sure yet if this research should perform comparative work between Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries or if I should move further into the future to trace an evolution. At least three of the texts that I’m considering for my dissertation are contemporary women’s literature that prominently feature a mother/daughter relationship and some discuss the myth of the maternal rather explicitly.

Beyond this insight about the direction my research should take, I found the cultural context in these articles to be very interesting. One of the reasons I experience somewhat more difficulty in coming up with and making strong claims about historical fiction is my anxiety about the need for cultural context. I’m not particularly comfortable drawing conclusions about the significance or implications of a text when I know little-to-nothing about the issues it was addressing, the climate into which it was released, and the probable and actual responses of its audience. The research process did what I usually most want a research process to do: educate me about some of the things I didn’t know that the author and her readers would have. Perhaps this is because I’ve been teaching some version of Freshman Comp I & II for the last 5 years of my life, but I think the audience shapes the text. Obviously, we can see and argue that these types of classic literary texts remain relevant and are, in their way, timeless—but I still struggle to see how I can prove some difference or similarity to other texts if I have no concept of how that text would have been conceived and received.

In approaching the second annotated bibliography, my initial thought was to seek articles or chapters dealing with the inset narratives in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or The Wrongs of Women. In particular, I was interested in Jemima, and the first source I found dealt with Jemima’s self-narration as it provides a potential commentary on prostitute biographies, a popular genre of the eighteenth century. As I continued to peruse the articles available, I noticed several titles making reference to theories of trauma and discussion of Wollstonecraft. The two that I chose deal specifically with narration and trauma, examining the ways that trauma both can and can’t be expressed through spoken narrative or writing.

I hadn’t considered the lens of trauma theory when I first explored the topic, and I’m still pondering how those considerations color ideas of the power of narration. My interest in form began with the first annotated bibliography, which focused specifically on Clarissa’s epistolary framework. One point that came up during class discussion of my annotated bibliography on Maria, however, was the potential for the ideas of trauma and narration to be examined in relation to Clarissa as well. Looking back on those earlier annotations, I recall Kvande’s connection between the epistolary form and the “female expressive self” (240). It’s interesting to consider the moments when Clarissa is able to put words to her trauma, and the moments where her ability to express herself fail. Maria is fragmentary in its form, which speaks in some ways to the nature of its heroine’s conflicts; Clarissa’s mental state in the aftermath of her rape by Lovelace is also represented through textual fragments. Trauma often seems to impede narrative in these texts, even as characters seek to use narrative—written or spoken—to articulate or to resolve trauma.

Both assignments provided an opportunity to investigate the minutia of the related works’ structures to a more significant extent. Schönfelder’s article, for example, noted that as many as twenty-five narratives of female experiences are articulated, to either a limited or deeper extent, as Maria develops. I enjoyed pursuing those threads for purposes of the annotations; I am interested in the way that those narrative details influence the work as a whole. I’m not certain how much bearing the lens of trauma theory will have on my work as I anticipate the final project. However, I hope that the discussions of narrative will in some way prove useful even if my project isn’t centered on Clarissa or Maria in particular.

As I mentioned in class, I am interested in developing a final project based on gaming treatment of, for lack of a better phrase, the “world of Jane Austen.” Thus far, I have done some reading about an online game called Ever, Jane and a card-based game called Good Society: A Jane Austen RPG. Both involve a multiplayer format, and dynamics and storylines are based in character/player interactions. For the project itself, I might explore how the narrative style that the gaming structure facilitates approximates the forms we have seen in the texts we have read this semester. The desire to engage with material in something like a game implies significant appreciation; I am also curious to consider what conclusions games like these might allow us to draw about the way contemporary audiences think about the world surrounding Austen.

I’ve been interested in the ways in which Evelina interacts with culture and functions in the public sphere, so that’s what I focused on here.

Dykstal, Timothy. “‘Evelina’ and the Culture Industry.” Criticism, vol. 37, no. 4 (1995), pp. 559–81.

Jürgen Habermas has posited that as the eighteenth-century middle class entered the public sphere and began to form their own opinions of art, they developed critical thinking skills that were eventually applied to politics and social issues. This is the framework in which Dykstal discusses Evelina’s relationship to culture. The author describes three benefits of art—moral instruction, enlightenment, and connoisseurship—and explores the degree to which Evelina (and eighteenth-century women more broadly) engage with them. Ultimately, he asserts that, with the notable exception of reading, art is reduced to spectacle in Evelina and the benefits proposed by Habermas are absent.

Park, Julie. “Pains and Pleasures of the Automaton: Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 4, no. 3 (2006), pp. 23–49.

In her three novels, Frances Burney focuses on the time period between childhood and marriage, and Park examines the way in which she portrays the relationship between the private minds of her female characters and their public life. Park believes that the coming out process involves a “compulsive identification with the automaton” and explores Burney’s portrayal of her heroines through that lens. While she sees Burney as identifying her characters with the automaton, she does not simply parrot a cultural conceit. Instead, Park asserts, Burney uses the novels to explore the degree to which individual affect can exist within automatized femininity.

Straub, Kristina. “Fanny Burney’s ‘Evelina’ and the ‘Gulphs, Pits, and Precipices’ of Eighteenth-Century Female Life. The Eighteenth Century, vol. 2, no. 3 (1986), pp. 230–46.

Straub analyzes how Frances Burney portrays the power and social importance of women in Evelina. Specifically, she is interested in the differences between women during courtship—when they are most in the public sphere—and afterward, and in the tension between the ideals of romantic love and the powerlessness that often followed marriage in the eighteenth century. Through a close reading of the text, Straub asserts that though Evelina is subversive is some ways, it ultimately reinforces patriarchal notions of power: female power must acknowledge and defer to male power.

Field, Corinne. “BREAST-FEEDING, SEXUAL PLEASURE, AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT’S VINDICATION.” Critical Matrix, vol. 9, no. 2, Princeton University, Program in the Study of Women and Gender, Dec. 1995, p. 25, http://search.proquest.com/docview/89070870/.

            In this article, Field discusses and dissects Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument for female equality in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by means of historical, political, biographical, and cultural contexts concerning maternity. In understanding Wollstonecraft’s text as a response to Enlightenment ideas on women’s bodies and their inferior position to male counterparts, Field notes that Vindication, addressed more specifically to Rousseau, employs the act of breastfeeding as evidence for women’s education and independence rather than against it. Flipping Rousseau’s argument over, Wollstonecraft refers to the anti-wet nurse campaign as reason women are meant to be more than sexual objects in the role as mother and also suggests that “men’s desire turned women into sexual objects for male consumption, but this male-defined sexuality could not be natural because it prevented women from being good mothers.” Aside from establishing the female breast as the location of female independence and agency, Field also speculates on Wollstonecraft’s rationale of rejecting coquetry for “rational affection” as a reaction to her own witnessing of the unpleasant interactions between her parents. Ending the article, Field acknowledges the irony between Wollstonecraft’s idea that nature granted pregnant women and mothers a status above a mere sexual object and her untimely death after complications during giving birth and also the irony of her argument regarding the female breast and how it is seemingly counter-revolutionary to feminism, particularly modern feminism.

“The Maternal Aliment: Feeding Daughters in the Works of Mary       Wollstonecraft.” Spilling the Beans: Eating, Cooking, Reading and Writing in British   Women’s Fiction, 1770-1830, Manchester University Press, 2013.

            In this rather lengthy chapter, issues of consumption and (re)production regarding the mother’s body in both socio-historical and literary contexts are the main concentration. The change of culture relating to breastfeeding and pregnancy shifted according to literary discourse. Taking, for example, William Buchan, a popular obstetrician who wrote books on pregnancy and maternity and who expressed the opinion that a mother was more than a woman who birthed a child, is one of many influential writers of these handbooks. These handbooks sought to instruct women on how to conduct themselves during pregnancy and childbirth to adhere to the “ideal” status. The chapter continues with this eighteenth-century idea on mothers as both consumers and producers in relation to Mary Wollstonecraft’s texts, where mothers also exist in the contexts of food and nutrition (in the sense of both food and instruction). When milk is no longer needed or available, the mother’s writing becomes its substitute nutrients, particularly to girls. Within Wollstonecraft’s texts, images of food reflect the quality of mothering they receive.

Raisanen, Elizabeth. Childbirth and Confinement: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Politics of Pregnancy. eScholarship, Mar. 2011, http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/18p0x4r5.

            Raisanen draws a parallel connection between the events or possible events in Maria and the choices Mary Wollstonecraft made regarding her own time giving birth. Beginning with the latter, Raisanen notes the puerperal fever Wollstonecraft developed after one male physician, with unwashed hands, extracted the placenta still lodged within her. Although Wollstonecraft had and much preferred a midwife, she did not have as much of an influence in the room as the obstetrician. Of course, as Raisanen acknowledges, was a current issue of the time, as female practitioners were not well received, and “a male physician was now deemed necessary to interpret the female body.” Although Maria is an unfinished work, Raisanen argues that its treatment of pregnancy and childbirth is one example of women writers’ expressing against the lack of influence eighteenth-century women possess. Maria is confined within a miserable marriage, pregnancy, and a madhouse while also stifled under the laws which subjects her and her child to the husband. Reflecting on the fragments of Maria, Raisanen concentrates on the suicide scenario, in which Jemima guides Maria back from the act during her second pregnancy. This, Raisanen assumes, is Wollstonecraft choosing female company and authority over her own body.

While this text is much shorter than the others and admittedly not as insightful, it may be useful in considering how much Wollstonecraft’s pregnancy influenced or would have influenced the ending of Maria. I believe this may be helpful to consider how she was received, since her contemporaries and some other earlier scholars have been known to hold Wollstonecraft’s texts up against her biography.

Updated 10/24/19: I’ve added my third source and annotation to the end of this list.

Mckeon, Michael. “Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel.” Cultural Critique 1 (1985): 159–181. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1354286.

McKeon argues that there are “great instances of categorical instability” that led to the rise of the novel: instability of literary genre categories and instability of “social categories” (161). He describes the first as “a major cultural transition in attitudes toward how to tell the truth in narrative” (161). And the second, as “a cultural crisis in attitudes toward how the external social order is related to the internal, moral state of its members” (161).

Regarding genre categories, there was on one side a criticism of “romantic” novels that became a “naive empiricist championing of ‘true history’” (163). But which was then met by a counter-critique that insisted the version these “naïve empiricists” put forth still wasn’t “real.” Fielding’s fiction, he argues, criticized the camp he labels the “extreme skeptics,” who had somehow become critical of “romance” in a way that made their writings become merely a species of an older type of romance. Ultimately, he argues that the novel came into existence “not in the isolated emergence of a great text or two, but as an experimental process consisting of many different stages” (170).

This was a difficult text for me, but one big takeaway for me is merely the witnessing of the “fights” over which narrative form was the most realistic. The squabbles happening over which genre was “best” at representing truth makes me feel that since then not much has changed: one person writes a novel, and soon after another writer writes a novel that somehow criticizes the previous for not being “real” enough but in the process executes some type of form that someone in the following generation will also find unrealistic.

Ross, Deborah L. “Introduction.” Excellence of Falsehood : Romance, Realism, and Women’s Contribution to the Novel, University Press of Kentucky, 1991. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uh/detail.action?docID=1915419.

Deborah Ross’ introduction argues that some of the debate surrounding the realistic capabilities of the “romance” vs. the realistic novel actually falls along gender lines. She writes the following:

“But this particular battle was clearly, in part, a battle of the sexes, a continued attempt to fortify serious literature against the encroachment of women’s writings, which were becoming ever more abundant and popular. When novels were the preferred form, writers such as Henry Fielding scornfully classed Eliza Haywood’s productions with French romances. And later, when romance was enjoying a new respectability, writers such as Sir Walter Scott wrote patronizingly of the “realist” Jane Austen. The need to draw and redraw lines that would keep women on the wrong side added zest to critics’ attempts to use “resemblance to truth” to separate “romance” from ‘novel'” (10).

Part of Ross’ argument, however, is that even the “realist” novels being written by men in the later part of the 18^th century were still borrowing conventions from earlier romances. And that the 18th “romances” written by women (Burney among them) held elements that were in certain ways very real and true to the people writing them.

This source, again, makes me troubled simply that we have a mode called “realism.” Is this mode more “real” than other modes of writing? I question its name.

Carnell, Rachel. “Introduction.” Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uh/detail.action?docID=308021.

Carnell in this book is analyzing Richardson, Austen, and others from a political perspective: how were their novels commenting on the political parties of the time? Her overall thesis is essentially that the political partisanship of the time “helped determine the formal structures we have come to call narrative realism” (1). A couple claims in this introduction I found pertinent to my questions about realism: that more recent scholarship of the 18^th century novel has been “cautious about focusing on formalist conventions that have been used to distinguish ‘great’ from ‘lesser’ works of literature” (1). And that what for a time was honored as the most realistic novels of the century falls not just along gender lines but also at times along political lines:

“Given the outcome of the events of 1688 and the subsequent emergence of Whig political dominance in eighteenth-century Britain, those writers handed down to us as serious, ‘realistic’ novelists have frequently been either Whig or anti-Jacobite Tory. Defoe has been admired since the early nineteenth century for his ‘natural painting.’ Fielding and Austen have been touted for their use of irony in depicting the social realities of their eras. By contrast, the narrative irony in Eliza Haywood’s late pro-Jacobite novels has rarely been mentioned by critics, and the pro-Stuart Behn is seldom considered a realist novelist, even though she employs many of the techniques associated with narrative realism in traditional scholarship” (9-10).

Borham-Puyal, Miriam. “Jemima’s Wrongs: Reading the Female Body in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Prostitute Biography.” International Journal of English Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 97–112.

In this article, Borham-Puyal focuses on Jemima’s self-narration as a moment in conversation with the genre of “prostitute’s biographies” popular among eighteenth-century audiences; she draws comparisons, particularly, with Defoe’s Moll Flanders. The inset narrative, the writer argues, allows Jemima the agency and space to frame the ways that society has both constructed her body as monstrous and forced her to act as a machine, with the first-person voice allowing her to become more than the commodity the genre typically makes its female subjects. Borham-Puyal concludes by re-stating the connection between Wollstonecraft’s narratives of entrapment and current feminist debates, highlighting a “need for feminist history to be understood as multilinear and multidirectional” (110).

Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Reading the Wound: Wollstonecraft’s ‘Wrongs of Woman, or Maria’ and Trauma Theory.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 31, no. 4, 1999, pp. 387–408.

Hoeveler uses Freud’s theory of trauma to examine the implications of the inset narratives and aborted endings in Maria. Important for this article is the discussion of character experiences and the resulting behaviors as cyclical; this is representative of the ways that trauma cannot be dismissed, and instead “lives a life of its own, twisting and turning in the victim’s psyche and on whatever page he or she attempts to compose” (402). Jemima, as a result of her traumas, becomes “as damaged and damaging as her oppressors” (395). In a testament to the “persistent power of traumatic residue,” Maria consistently “finds herself in yet another victimized situation” (399). For Hoeveler, these considerations are important in that they show us the ways that Wollstonecraft used fiction to transform her own traumas. Importantly, Hoeveler also points out that Maria’s self-narrative never reaches its intended audience; additionally, when Maria writes to speak in court, she is dismissed by the judge.

Schönfelder, Christa. “The ‘Wounded Mind’: Feminism, Trauma, and Self-Narration in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman.” Wounds and Words: Childhood and Family Trauma in Romantic and Postmodern Fiction, pp. 87–126. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013.

Central to Schönfelder’s discussion is the importance of childhood trauma, in the form of “unhealthy and destructive parent-child relationships,” to the accounts of Jemima, Darnford and Maria, with the consequences depicted as less severe in the man’s case (96). Childhood trauma, Schönfelder reads, has a formative effect that readers can trace through the novel’s numerous narratives about women’s suffering. She emphasizes the resourcefulness and resilience of characters like Maria and Jemima, and the potential of narrative to create bonds and “facilitate personal and political change” (100). The importance of narrative, here, is not simply in expression—personal therapy—but in its allowing the formation of communities; response to trauma becomes a source of (female) power. The complex and fragmentary nature of the text, however, with gaps evidence both in the novel’s structure and in its characters’ individual languages, serves as a lingering testament to the “persistent power of trauma” (120). Like Hoeveler, Schönfelder concludes that the cyclical nature of the novel’s story undercuts the potential healing power of narration.