The Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Old English Baron, first published in 1777 under the title T... more The Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Old English Baron, first published in 1777 under the title The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story, and then, a year later, under its present title, were the first two gothic novels. One can't imagine the two writers creating the genre as a single-(or even double-) handed feat of genius, partly because, for a new form to catch on, there must be an audience ready to appreciate it. Rather than studying what in the personal psychology of our authors would have led to this invention, then, it makes more sense to examine the intellectual ferment which made it possible. During the time that critics usually call the "Augustan" or "Neoclassical" literary period, conventionally dated from 1660 to 1740, there had raged what has come to be called "the Battle of the Books," named after a treatise written by Jonathan Swift. The battle was between "ancients" and "moderns," and Augustan polemics centered on proving who were the better writers, those of classical antiquity or those of modern Europe. As the name "neoclassical" implies, major literary figures of the time weighed in for the ancients, The Dunciad by Alexander Pope turning all "the moderns" into Dunces. But among scientists -"natural philosophers" as they were called -there was a contrary movement: the major developments in scientific study depended on the advent of "empiricism," of observing the world for oneself rather than adhering to what ancient authorities such as Aristotle had said about it. And among philosophers it became more important to reason correctly than to cite ancient authorities. Partaking of a new scientific and rational spirit, the eighteenth century was the age of Enlightenment in 1 Germany, Britain, and France insofar as people began to think for themselves rather than to rely on the say-so of past luminaries (Kant 90; see also Gay, ed.) -therefore, implicitly, to imagine that they might know better than the authorities who wrote in the past. But in the arts, the old is revered. The battle between ancients and moderns resulted from applying to literature the new, Enlightenment notion of historical "progress" in which the present is an improvement over the past.
These short novels, published within the same decade–Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764... more These short novels, published within the same decade–Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771)–helped produce the turn from social realism to sentimentality and strangeness that will characterize works of the Romantic era as well as popular novels, Gothic spectacles (including film), and all literary works interested in modern notions of individualism and human sympathy.
Some kinds of misogyny are used in eighteenth-century literature for what we might call "good" pu... more Some kinds of misogyny are used in eighteenth-century literature for what we might call "good" purposes, to resist the commodification of literature and even to resist the sexism inherent in idealizing representations of women, i.e., even for feminist purposes. The efficacy of such resistance, however, depends upon being able to read that misogyny as a rhetorical figure rather than as having a real referent, the female body. Misogyny becomes virulent when we de-rhetoricize it: some texts do that, but also some readers do it no matter what is going on in the text being read. To see misogyny as rhetorical is not to deny that it has had insidious effects: misogynous representations have indeed promoted the oppression of women. It is just to notice that misogyny as a rhetoric serves many functions. This book deals with two, specifically: the promotion of capitalist desires, and the construction of the canon.
Chapter 1. "Misogyny and Literariness: Dryden, Pope, and Swift": Swift, Pope, and Dryden turn to misogyny as a refuge from reductive reading practices; only by reading their works as figurative rather than literal attacks on women can we see those pressures which come from the commodification of literature into objects. Misogyny is one means they have for fighting against reductive readings, preserving the opportunity for understanding texts by occupying the many different perspectives offered by each sentence, regardless of whether a perspective is ostensibly maligned or approved by the text as a whole. (I wouldn't choose to have them be misogynous writers. But it seems to me that they were trying to do something besides just express their own distaste for women.)
Chapter 2. "Capitalism and Rape: Thomas Otway's The Orphan": Otway's she-tragedy eroticizes rape for the sake of making it attractive, rape representing capitalist entrepreneurial practices in displaced form. Misogyny is not intrinsically erotic but has been eroticized and then used to figure capitalist relations. Sadomasochism provides sexual pleasure (not necessarily because of human nature; that is, it could be historically conditioned). Entrepreneurs need to be sadistic but not masochistic (giving everything away, or giving up all one's power, won't make one a successful capitalist). Transferring the pleasures of sadomasochism from representations of male-to-male relations (as in the courtier's relation to his lord) onto representations of male-to-female relations (as in the capitalist's relation to his workers and/or competitors) encourages the entrepreneur to get pleasure from sadism (attacking someone who is envisaged as completely other) while secretly garnering masochistic pleasure (secretly identifying with that other). The quintessential Restoration play, according to our canon, is not the she-tragedy, I argue, because plays such as Otway's Orphan and Rowe's Jane Shore rendered their women figures too sympathetic: their misogyny is not virulent enough to secure capitalist desire nor to render the texts canonical objects.
Chapter 3. "Engendering Capitalist Desires: Filthy Bawds and Thoroughly Good Merchants in Mandeville and Lillo": Mandeville and Lillo successfully idealize the businessman by representing female prostitutes as the abject other. Mandeville's "Modest Defence" and Lillo's "London Merchant" do effectively promote capitalism, but they are more like propaganda than literature. They do not have the status of canonical texts, even though reading works by Swift and Pope as unambiguous, as if they simply expressed virulent misogyny, has indeed worked to canonize Augustan satire.
Chapter 4. "Misogyny and Feminism: Mary Leapor": Mary Leapor's poetry makes use of misogynous representations for feminist purposes. Sexism takes many forms, including the idealization of women. If women's bodies are being exploited by representations that idealize them, de-idealizing them is one way of protesting that exploitation -- Mary Leapor's strategy. There is a fine line between de-idealizing and degrading representations of women; or, it is more correct to say that there may not be any line at all between them, that such a line can only be drawn by readers who elicit the de-idealizing and hence feminist potential of derogatory representations of women.
Chapter 5. "Misogyny and the Canon: The Character of Women in Anthologies of Poetry": This chapter shows how misogyny has been deployed in the process of canon formation. It is not the case that canonical texts necessarily degrade women. Rather, the material conditions for reproducing poetry, specifically the division of poems into canonizing anthologies on the one hand, and miscellanies, giftbooks, and ephemeral teaching texts on the other, has abjected women: excluded them from the ideal, eternal realm of "the Author" by including them as historically embodied "curiosities."
Chapter 6. "Transcending Misogyny: Anna Letitia Barbauld Writes Her Way Out": Chapter 6 shows how Barbauld was able to imagine herself a great writer through the development of a "dissenting aesthetic." In the context of an emerging discipline that abjects women writers in order to render male writers transcendent, Barbauld's religion allows her to see the body as such -- which women were seen as incarnating -- as transcendent even though (or better, because) material. An underlying fantasy of the material soul sustains her faith in her own writing.
Scholarly and Research Communication, Oct 29, 2015
Background: î€ e Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) î€ e Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) began in ... more Background: î€ e Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) î€ e Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) began in 2005 with the launch of the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship (NINES), the brainchild of Jerome McGann and Bethany Nowviskie. Organized around literary and historical periods, ARC is comprised of the directors of online scholarly communities that peer review digital projects and aggregate metadata for peer reviewed and other collections into an online search portal. î€ e five ARC search portals are NINES, 18thConnect, MESA or medieval, ModNets or modernism, and ReKN or Renaissance (the latter two are forthcoming). In this article, we will discuss partnerships that ARC has established with proprietary data companies and the possible benefits for scholars and libraries from the possibility of collaborating with companies-vendors that serve data to libraries. More important, I will argue that there is a terrible threat hanging over disciplines such as literary studies and that we need to become avid archive entrepreneurs.
A common charge against Digital Humanities, iterated most persuasively by Alan Liu in the recentl... more A common charge against Digital Humanities, iterated most persuasively by Alan Liu in the recently published essay collection Debates in Digital Humanities is that it is not theoretical enough, and especially not critical enough about its own grounds for production. In this talk, I examine and affirm that criticism, asking, how do we get from digitizing in the name of identity politics (women writers) to the awareness of structural problems and how our own productivity might contribute to them? However, it is important to notice, I argue, that Feminist Critique itself, no matter its content, is no better at counteracting its own immersion in sexist social structures. The problem is hidden in the case of Feminist Critique because book production has been naturalized; it comes to the fore in digital production but is a problem both must confront. I then show how Digital Humanities can help us figure out how to intervene in the conditions of production of academic feminism
The first miscellanies in England, from Tottel's Miscellany (1557) and the Mirrour for Magistrate... more The first miscellanies in England, from Tottel's Miscellany (1557) and the Mirrour for Magistrates (1559), on up to the Miscellany Poems, by the most eminent hands published by Tonson and Dryden (1684), The Miscellaneous Works of the late Earls of Rochester and Roscommon; to which is added a curious collection of original poems by the Earl of Dorset, Devonshire, Buckinghamshire (1707) and the Miscellaneous poems and translations by several hands, also called Lintot's Miscellany or Pope's Miscellany (1712)all of them either directly reproduce or imitate manuscript collections of verse circulated among members of a coterie or a family. Handwritten miscellanies-commonplace books-appropriate verse from authors. The compilers whose names appear on the manuscript often fail to attribute poems or misattribute them and then put them to the compilers', coterie's, or family's own uses, retitling them for example "to conform to conventional situations" (Marotti 52). Poems were revised in the process of being copied (sometimes from memory, the copyist having heard the poem read aloud) or in the process of being circulated among friends and family. Coterie culture does not sharply distinguish readers from writers. In manuscript circulation, it is difficult to see where one author ends and another begins: "the concept of authenticity is not applicable," Stallybrass and De Grazia write, "to what must be imagined as, [to quote Stephen Orgel,] an `unstable and infinitely revisable script'" (260). Thus, Marotti points out that a section of the Arundel Harington manuscript is entitled, "Certayne verses made by unceratyen autors, wrytten out of Charleton his booke" (Marotti 14). We know that "Charleton" copied these verses, that he selected them as
Unlike previous rhyming dictionaries, Thomas Hayward's British Muse (1738) conceives of poems as ... more Unlike previous rhyming dictionaries, Thomas Hayward's British Muse (1738) conceives of poems as whole bodies. The difference between the beauties that Hayward has collected, William Oldys says in the Preface to Hayward's volumes, and those collected by earlier
The transatlantic poetess is now studied in British (1773-1839), American (1770-1865), and Transa... more The transatlantic poetess is now studied in British (1773-1839), American (1770-1865), and Transatlantic (1770-1860) literature courses. This introduction is designed to help plan courses that focus either wholly or in part on the poetess and for doing research on a ...
... 5. PW 1.131, 135; Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume ... P... more ... 5. PW 1.131, 135; Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume ... Price's proposal of a "new, and hitherto unheard of bill of rights," Burke says, "though made in the name of the whole people, belongs to those gentlemen and their faction only [ie, only to ...
The Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Old English Baron, first published in 1777 under the title T... more The Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Old English Baron, first published in 1777 under the title The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story, and then, a year later, under its present title, were the first two gothic novels. One can't imagine the two writers creating the genre as a single-(or even double-) handed feat of genius, partly because, for a new form to catch on, there must be an audience ready to appreciate it. Rather than studying what in the personal psychology of our authors would have led to this invention, then, it makes more sense to examine the intellectual ferment which made it possible. During the time that critics usually call the "Augustan" or "Neoclassical" literary period, conventionally dated from 1660 to 1740, there had raged what has come to be called "the Battle of the Books," named after a treatise written by Jonathan Swift. The battle was between "ancients" and "moderns," and Augustan polemics centered on proving who were the better writers, those of classical antiquity or those of modern Europe. As the name "neoclassical" implies, major literary figures of the time weighed in for the ancients, The Dunciad by Alexander Pope turning all "the moderns" into Dunces. But among scientists -"natural philosophers" as they were called -there was a contrary movement: the major developments in scientific study depended on the advent of "empiricism," of observing the world for oneself rather than adhering to what ancient authorities such as Aristotle had said about it. And among philosophers it became more important to reason correctly than to cite ancient authorities. Partaking of a new scientific and rational spirit, the eighteenth century was the age of Enlightenment in 1 Germany, Britain, and France insofar as people began to think for themselves rather than to rely on the say-so of past luminaries (Kant 90; see also Gay, ed.) -therefore, implicitly, to imagine that they might know better than the authorities who wrote in the past. But in the arts, the old is revered. The battle between ancients and moderns resulted from applying to literature the new, Enlightenment notion of historical "progress" in which the present is an improvement over the past.
These short novels, published within the same decade–Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764... more These short novels, published within the same decade–Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771)–helped produce the turn from social realism to sentimentality and strangeness that will characterize works of the Romantic era as well as popular novels, Gothic spectacles (including film), and all literary works interested in modern notions of individualism and human sympathy.
Some kinds of misogyny are used in eighteenth-century literature for what we might call "good" pu... more Some kinds of misogyny are used in eighteenth-century literature for what we might call "good" purposes, to resist the commodification of literature and even to resist the sexism inherent in idealizing representations of women, i.e., even for feminist purposes. The efficacy of such resistance, however, depends upon being able to read that misogyny as a rhetorical figure rather than as having a real referent, the female body. Misogyny becomes virulent when we de-rhetoricize it: some texts do that, but also some readers do it no matter what is going on in the text being read. To see misogyny as rhetorical is not to deny that it has had insidious effects: misogynous representations have indeed promoted the oppression of women. It is just to notice that misogyny as a rhetoric serves many functions. This book deals with two, specifically: the promotion of capitalist desires, and the construction of the canon.
Chapter 1. "Misogyny and Literariness: Dryden, Pope, and Swift": Swift, Pope, and Dryden turn to misogyny as a refuge from reductive reading practices; only by reading their works as figurative rather than literal attacks on women can we see those pressures which come from the commodification of literature into objects. Misogyny is one means they have for fighting against reductive readings, preserving the opportunity for understanding texts by occupying the many different perspectives offered by each sentence, regardless of whether a perspective is ostensibly maligned or approved by the text as a whole. (I wouldn't choose to have them be misogynous writers. But it seems to me that they were trying to do something besides just express their own distaste for women.)
Chapter 2. "Capitalism and Rape: Thomas Otway's The Orphan": Otway's she-tragedy eroticizes rape for the sake of making it attractive, rape representing capitalist entrepreneurial practices in displaced form. Misogyny is not intrinsically erotic but has been eroticized and then used to figure capitalist relations. Sadomasochism provides sexual pleasure (not necessarily because of human nature; that is, it could be historically conditioned). Entrepreneurs need to be sadistic but not masochistic (giving everything away, or giving up all one's power, won't make one a successful capitalist). Transferring the pleasures of sadomasochism from representations of male-to-male relations (as in the courtier's relation to his lord) onto representations of male-to-female relations (as in the capitalist's relation to his workers and/or competitors) encourages the entrepreneur to get pleasure from sadism (attacking someone who is envisaged as completely other) while secretly garnering masochistic pleasure (secretly identifying with that other). The quintessential Restoration play, according to our canon, is not the she-tragedy, I argue, because plays such as Otway's Orphan and Rowe's Jane Shore rendered their women figures too sympathetic: their misogyny is not virulent enough to secure capitalist desire nor to render the texts canonical objects.
Chapter 3. "Engendering Capitalist Desires: Filthy Bawds and Thoroughly Good Merchants in Mandeville and Lillo": Mandeville and Lillo successfully idealize the businessman by representing female prostitutes as the abject other. Mandeville's "Modest Defence" and Lillo's "London Merchant" do effectively promote capitalism, but they are more like propaganda than literature. They do not have the status of canonical texts, even though reading works by Swift and Pope as unambiguous, as if they simply expressed virulent misogyny, has indeed worked to canonize Augustan satire.
Chapter 4. "Misogyny and Feminism: Mary Leapor": Mary Leapor's poetry makes use of misogynous representations for feminist purposes. Sexism takes many forms, including the idealization of women. If women's bodies are being exploited by representations that idealize them, de-idealizing them is one way of protesting that exploitation -- Mary Leapor's strategy. There is a fine line between de-idealizing and degrading representations of women; or, it is more correct to say that there may not be any line at all between them, that such a line can only be drawn by readers who elicit the de-idealizing and hence feminist potential of derogatory representations of women.
Chapter 5. "Misogyny and the Canon: The Character of Women in Anthologies of Poetry": This chapter shows how misogyny has been deployed in the process of canon formation. It is not the case that canonical texts necessarily degrade women. Rather, the material conditions for reproducing poetry, specifically the division of poems into canonizing anthologies on the one hand, and miscellanies, giftbooks, and ephemeral teaching texts on the other, has abjected women: excluded them from the ideal, eternal realm of "the Author" by including them as historically embodied "curiosities."
Chapter 6. "Transcending Misogyny: Anna Letitia Barbauld Writes Her Way Out": Chapter 6 shows how Barbauld was able to imagine herself a great writer through the development of a "dissenting aesthetic." In the context of an emerging discipline that abjects women writers in order to render male writers transcendent, Barbauld's religion allows her to see the body as such -- which women were seen as incarnating -- as transcendent even though (or better, because) material. An underlying fantasy of the material soul sustains her faith in her own writing.
Scholarly and Research Communication, Oct 29, 2015
Background: î€ e Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) î€ e Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) began in ... more Background: î€ e Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) î€ e Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) began in 2005 with the launch of the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship (NINES), the brainchild of Jerome McGann and Bethany Nowviskie. Organized around literary and historical periods, ARC is comprised of the directors of online scholarly communities that peer review digital projects and aggregate metadata for peer reviewed and other collections into an online search portal. î€ e five ARC search portals are NINES, 18thConnect, MESA or medieval, ModNets or modernism, and ReKN or Renaissance (the latter two are forthcoming). In this article, we will discuss partnerships that ARC has established with proprietary data companies and the possible benefits for scholars and libraries from the possibility of collaborating with companies-vendors that serve data to libraries. More important, I will argue that there is a terrible threat hanging over disciplines such as literary studies and that we need to become avid archive entrepreneurs.
A common charge against Digital Humanities, iterated most persuasively by Alan Liu in the recentl... more A common charge against Digital Humanities, iterated most persuasively by Alan Liu in the recently published essay collection Debates in Digital Humanities is that it is not theoretical enough, and especially not critical enough about its own grounds for production. In this talk, I examine and affirm that criticism, asking, how do we get from digitizing in the name of identity politics (women writers) to the awareness of structural problems and how our own productivity might contribute to them? However, it is important to notice, I argue, that Feminist Critique itself, no matter its content, is no better at counteracting its own immersion in sexist social structures. The problem is hidden in the case of Feminist Critique because book production has been naturalized; it comes to the fore in digital production but is a problem both must confront. I then show how Digital Humanities can help us figure out how to intervene in the conditions of production of academic feminism
The first miscellanies in England, from Tottel's Miscellany (1557) and the Mirrour for Magistrate... more The first miscellanies in England, from Tottel's Miscellany (1557) and the Mirrour for Magistrates (1559), on up to the Miscellany Poems, by the most eminent hands published by Tonson and Dryden (1684), The Miscellaneous Works of the late Earls of Rochester and Roscommon; to which is added a curious collection of original poems by the Earl of Dorset, Devonshire, Buckinghamshire (1707) and the Miscellaneous poems and translations by several hands, also called Lintot's Miscellany or Pope's Miscellany (1712)all of them either directly reproduce or imitate manuscript collections of verse circulated among members of a coterie or a family. Handwritten miscellanies-commonplace books-appropriate verse from authors. The compilers whose names appear on the manuscript often fail to attribute poems or misattribute them and then put them to the compilers', coterie's, or family's own uses, retitling them for example "to conform to conventional situations" (Marotti 52). Poems were revised in the process of being copied (sometimes from memory, the copyist having heard the poem read aloud) or in the process of being circulated among friends and family. Coterie culture does not sharply distinguish readers from writers. In manuscript circulation, it is difficult to see where one author ends and another begins: "the concept of authenticity is not applicable," Stallybrass and De Grazia write, "to what must be imagined as, [to quote Stephen Orgel,] an `unstable and infinitely revisable script'" (260). Thus, Marotti points out that a section of the Arundel Harington manuscript is entitled, "Certayne verses made by unceratyen autors, wrytten out of Charleton his booke" (Marotti 14). We know that "Charleton" copied these verses, that he selected them as
Unlike previous rhyming dictionaries, Thomas Hayward's British Muse (1738) conceives of poems as ... more Unlike previous rhyming dictionaries, Thomas Hayward's British Muse (1738) conceives of poems as whole bodies. The difference between the beauties that Hayward has collected, William Oldys says in the Preface to Hayward's volumes, and those collected by earlier
The transatlantic poetess is now studied in British (1773-1839), American (1770-1865), and Transa... more The transatlantic poetess is now studied in British (1773-1839), American (1770-1865), and Transatlantic (1770-1860) literature courses. This introduction is designed to help plan courses that focus either wholly or in part on the poetess and for doing research on a ...
... 5. PW 1.131, 135; Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume ... P... more ... 5. PW 1.131, 135; Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume ... Price's proposal of a "new, and hitherto unheard of bill of rights," Burke says, "though made in the name of the whole people, belongs to those gentlemen and their faction only [ie, only to ...
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Books by Laura Mandell
Chapter 1. "Misogyny and Literariness: Dryden, Pope, and Swift": Swift, Pope, and Dryden turn to misogyny as a refuge from reductive reading practices; only by reading their works as figurative rather than literal attacks on women can we see those pressures which come from the commodification of literature into objects. Misogyny is one means they have for fighting against reductive readings, preserving the opportunity for understanding texts by occupying the many different perspectives offered by each sentence, regardless of whether a perspective is ostensibly maligned or approved by the text as a whole. (I wouldn't choose to have them be misogynous writers. But it seems to me that they were trying to do
something besides just express their own distaste for women.)
Chapter 2. "Capitalism and Rape: Thomas Otway's The Orphan": Otway's she-tragedy eroticizes rape for the sake of making it attractive, rape representing capitalist entrepreneurial practices in displaced form. Misogyny is not intrinsically erotic but has been eroticized and then used to figure capitalist relations. Sadomasochism provides sexual pleasure (not necessarily because of human nature; that is, it could be historically conditioned). Entrepreneurs need to be sadistic but not masochistic (giving everything away, or giving up all one's power, won't make one a successful capitalist). Transferring the pleasures of sadomasochism from representations of male-to-male relations (as in the courtier's relation to his lord) onto representations of male-to-female relations (as in the capitalist's relation to his workers and/or competitors) encourages the entrepreneur to get pleasure from sadism (attacking someone who is envisaged as completely other) while secretly garnering masochistic pleasure (secretly identifying with that other). The quintessential Restoration play, according to our canon, is not the she-tragedy, I argue, because plays such as Otway's Orphan and Rowe's Jane Shore rendered their women figures too sympathetic: their misogyny is not virulent enough to secure capitalist desire nor to render the texts canonical objects.
Chapter 3. "Engendering Capitalist Desires: Filthy Bawds and Thoroughly Good Merchants in Mandeville and Lillo": Mandeville and Lillo successfully idealize the businessman by representing female prostitutes as the abject other. Mandeville's "Modest Defence" and Lillo's "London Merchant" do effectively promote capitalism, but they are more like propaganda than literature. They do not have the status of canonical texts, even though reading works by Swift and Pope as unambiguous, as if they simply expressed virulent misogyny, has indeed worked to canonize Augustan satire.
Chapter 4. "Misogyny and Feminism: Mary Leapor": Mary Leapor's poetry makes use of misogynous representations for feminist purposes. Sexism takes many forms, including the idealization of women. If women's bodies are being exploited by representations that idealize them, de-idealizing them is one way of protesting that exploitation -- Mary Leapor's strategy. There is a fine line between de-idealizing and degrading representations of women; or, it is more correct to say that there may not be any line at all between them, that such a line can only be drawn by readers who elicit the de-idealizing and hence feminist potential of derogatory representations of women.
Chapter 5. "Misogyny and the Canon: The Character of Women in Anthologies of Poetry": This chapter shows how misogyny has been deployed in the process of canon formation. It is not the case that canonical texts necessarily degrade women. Rather, the material conditions for reproducing poetry, specifically the division of poems into canonizing anthologies on the one hand, and miscellanies, giftbooks, and ephemeral teaching texts on the other, has abjected women: excluded them from the ideal, eternal realm of "the Author" by including them as historically embodied "curiosities."
Chapter 6. "Transcending Misogyny: Anna Letitia Barbauld Writes Her Way Out": Chapter 6 shows how Barbauld was able to imagine herself a great writer through the development of a "dissenting aesthetic." In the context of an emerging discipline that abjects women writers in order to render male writers transcendent, Barbauld's religion allows her to see the body as such -- which women were seen as incarnating -- as transcendent even though (or better, because) material. An underlying fantasy of the material soul sustains her faith in her own writing.
Papers by Laura Mandell
Chapter 1. "Misogyny and Literariness: Dryden, Pope, and Swift": Swift, Pope, and Dryden turn to misogyny as a refuge from reductive reading practices; only by reading their works as figurative rather than literal attacks on women can we see those pressures which come from the commodification of literature into objects. Misogyny is one means they have for fighting against reductive readings, preserving the opportunity for understanding texts by occupying the many different perspectives offered by each sentence, regardless of whether a perspective is ostensibly maligned or approved by the text as a whole. (I wouldn't choose to have them be misogynous writers. But it seems to me that they were trying to do
something besides just express their own distaste for women.)
Chapter 2. "Capitalism and Rape: Thomas Otway's The Orphan": Otway's she-tragedy eroticizes rape for the sake of making it attractive, rape representing capitalist entrepreneurial practices in displaced form. Misogyny is not intrinsically erotic but has been eroticized and then used to figure capitalist relations. Sadomasochism provides sexual pleasure (not necessarily because of human nature; that is, it could be historically conditioned). Entrepreneurs need to be sadistic but not masochistic (giving everything away, or giving up all one's power, won't make one a successful capitalist). Transferring the pleasures of sadomasochism from representations of male-to-male relations (as in the courtier's relation to his lord) onto representations of male-to-female relations (as in the capitalist's relation to his workers and/or competitors) encourages the entrepreneur to get pleasure from sadism (attacking someone who is envisaged as completely other) while secretly garnering masochistic pleasure (secretly identifying with that other). The quintessential Restoration play, according to our canon, is not the she-tragedy, I argue, because plays such as Otway's Orphan and Rowe's Jane Shore rendered their women figures too sympathetic: their misogyny is not virulent enough to secure capitalist desire nor to render the texts canonical objects.
Chapter 3. "Engendering Capitalist Desires: Filthy Bawds and Thoroughly Good Merchants in Mandeville and Lillo": Mandeville and Lillo successfully idealize the businessman by representing female prostitutes as the abject other. Mandeville's "Modest Defence" and Lillo's "London Merchant" do effectively promote capitalism, but they are more like propaganda than literature. They do not have the status of canonical texts, even though reading works by Swift and Pope as unambiguous, as if they simply expressed virulent misogyny, has indeed worked to canonize Augustan satire.
Chapter 4. "Misogyny and Feminism: Mary Leapor": Mary Leapor's poetry makes use of misogynous representations for feminist purposes. Sexism takes many forms, including the idealization of women. If women's bodies are being exploited by representations that idealize them, de-idealizing them is one way of protesting that exploitation -- Mary Leapor's strategy. There is a fine line between de-idealizing and degrading representations of women; or, it is more correct to say that there may not be any line at all between them, that such a line can only be drawn by readers who elicit the de-idealizing and hence feminist potential of derogatory representations of women.
Chapter 5. "Misogyny and the Canon: The Character of Women in Anthologies of Poetry": This chapter shows how misogyny has been deployed in the process of canon formation. It is not the case that canonical texts necessarily degrade women. Rather, the material conditions for reproducing poetry, specifically the division of poems into canonizing anthologies on the one hand, and miscellanies, giftbooks, and ephemeral teaching texts on the other, has abjected women: excluded them from the ideal, eternal realm of "the Author" by including them as historically embodied "curiosities."
Chapter 6. "Transcending Misogyny: Anna Letitia Barbauld Writes Her Way Out": Chapter 6 shows how Barbauld was able to imagine herself a great writer through the development of a "dissenting aesthetic." In the context of an emerging discipline that abjects women writers in order to render male writers transcendent, Barbauld's religion allows her to see the body as such -- which women were seen as incarnating -- as transcendent even though (or better, because) material. An underlying fantasy of the material soul sustains her faith in her own writing.