Introductory description

This module explores aspects of the political and intellectual provenance of a range of 19th century feminisms and their impact upon English literary culture in the period.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1 - Module aims and introduction: planning your year’s work
Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary feminisms and their literatures, 1790-1830
At the turn of the 19th century debates about the status and role of women gained inspiration and inflection by the split created in British political culture by the French Revolution. Radical and revolutionary thinkers advocated the overthrow of social hierarchy, the equitable redistribution of wealth and other kinds of far-reaching social change; conservative, counterrevolutionary thinkers advocated the maintenance of hierarchical and paternalistic social structures which, they argued, would provide protection for the vulnerable in return for acceptance of social and economic inequality. The two factions represented, respectively, ‘rights’ and ‘duties’ as the crucial means to maintain a just and healthy society. Our first two sessions examine the work of writers who took up positions on either side of the argument. Mary Wollstonecraft inserted her polemic into the radical concept of the ‘rights of man’, arguing that women constituted a specific group whose rights deserved particular delineation. Hannah More used the novel to explicate the conservative thesis that women had specific duties within society and that a certain kind of femininity was essential to the maintenance of social stability. We will ask the question: in spite of their opposing political provenance, are their positions and poetics as distinct as each would have liked? It took only a generation for the sureties of each position to begin to unravel. Both the inevitability of familial and social cohesion (dominant in More, present in Wollstonecraft) and faith in reason (dominant in Wollstonecraft, present in More) are excoriated in Mary Shelley’s novel. We complete this section with Austen's early novel, written in the wake of the emergence of reason as the chief category of legitimation for both radical and conservative feminisms. Does Austen, ostensibly working with the most traditional models of female and family life, manage to create a more comfortable accommodation with passion for her rational heroine?
Week 2 - Rights and duties 1: feminism and radicalism
Text: Mary Wollstonecraft - Vindication of the Rights of Woman

• Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman
  Week 3 - Rights and duties 2: feminism and conservatism
  Text: Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife
  Week 4 - The limits of Enlightenment
  Text: Mary Shelley - Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
  Week 5 - Passion and the rational heroine
  Text: Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility
  Week 6 - READING WEEK
  Women’s poetry and woman’s mission: the woman writer’s ‘proper sphere’, 1802-65
  In the first half of the 19th century poets and literary critics developed strong arguments for the importance of women's poetry; both radical and conservative thinkers argued that women poets had a specific social and moral mission. Poems intervened explicitly into a variety of controversial contemporary issues. In our first session in this section we explore poetry addressing the campaigns for the abolition of slavery and the legislation around factory labour. Other writers concentrated on the development of the concept of the woman poet as intellectual, artist and civic icon. We read the most important inspiration for this, Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, Or Italy and some of the British poems it inspired. The figure of the woman poet was an important cultural flashpoint for debates around woman’s role in the relation between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ spheres.
  Week 7 - Women’s poetry and woman’s mission
  Text: Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce’
  Hannah More, ‘The Sorrows of Yamba, or The Negro Woman’s Lamentation’
  ‘The Black Slave Trade’
  Amelia Opie, ‘The Negro Boy’s Tale’
  Janet Hamilton, ‘Civil War in America’
  Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’
  ‘The Cry of the Children’
  Caroline Bowles, ‘Tales of the Factories’
  Week 8 - The woman of genius
  Text: Germaine de Staël, Corinne, Or Italy
  Week 9 - Women of genius
  Text: Letitia Landon, ‘The History of the Lyre’
  Felicia Hemans ‘Corinne at the Capitol’
  Liberalism, Unitarianism and feminism: the limits of the novel, 1840-69
  During the mid-19th century feminism in Britain entered a new period of self-definition. Specific analyses of the economic, social and political causes of women’s oppression and demands for their abolition were made. This was the period when women’s admission to full civil, political and economic status began to be a seriously and widely debated proposition. Women turned to the classic narrative of bourgeois subjectivity and experience, the novel, to explore the precise dimensions of their inclusion and exclusion. The problems and irresolutions of these texts are crucial indicators of how far the debate had come and of the contradictions it had assumed. Scrutiny of the institution of marriage became intense. Liberal feminist thinkers began to offer explicit economic analysis of marriage, refusing the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres and demanding legal protection for married women and their property. Marriage was also, scandalously, compared with the exchange of money for sex within prostitution.
  Week 10 - Liberalism, Unitarianism, the two nations and the separate spheres
  Text: Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
  Week 11 - Gender and genre, the limits of the novel for the woman writer
  Text: Charlotte Brontë, Villette
  Week 12 - Sexual exchanges
  Text: John Stuart Mill, ‘On the Subjection of Women’
  Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market’
  Socialism, science and sexual deviance, 1862-1889
  Earlier in the 19th century feminism was inflected by radical, conservative and liberal positions and rhetoric, by the campaign for the abolition of slavery, concerns about the social effects of industrialization and the question of women’s access to bourgeois civic institutions; during later decades new political, cultural and scientific debates come to the fore which give rise to new kinds of feminist argument. We study the impact of Darwin and his commentators from the 1870s. Social theorists in the period use Darwinian concepts of ‘survival of the fittest’, ‘extinction’ and ‘instinct’ to engage 'The Woman Question' as it develops in the late 19th century. New models of the female body, its needs and instincts emerge which inflect accounts of women's demands for sexual and social autonomy. Feminism at this time becomes implicated with developing discourses of ‘race’, ‘racial purity’ and ‘racial degeneration’. The strain that the ‘marriage plot’ had been under since the mid-century becomes acute. Unequivocal and strident criticism of marriage and heterosexuality begin to appear. Alternative sexual identities - celibacy and same-sex - are explored. Socialism begins to have significant impact upon feminism. The political and literary careers of a range of feminists, Annie Besant, Clementina Black, Eleanor Marx, Beatrice Webb and Margaret Harkness, offer important points of divergence. The conflict between the strict scientific socialist analysis with which some attempted to inflect feminism and the utopian emphasis of others is indicative of the problems of the dialogue between socialism and feminism in this period.
  Week 13 - the Modern Marriage Market 2
  Text: Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up As A Flower
  Week 14 - Darwin's plots
  Text: Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm
  Week 15 - Feminism and semitic discourse
  Text: Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs
  ‘Middle-class Jewish Women of To-Day’
  Week 16 - READING WEEK
  Week 17- Feminism and socialism
  Text: Eleanor Marx, ‘Review Woman in the Past, Present and Future by August Bebel’, Supplement to the Commonweal, August 1885’
  Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, ‘The Woman Question’
  Margaret Harkness, Out of Work
  The ‘New Woman’, 1890-1899
  The final section of the module explores the figure of the ‘New Woman’, the image propagated across a variety of cultural and literary forms at the end of the 19th century. We consider the development of the conservative feminist idea of the single woman’s mission in and to society. Whereas Christian evangelicalism was crucial in earlier justifications of middle-class women’s activities outside the home, the literature of the 1890s secularises woman’s mission, shifting the emphasis from God to society from spiritual salvation to economic salvation of oneself and others through participation in the labour market, often within occupations which utilize exotic new technologies. The conflict between marriage and work for women recurs within the genre of New Woman fiction. We study the impact of the ‘New Woman’ across literary and ‘popular’ fiction.
  Week 18 - The Single Woman and her Mission
  Text: George Gissing, The Odd Women
  Anon - ‘The Glorified Spinster’
  Week 19 - The ‘New Woman’ and the question of marriage
  Text: Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did’
  Week 20 ‘They suck us dry’: feminism and vampirism
  Text: Bram Stoker, Dracula

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• A secure understanding of the range of debates – conservative, radical and liberal – around the ‘Woman Question in the period 1790-1899.
• Experience and understanding of the range of genres including novels, poetry and non-fictional prose in which these ideas and debates were promulgated and resisted and the ability to critically analyse the same across genres.
• A secure understanding of how these texts and debates relate to a wider context of political, social and cultural upheaval and challenge in Britain, Europe and across Britain’s imperial interests.

Indicative reading list

 21. Illustrative Bibliography Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility [1811] (ed. Ros Ballaster, Penguin, 2003)
 Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did [1895] (ed. Nicholas Ruddick, Broadview: 2004)
 Charlotte Brontë, Villette [1853] (ed. Helen Cooper, Penguin: 2002)
 Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up As A Flower [1867] (ed. Pamela Gilbert, Broadview: 2010)
 Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South [1855] (ed. Patricia Ingram, Penguin: 1996)
 George Gissing, The Odd Women [1893] (ed. Patricia Ingram, OUP: 2000)
 Margaret Harkness ['John Law'], Out of Work [1888] (The British Library: 2010)
 Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs [1888] (ed. Susan Bernstein, Broadview: 2006)
 Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife [1809] (Broadview: 2003)
 John Stuart Mill, ‘On the Subjection of Women’ [1869] (Broadview: 2000)
 Christina Rossetti, 'Goblin Market' [1862] any modern edition
 Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm [1883] (ed. Joseph Bristow, OUP: 2008)
 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus [1818] (ed. Maurice Hindle, Penguin: 2008)
 Germaine de Stael, Corinne, Or Italy [1802] (ed. Sylvia Raphael, OUP:2008)
 Bram Stoker, Dracula [1897] (ed. Maud Ellmann, OUP: 1998)
 Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792] and Maria or the Wrongs of Woman [1798] (ed. Anne K. Mellor, Longman Cultural Editions: 2006)

Subject specific skills

-Demonstrate a broad understanding of novels, poetry and non-fictional prose produced by British writers that deal with the ‘Woman Question’ in the period 1790-1899; demonstrate understanding of these works and debates in the relevant European context, particularly that of responses to the French Revolution; demonstrate understanding of the evolution of these debates across the period in dialogue with emergent and developing debates around racism and racial difference, imperialism, democratization, Darwinism and eugenics, trade unionism and shifting understandings of maternity.
-Apply their knowledge of historical cultural and political contexts of the period to independent reading and analysis of texts studied on the course.

Transferable skills

-Use a range of techniques and critical methodologies relevant to poetry, novels and non-fictional prose to analyse literary texts including close reading of primary texts, critical reading of secondary materials, and carry out searches for appropriate scholarly materials relevant to the materials studied on the course.
-Effectively and accurately communicate arguments and analysis in response to year specific examination questions authored by the module convenor and essay question determined by the student independently in consultation with the module convenor.