1 What Comes After the Ideology of Separate Spheres? Women Writers and Modernism

Notes 1 What Comes after the Ideology of Separate Spheres? Women Writers and Modernism. 1 Such influential works as Gilbert and Gubar’s No Man’s Land and Friedman’s early work on H.D. in Psyche Reborn follow modernist tradition in emphasizing the First World War as a historical rupture with the nineteenth century. In contrast, Clark’s turn to the sentimental and Ardis’s to the figure of the ‘new woman’ both provide alternative nineteenth- century cultural contexts for women’s modernist writing, while Caren Kaplan offers one of the few readings of modernism’s continuities with postmodernism, specifically the value that they both place on travel and mobility. 2 Key works of the postmodern geography movement include Lefebvre, Soja and Harvey; the feminist interventions of Massey and Rose; and essay collections edited by Sibley, Duncan, Watson and Gibson, Keith and Pile, and Crang and Thrift. See Philo for a reading of Foucault’s contribution to this movement, and Vidler and Wigley for a parallel tendency within architectural theory. 3 Massey makes a similar point in her critique of Harvey and Soja (235). 4 Geographer Linda McDowell argues that a ‘spatialized’ feminist politics that wishes to avoid the problem of essentialism must reimagine both space and gender as ‘a network of relations, unbounded and unstable’ (36). McDowell specifically defines this reimagining of space as a problem for feminist standpoint epistemologies and cites Haraway’s intervention in standpoint theories, in Haraway’s essay on ‘Situated Knowledges’ (McDowell 35–6; Haraway 195–6). 5 See Ezra Pound’s attacks on romantic sentimentality (Literary Essays of Ezra Pound 11–12); Zach analyses Pound’s gendered metaphors of ‘soft’ romanticism vs. ‘hard’ modernism (235, 238). Clark argues that this break with romanticism is more complicated for women writers, as a result of the ways in which romanticism was gendered by male modernists. DeKoven’s ‘Gendered Doubleness’ theorizes women’s modernism in terms of this ambivalent relation to the general modernist project and its self-authorizing strategies. 6 Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’ is one of the best literary examples of how male modernists treated the figure of ‘home’; in part 1, canto 8, the speaker suggests that it is anachronistic and self-deluding to imagine that ‘we’ can still construct a securely interiorized domestic space or ‘castle-fortress-home’ (386). For commentators who associate either processes of social and political modernization or modernist culture and aesthetics with a condition of metaphorical or metaphysical homelessness, see Berger, et al. (82); Lukacs (Theory of the Novel 41); Marshall Berman (5); Steiner; Bradbury; Levin; Cowley. See also Benstock (‘Expatriate’) and Caren 155 156 Notes Kaplan’s feminist critiques of the tendency to privilege homelessness in definitions of modernism (36–9, 41–9). 7 Romero and Gillian Brown’s books offer the fullest examples of what Romero calls this ‘third wave’ of feminist reinterpretations of domesticity (Brown 4), but see also Higonnet (4). Cherniavsky offers a similar reinterpretation of American sentimental culture more generally. Among historians, see Isenberg (xvi, 44) and Cott’s The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), which revises her classic work on the ideology of separate spheres, The Bonds of Womanhood (1977), by arguing that modern feminism redefines the spatial ‘unity’ of the domestic sphere as merely ‘circumstantial’ (Grounding 7). Fox-Genovese and Genovese offer an important analysis of domestic economy’s role in constructing a binary logic of spatial relations (318). See Nicholson for an argument about the necessary failure of industrialization to ever completely sever production from reproduction, marketplace from home (29). 8 See also Tompkins on Catherine Beecher’s 1842 Treatise on Domestic Economy (144); Cott (Bonds 62); Fox-Genovese (‘Placing’ 25–6); and Dorothy Smith. Both Davidoff and Hayden offer excellent histories of feminist attempts to ‘rationalize’ and modernize domestic labor. 9 One difference in the British and American critical contexts is the relatively greater resistance among British feminists to the idea that domesticity represents any genuine alternative to capitalism, certainly not one based on the premise of domestic work’s total exclusion from capitalist economic networks. See Poovey (3); Newton (168); Rowbotham’s Woman’s Consciousness (chs 4 and 5; and Barrett (chs 5 and 6). Romero (31) cites Poovey as a model for bringing more of this skepticism into the American tradition. 10 Modernism can be defined philosophically through its rejection of such a stable ontological or epistemological ‘ground’, as Adorno argues (Aesthetic Theory 34). Cott interprets the semantic shift from the nineteenth-century ‘woman’s movement’ to ‘feminism’ as implying a modernist rejection of these types of spatial metaphors, with the shift in terminology creating a ‘semantic claim’ to a female modernism (Grounding 7, 15). For an idiosyncratic challenge to the category of ‘woman’ in the modernist period, see Laura (Riding) Jackson. Standpoint epistemologies depend on a dialectical model (adapted from Marxism) for the formation of resistant consciousness on the basis of social antagonisms and antitheses; see Hartsock, Mackinnon and Harding for examples of key texts in this tradition, and Hekman for a more recent reassessment. See Flax (56) and Jaggar (385) for critiques of the spatial assumptions implicit in standpoint epistemologies, particularly the tendency to homogenize gender and the difficulty such models have in articulating race, class and gender as anything but distinct positions, linked only exter- nally, in an additive manner. See Jameson for a critique of this same problem in Georg Lukacs’s Marxist theory of class consciousness (‘History ‘69–70), and Caren Kaplan for a similar critique of Adrienne Rich’s ‘politics of location’ (Kaplan 166–7; Rich, Blood 213). For other responses to Rich, see Clifford, Smith and Katz, Mohanty, Mani, and Dhareshwar. Friedman’s Mappings offers another, longer reflection on the feminist use of such spatial metaphors. Notes 157 11 Carby and Giddings offer African-American critiques of domestic womanhood, while Spivak (‘Imperialism’; ‘Three Women’s Texts’), Grewal, Sanchez-Eppler (‘Raising Empires like Children’), and George (6; see also chapter 2) do the same from post-colonial perspectives. Chatterjee offers a historical account of how domestic economy was exported to India as a disciplinary apparatus for producing colonial subjects. Romero cites Wexler as an example of how feminist critics of the nineteenth century have responded to these critiques (Romero 3; Wexler 15). 12 See Patricia Hill Scott for a historical analysis of one such missionary project, and Baym’s argument for recognizing the agency of the women involved in this kind of activism (48); Kelley offers a critique of this feminist revaluation of ‘social housekeeping’ (222). Working in the British context, Vicinus offers an ambivalent assessment of this project, since she emphasizes the value of domestic rhetorics for the achievement of independence for women but also shows how the rhetoric of enlarging ‘woman’s sphere’ was often articulated through metaphors of the colonization of workers and the unemployed (39–40, 219–21). Note, however, the appropriation of such rhetorics by African-American women to define the project of racial uplift in the late nineteenth century (Giddings 52, 80–3; Tate 133–4; Romero 29). 13 I am here drawing on Foucault’s famous argument about the role played by the internalization of disciplinary structures in the formation of the modern self, in Discipline and Punish, as does Chatterjee (note 11 above). Armstrong applies Foucault to the discourse of domestic economy, arguing that domestic treatises served as the basis for imagining the modern indi- vidual, whose separation from society is modeled on the separation of the domestic from the public sphere (8); see also Jehlen (211–12). Romero notes how ‘using the home as a metaphor for interiority (in the sense of “self- hood”)’ was a way ‘to redefine woman’s value in terms of internal qualities’ rather than male-dominated standards of physical beauty (20–1). 14 Commentaries on Reagon’s important essay include Martin and Mohanty (192); Foster, ‘The Very House of Difference’ (29–30); Kaplan (172–5); and Honig (267–70). My analysis of the trope of homelessness at home has been especially influenced by Martin and Mohanty’s argument that feminist subjectivity is structured by ‘two specific modalities: being home and not being home. “Being home” refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; “not being home” is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself’ (195–6). 15 On this point I disagree with Romero’s claim that enlarged or social housekeeping ‘became conventional enough to make the dichotomy of home and world insufficient’ (33); instead such rhetorics preserved the conceptual distinction between home and world even as they detached that distinction from the material architecture of the private home. The result was the recontainment of women’s agency rather than a subversion of the frameworks that defined it. 16 Drawing on Ann Douglas’s work on ‘the feminization of America’, Romero also argues that ‘home’ signified conventional forces of socialization, a 158 Notes coding of ‘home’ that underlies (male) modernist practices of expatriation and the privileging of techniques of defamiliarization as a stylistic analogy to exile or homelessness, as Benstock (‘Expatriate’ 26–7) and Caren Kaplan point out (38). 17 Dickinson’s poems using the trope of homelessness at home are poems #624 and 1573, following the numbering system used in Thomas Johnson’s standard edition of the poems. I will discuss these poems and this trope at length in the section on Dickinson in the next chapter. See Bonnie Kime Scott for an important analysis of modernist women’s alternative domestic arrangements (Refiguring, vol.

Load more