Fracture Feminism

David Sigler

Description

Feminist writers in British Romanticism often developed alternatives to linear time. Viewing time as a system of social control, writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, and Mary Shelley wrote about current events as if they possessed knowledge from the future. Fracture Feminism explores this tradition with a perspective informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction, showing how time can be imagined to contain a hidden fracture—and how that fracture, when claimed as a point of view, could be the basis for an emancipatory politics. Arguing that the period's most radical experiments in undoing time stemmed from the era's discourses of gender and women's rights, Fracture Feminism asks: to what extent could women "belong" to their historical moment, given their political and social marginalization? How would voices from the future interrupt the ordinary procedures of political debate? What if utopia were understood as a time rather than a place, and its time were already inside the present?
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Uses of History in Wollstonecraft's Afterlives

2. Adoptive Siblings across Oceans of Futurity: Paul and Virginia and The Victim of Prejudice

3. Della Cruscan Time

4. Future Poetry: Clock Time Misses Barbauld, Smith, Richardson, and Hemans

5. Gulzara and The Last Man: Worldwide-izing the Roman à Clef

Conclusion

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Royaume-Uni
• Great Britain
• Stephen Ireland
• United Kingdom
• Literary theory
• Ireland
• Reino Unido

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438484877
• Langue: English

Extrait

FRACTURE FEMINISM
SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Pamela K. Gilbert, editor
FRACTURE FEMINISM
The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism
DAVID SIGLER
Cover art: Mary Shelley in Italy , by Louisa Amelia Albani, mixed media.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Sigler, David, author
Title: Fracture feminism : the politics of impossible time in British romanticism / David Sigler, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438484853 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438484877 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939443
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Uses of History in Wollstonecraft’s Afterlives
Chapter 2 Adoptive Siblings across Oceans of Futurity: Paul and Virginia and The Victim of Prejudice
Chapter 3 Della Cruscan Time
Chapter 4 Future Poetry: Clock Time Misses Barbauld, Smith, Richardson, and Hemans
Chapter 5 Gulzara and The Last Man : Worldwide-izing the Roman à Clef
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Agency Reference Number 435-2017-0037). The book would never have been possible without the grant, so I’m extremely thankful for it. Several of the ideas in this book were set in motion at the NEH Summer Seminar on “Reassessing Romanticism” held in 2013 at the University of Nebraska, led by Stephen C. Behrendt. I remain grateful for that opportunity and Dr. Behrendt’s mentorship. A portion of chapter 2 appeared in an earlier form as an article entitled “ ‘The Ocean of Futurity, Which Has No Boundaries’: The Deconstructive Politics of Helen Maria Williams’s Translation of Paul and Virginia ,” in European Romantic Review vol. 23, no. 5, pp. 575–592. The article was published on October 1, 2012, and is reprinted here by permission of the publisher, Taylor Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com .
I would like to thank everyone at SUNY Press who helped bring this manuscript through the publication process. I especially thank Rebecca Colesworthy, the acquisitions editor, for her enthusiasm for this project and astonishing gumption, as well as James Peltz, the Press’s associate director and editor-in-chief, who seamlessly covered for Rebecca as necessary along the way. I am grateful to have had anonymous peer reviewers who took such care and showed such great intellectual generosity with this manuscript. They gave truly expert advice. I also thank editorial coordinator Catherine Blackwell for her care with the details.
I have received tremendous support, intellectual and material, from the University of Calgary. I would especially like to acknowledge Richard Sigurdson, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and Jacqueline Jenkins, Head of English, as they have been enormously supportive. Startup funds, departmental travel funds, and a developmental SSHRC-funded grant internally administered by the Faculty of Arts helped get me started on this project; a well-timed Research and Scholarship Leave enabled the project’s completion. My more immediate colleagues have given me a strong research community in which to develop my thinking. I want to recognize for special thanks Karen Bourrier, Susan Cahill, Anthony Camara, Michael Tavel Clarke, Donna Coates, Faye Halpern, Larissa Lai, Derritt Mason, Christian Olbey, Michael Ullyot, Martin Wagner, and Jason Wiens, all of whom offered me good advice along the way. I am grateful to those in the Faculty of Arts who helped me develop my grant proposal—most of all Kinga Olszewska, whose judgment I have learned always to trust, and also Robert Oxoby and Penny Pexman, during their terms as Associate Deans (Research). Finally, I would like to thank University of Calgary Research Services and the librarians at University of Calgary Libraries and Cultural Resources, particularly Melanie Boyd.
I have worked with a superb graduate research assistant over the last several years, Isabelle Michalski, who along the way became my research collaborator on a separate essay. I have also appreciated the chance to work collaboratively with Celiese Lypka on two articles that, although distinct from this book project, informed my thinking for it. Isabelle and Celiese have been important interlocutors for me over the last few years. Less formally, discussions with graduate students John MacPhereson, Bobby Sze Chun Ng, and Neil Surkan have sustained me in this work.
Many extramural colleagues have been hugely supportive, both as mentors and friends, throughout this project. They have given me opportunities to develop this work, read pieces of work in progress, offered advice on new directions, alerted me when things appeared to be spiraling into futility, or suggested the perfect next thing to read. In the process, through a blend of attentiveness, praise, and what often seemed to be open hostility, they pushed me into better arguments. The most vital of these allies have been Suzanne Barnett, Stephen Behrendt, Colin Carman, David Clark, David Collings, Ashley Cross, Kellie Donovan-Condron, Joel Faflak, Cassandra Falke, Michelle Faubert, Elizabeth Fay, Daniela Garofalo, Michael Genovese, Erin Goss, Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square, Michael Kramp, Devoney Looser, Nowell Marshall, Anne McCarthy, Grace Moore, Lucy Morrison, Jonathan Mulrooney, Christopher Nagle, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Brian Rejack, Marlon Ross, Richard Sha, Anna Shajirat, Kate Singer, Orianne Smith, Michele Speitz, Michael Theune, Crystal Veronie, Orrin Wang, Chris Washington, and Gary Williams. Much could (and ought to) be said about the intellectual generosity of each of these people, the opportunities they have opened for me, and the mark they have left on this work, but I will simply express my deepest thanks without inelegantly gushing.
Most of all, I am in awe of my unfaltering partner, Dawn Hamilton, who unsuspectingly serves as a model of intelligence, love, feminism, and work ethic for me. It has not escaped me how often the fracture feminists wrote enthusiastically of “dawn,” and I believe it is apt. I wish to thank Ms. Hamilton for not murdering me while we sheltered in place to avoid the coronavirus. I reserve similar supreme thanks for my parents, Judy and Murray Sigler, who have been, as ever, the picture of love, support, and encouragement.
Introduction
I n the British Romantic period, feminist literary writers would often question the meaning of time, rather than directly champion rights for women. Perceiving time to be a system of social control, they pried open its linearity to display what we might think of as a fracture within; they placed themselves, rhetorically speaking, within that fracture as a way of discussing current events. I call this tradition “fracture feminism.” By occupying a fracture in time, these writers could seize the space and authority to assess the immediate political world. The fracture feminists resisted the demands of clock and calendar, the obligatory patriotism that often came along with such demands, and the prevailing narratives of English history. They seemed to have knowledge from the future, or at least a strange disregard for chronology. By keeping a foothold in the future while remaining focused on the present, their writing was incompletely subject to the demands of time.
To give an example: in June of 1809, the fifteen-year-old Felicia Dorothea Browne, later to be known as Felicia Hemans, was writing “her first mature poem,” an ambitious work of over 800 lines, entitled “War and Peace.” 1 The poem would eventually become part of Browne’s third collection, The Domestic Affections , which would establish her literary stardom in 1812. Browne was a patriotic child from a military family, and so, perhaps inevitably, she thought of the United Kingdom as a massive war machine. Her country had been at war her entire life, having assembled, through the eighteenth century, its standing army and enormous military apparatus. 2 The family’s correspondences reveal that Browne thought of the army as an essential attribute of Britishness generally, even as “she was aware that this [interest of hers] was not wholly appropriate for a young woman.” 3 Caught between a national war effort with which she was fascinated and the domestic realm that was supposed to be her station—a tension captured by the poem’s very presence in a volume of that title and theme—Browne appealed to the future as a way to navigate the impasse. The poem begins:
Thou, bright Futurity! whose prospect beams,
In dawning radiance on our day-light dreams;
Whose lambent meteors and ethereal forms
Gild the dark clouds, and glitter thro’ the storms;
…
Thou bright Futurity! w