Classics: Feminist or No?

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Classics: Feminist or No?

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1barney67
Editado: Out 5, 2012, 10:43 am

Mensagem removida pelo autor.

2thorold
Set 14, 2011, 12:06 pm

Isn't that a bit like asking whether all classics with ships embrace an Archimedean ideology? (Full of bourgeois physical models of "buoyancy" and "flotation"...)

If you accept that there is such a thing as a feminist ideology (I imagine a lot of feminists would say that feminism is all about opposing ideologies), then it affects the way all cultural artefacts in its time are produced and received. If you don't, then it's a pointless question.

3barney67
Editado: Out 7, 2012, 10:35 am

Mensagem removida pelo autor.

4raton-liseur
Set 14, 2011, 4:08 pm

Isn't there a difference between a feminist novel and a novel meant exclusively for women?
A novel meant for women is based on the premises that what attracts men and women is different ('let's give romance to women and let's men read to serious books'-type of statement).
A feminist novel would be a novel that promotes a certain vision of gender relations, based on equity, and on abilities for women to make their own choices.
If I am provocative, I would say that arguing that there are novels meant for women is anti-feminist…

5thorold
Set 14, 2011, 5:35 pm

>3 barney67:
Yes, OK, I was being a bit flippant.

The "appeal exclusively to women" thing is a bit of a red herring, if you think that the commercial market for novels has always been predominantly female, never more so than in the 19th century. Really, novels designed to appeal to men are the oddity, but it turns out that we have declared quite a few of those to be classics.

Pretty well any novel involving women characters will have a feminist interpretation somewhere. Especially Jane Eyre, because of the "madwoman in the attic" thing. I'm sure you could even find a feminist take on Fanny Hill somewhere, if you looked hard enough.

6DanMat
Set 14, 2011, 8:12 pm

An interesting question.

I think any classic novel to prominently feature a female character to be protofeminist, excluding the outright pornographic of course.

If Richardson were female, I'm sure Pamela might be a tad distateful. Though it would still be useful in an analysis of 18th century male/female roles.

Interestingly, the pornographic imagery in Fanny Hill is fairly male homoerotic.

I think Fanny Burney doesn't quite get the wider spread accolades she deserves from feminists. But there is enough good literary critisim available for those doing scholarly research on the subject.

7thorold
Set 15, 2011, 5:38 am

>6 DanMat:
I think the trouble with Burney is that her biography has more obvious material to offer for a feminist critic than her novels do (having to write in her spare time whilst acting as unpaid secretary to her father).

8thorold
Set 15, 2011, 5:56 am

...I wonder if some of the books in this list might fit the bill, deniro? http://www.librarything.com/tag/adultery,+classic,+fiction

Most of them have transgressive female characters who end up getting punished in one way or another, and some of them portray women in very negative ways.

9wrmjr66
Editado: Set 15, 2011, 9:20 am

Wouldn't this also beg the question of what is a "classic?" Margaret Oliphant, for example, has been called an anti-feminist writer, but does she qualify as a writer of classics?

10barney67
Editado: Out 7, 2012, 10:36 am

Mensagem removida pelo autor.

11alaudacorax
Set 15, 2011, 11:49 am

#10 - ... can be read in such a way that ...

That's the problem, books are changed by reading them. If you and I read, for example, Fanny Hill our perceptions would, to a greater or lesser extent, be different and neither would exactly match the author's idea of what he had written.

There are probably vast numbers of novels where reasonable, intelligent people could put up good, sound arguments both that they embraced and definitely did not embrace a feminist ideology, purely depending on who was doing the arguing.

It's an unanswerable question.

12LipstickAndAviators
Set 15, 2011, 12:15 pm

>11 alaudacorax:

Or it's a question answerable by anyone with noreal wrong answer? :-P

Also on the argument of books written for women vs books that are feminist... I'd argue that ANY book written intentionally to be feminist very much is a book written for women, so I'm not sure you could say books written for women can't be feminist.

But then i just like to argue, and have no real sensible answer for OP's question. Apologies.

13Phocion
Set 15, 2011, 12:25 pm

Books for women versus feminists novels runs the risk of invoking No True Scotsman and Real Women Don't Wear Dresses. It runs on the assumption that there are books only women read; and it's an obvious allusion to romance novels, and both the argument that those are just for women and that they are somehow not feminist creates an unnecessary barrier.

As for looking for feminism in books written before the feminist movement, that seems silly. You may find some proto-feminist novels if you look hard enough.

14thorold
Set 15, 2011, 12:50 pm

>11 alaudacorax:
Yes, exactly.

>10 barney67:
Sorry - didn't mean to imply that you were an S-M enthusiast!

15Gail.C.Bull
Editado: Out 4, 2012, 4:59 pm

For a real non-feminist feminist classic, I would recommend The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte. It's about a mysterious widow who appears in rural community with her young son. Many rumours begin to circulate about her and, eventually, the young man learns that she fled from her husband because he beat her and she is living in hiding. Keep it mind when it was written at a time when the "rule of thumb" (a law which said that a man was allowed to beat his wife as long as the stick he beat her with was no bigger around than his thumb) was still very much in practice. But the young woman is painted as a courageous, affectionate mother rather than an disobedient wife. It was the book that sparked real debate about domestic violence, and began to change attitudes towards it.

The Flowers of Evil is also very good if you like poetry. Charles Baudelaire peopled his poetry with rebellious, spirited women and used lesbians as a symbol feminine independence.

16madpoet
Out 4, 2012, 8:34 pm

Can a novel written by a man be feminist? Because a lot of male writers wrote novels with female protagonists. Anna Karenina, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Madame Bovary, Moll Flanders, Portrait of a Lady, The Old Curiosity Shop, etc., etc.

17anthonywillard
Out 4, 2012, 8:44 pm

Since the original question didn't restrict itself to novels, I find it difficult to think of a feminist interpretation of any of Poe's fiction. I do not think there is a viable feminist interpretation of the Iliad, though there is of the Odyssey. I would like to see a feminist interpretation of Billy Budd, I think it might be possible. Despite Beatrice, I question whether there is a convincing feminist interpretation of the Divine Comedy. There are pre-feminist classics that lend themselves strongly to feminist interpretation, including many Greek tragedies, and the medieval Nibelungenlied.

18Gail.C.Bull
Out 4, 2012, 9:09 pm

Of course a man can be a feminist. Although most people these days simply say "I believe in gender equality". The original definition of a feminist is "someone who believes in the equality of sexes" but extremists have hi-jacked the term, and now most people take it to mean that you believe that women should be superior. Perhaps we need a new term for people who believe in gender equality.

But to get back to the point, I wouldn't call Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary or The Old Curiosity Shop feminist works. In two of them, the women are punished with death for their acts of independence and in the third the female character is a hapless victim without an ounce of resourcefulness.

I certainly wouldn't describe Dickens as a feminist writer. All the women in his works are either hapless victims or evil villains. Gustave Flaubert may be described as a feminist writer though. His female characters are very human with all the strengths and flaws that the word "human" implies. Leo Tolstoy had a great deal of respect for women. He wouldn't have been able to sympathize with Anna as much as he did otherwise, but he was very much a man of his times, and still felt that a woman should be punished for stepping outside the place that society prescribed for her. The outcome of Anna Karenina is proof of that he believed that.

Moll Flanders is a great example of classic feminist work. It shows behaviours traditionally associated with the evil woman who deserves to be punished, but as the actions of someone who is simply forced by circumstance to do what she has to do to survive. You get the impression that Defoe has a great deal of admiration for Moll's resourcefulness and courage, and in the end, he can't resist allowing her a new start in the new world after all her hardships.

I'm ashamed to say that I haven't read either Tess of the D'Urbervilles or Portrait of a Lady, so I can't comment on whether those fit the description of a feminist works.

19Gail.C.Bull
Editado: Out 4, 2012, 9:25 pm

>17 anthonywillard:: You slipped in your post while I was composing mine. ; )

Have you ever read The Penelopiad by Margret Atwood? It's a comic feminist interpretation of the Odyssey told from the perspective of Penelope, complete with a singing chorus of murdered hand maidens.

Ann-Marie MacDonald also wrote a fantasy feminist play called Good Night, Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) in which a literary scholar who has allowed her male boss to take advantage of her work, gets the opportunity to meet some of Shakespeare's famous leading ladies as they most likely would've been if they were real women. MacDonald's take on Juliet as air-headed adolescent who is too young to be in a serious relationship, and Desdemona as a warrior maiden with nerves like steel (based on Shakespeare's claim that Othello won her heart by telling her war stories) are absolutely hilarious.

20madpoet
Out 4, 2012, 10:00 pm

>18 Gail.C.Bull: "I certainly wouldn't describe Dickens as a feminist writer. All the women in his works are either hapless victims or evil villains."

Now, that's true of some of his characters. Dickens' mother was, by most accounts, a horrible person, and some of his female villains are based on her. But there are also many strong female characters, whose husbands defer to their judgement, such as Mrs. Bagnet in Bleak House. Many of the households in Dickens' novels are matriarchal, although not always happily so. Which of course reflects reality, where matriarchal households are as often happy or unhappy as patriarchal households.

21jaqdhawkins
Out 5, 2012, 3:10 am

I think classics reflect the societal norm of their time. Strong women have always existed and using female characters brings attention to the simple fact that women have minds. Dickens did have distinctive female characters, but they still fit the societal norms for the most part, even Stella.

22Gail.C.Bull
Out 5, 2012, 8:21 am

>21 jaqdhawkins:

I think that's true for most of classic literature, but there are exceptions. Moll Flanders being the most notable. Societal norms are admired (if not followed) by most people in a society, but there is always the "underbelly" of society in which people do as their personality dictates. Any author who focuses their attention on those outcasts and social misfits in a non-biased way is going to discover social truths that the contradict the societal norms of the time.

>20 madpoet:

The reason I have a hard time thinking of Dickens' depiction of women as "feminist" is because all of Dickens' characters, male and female, are drawn as caricatures. They personalities are exaggerated into their physical appearance (all the evil people are ugly or deformed or dirty, all the virtuous people are frail, beautiful, and ethereal). That's why actors like playing the characters from Dickens; its a chance to really dig into their acting skills and physically as well and psychologically transform themselves.

23Booksloth
Out 6, 2012, 5:55 am

Have to throw in a word here for the great feminist writer Winifred Holtby. Not only did Holtby work tirelessly for the feminist cause during her short lifetime, she also wrote books (South Riding is the best-known example) whose female protagonists find their fulfilment in their careers, helping others and following their hearts. Sarah Burton, for example (in SR) is sexually independent, politically aware and emerges as a triumphant single working woman. One of my favourite fictional characters!

24southernbooklady
Out 6, 2012, 10:49 am

15 Keep it mind when it was written at a time when the "rule of thumb" (a law which said that a man was allowed to beat his wife as long as the stick he beat her with was no bigger around than his thumb) was still very much in practice.

Not so.

I've always found feminism more helpful as an approach to literature than as a label for it--as if a book could achieve "feminist" status by a certain tally of strong female characters.

I still remember with blinding clarity the moment when I realized this. It was while I was sitting in a class taught by Mary Daly and she suddenly turned around to look at us and said "So tell me, what does Shakespeare really have to say to women?"

25anthonywillard
Out 6, 2012, 7:24 pm

@ 24 : What was the answer?

26southernbooklady
Out 6, 2012, 7:34 pm

>25 anthonywillard: Mary Daly's answer was "not a helluva lot." I disagreed, but came away thinking it was a valid question to ask of any piece of literature.

27anthonywillard
Out 6, 2012, 8:42 pm

@ 26 It is a valid question, and the answer(s) to it would always be of interest to everyone.

28anthonywillard
Out 6, 2012, 8:54 pm

It reminds me of my parents, who were both schoolteachers, occasionally debating what various authors had to say to children. Of course they did not concern themselves with Henry James or Proust, or such, but rather Hawthorne, Dickens, Cather, and so on. The most memorable argument was about Whitman, who according to my father (a Whitman expert) had nothing to say to children, while my mother (more of a mother expert) thought just the opposite, though as I recall she leaned rather heavily on "Oh Captain, My Captain".

29Gail.C.Bull
Out 6, 2012, 10:40 pm

>28 anthonywillard: quote: "...she leaned rather heavily on 'Oh Captain, My Captain'."

Did the captain fall over?

Sorry, bad joke. I couldn't resist.

30anthonywillard
Out 7, 2012, 4:08 am

@ 29 I think he had already fallen over.

31jaqdhawkins
Out 7, 2012, 12:46 pm

> 22, good point about Moll Flanders. Focusing on a character that breaks societal norms will obviously make a good story.

> 28 The phrase "Oh Captain, My Captain" alsways takes me right to Deat Poet's Society.

32thorold
Out 9, 2012, 7:41 am

>28 anthonywillard:
Proust: "It's time for bed!"
Henry James: "You would enjoy a little holiday in the country with your new governess."

33anthonywillard
Editado: Out 9, 2012, 8:55 am

@ 32 So. You see? There you have it! Nothing ventured nothing gained! The problem was that in the 1950's my mother hadn't yet got around to reading Proust. She saved him for her 80's, in the nursing home, and then she couldn't see what all the fuss was about. And of course my father always thought that literature was wasted on children, and that so was everything else. A perverse attitude for a schoolteacher, but, as I said, there you have it! And of course in Proust there's the bit about the cookie, and children like reading about cookies, and about animals, and of course Whitman has animals, he wanted to go live with them, that speaks to children, they like to read about living with animals. My father thought children were animals and enough said.

34jnwelch
Out 11, 2012, 3:23 pm

>18 Gail.C.Bull: I agree with you that Dickens was no feminist, but " All the women in his works are either hapless victims or evil villains" to me isn't really a good description.

They often were angelic or heroic, like Agnes and Peggoty in David Copperfield. But he viewed girls and women through a traditional lens and they often come across as stereotypes rather than real people (not that he didn't have that problem with a lot of male characters, too). I thought this was a pretty good short article, which expresses disappointment in his female characters: http://www.ucm.es/info/siim/descargas/17.FeminineStererotypesDickens.pdf.

35Gail.C.Bull
Out 13, 2012, 1:05 am

>34 jnwelch::
I agree with you that both the female and male characters in Dickens' works were stereotypical, but the "traditional lens" is what created those stereotypes in the first place, so women viewed through that lens don't just "come across as stereotypes", they are stereotypes.

The other thing that is important to remember about Dickens is that he grew up in poverty and uncertainty: the two things which always create a more conservative bent in a person's mind as conservatism preaches security and safety. Other, liberal-thinking, writers of Dickens' time took a very different view of women. Baudelaire was writing poetry that celebrated female sexuality. Percy Shelley was encouraging his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft-Shelley to pursue her own literary ambitions. Lord Byron was writing sensual love poetry which preached the virtues of free love long before the 1960s coined the phrase. The mid-1850s marks a change in the view of women as angel-or-demon to a more enlightened view of women as human beings in their own right, neither angelic nor demonic but just human. Dickens was not a part of this literary revolution because of his conservative outlook, not because of his times.

36Gail.C.Bull
Fev 17, 2013, 9:30 pm

Quote #24: "I've always found feminism more helpful as an approach to literature than as a label for it--as if a book could achieve "feminist" status by a certain tally of strong female characters."

You're right: it's not about a tally of strong female characters. But is it about a tally of the number of female characters depicted as human beings, with all the flaws and strengths that that word implies. Everyone likes to point to Lady MacBeth when they talk about Shakespeare's view of women, but I prefer to point out Beatrice from "Much Ado About Nothing". She's loyal to her friends and family, but sometimes that loyalty is too blind, causing her to make unfair judgements about others. She is highly intelligent, but her sharp tongue and wit often get her into trouble and cause her to pick fights with people that she really shouldn't be fighting. She has strengths and weaknesses as all people do. I think she and Benedick are easily my favourite romantic couple from all of literature.

I just finished reading "Pere Goriot", and I have to say, I think we should be adding Balzac to our list of pre-feminist feminist authors. Goriot's daughters love their father, but they let their ambitions and greed trump the needs of their father. They are good people with good intentions, but they sink to remarkable depths when forced to by poverty or ambition. Good examples of "woman as human being" characters.

37southernbooklady
Fev 18, 2013, 8:31 pm

I prefer to point out Beatrice from "Much Ado About Nothing". She's loyal to her friends and family, but sometimes that loyalty is too blind, causing her to make unfair judgements about others. She is highly intelligent, but her sharp tongue and wit often get her into trouble and cause her to pick fights with people that she really shouldn't be fighting.

Women in Shakespeare plays are almost always at their most true not in the whirlwind of the plays action, but in the smaller, more contained moments of private, one-on-one repartee between characters. In those spaces they more than hold their own and can be pretty pithy.

38rocketjk
Mar 10, 2013, 3:18 pm

"The other thing that is important to remember about Dickens is that he grew up in poverty and uncertainty: the two things which always create a more conservative bent in a person's mind as conservatism preaches security and safety."

Always? That's quite a generalization. I think that growing up in poverty and uncertainty will often engender a suspicion and/or loathing of the dominant paradigm, respect for which is also a strong tenet of conservatism. The first name to pop into my mind was Caesar Chavez.

39Gail.C.Bull
Abr 8, 2013, 10:39 pm

> 38: Perhaps I should have said, "almost always".

Nonetheless, I do stand by my statement that growing up in poverty and uncertainty create a more conservative bent in the political views of the person in question. While they may come to hate people with power and money, that hatred springs more from envy then from the belief that those wealth and power should more evenly distributed. They want to take the place of the rich, not dispose of wealth altogether.

People living in poverty also learn to focus on how survive from day-to-day and week-to-week. They may rage against the system, but they also, ironically, become masters of stretching it's rules and twisting it's codes to serve they're own purpose. So in the end, they become as dependant on the system staying the same as those who gain the most wealth from it. Ultimately, we all have to learn to survive in the world as it is, not he world that we wish it was.

Most political activists rise from the middle, upper, or educated classes. Caesar Chavez is the exception that proves the rule.

40rocketjk
Abr 9, 2013, 2:04 am

"People living in poverty also learn to focus on how survive from day-to-day and week-to-week. They may rage against the system, but they also, ironically, become masters of stretching it's rules and twisting it's codes to serve they're own purpose. So in the end, they become as dependent on the system staying the same as those who gain the most wealth from it. Ultimately, we all have to learn to survive in the world as it is, not he world that we wish it was.

Most political activists rise from the middle, upper, or educated classes."

Again, you are generalizing furiously about what "they" think and feel about their lives. I'd say that people who must "become masters of stretching {the system's} rules and twisting it's codes to serve their own purposes" are certainly not therefore dependent on that system staying the same. If the system changed to make life fairer for them, they would benefit greatly, and most poor people know it.

I wonder how many of the Black Panther leaders of the 60s were from middle class families. I suppose some might have been. According to wikipedia, Huey Newton "was born in Monroe, Louisiana, the youngest of seven children to Armelia Johnson and Walter Newton, a sharecropper and Baptist lay preacher."

Newton's co-leader of the Panthers was Bobby Seale, who (again wikipedia), "was one of the three children born to his mother, a homemaker, and his father, a carpenter, in Dallas, Texas. After moving around in Texas, his family relocated to Oakland, California during World War II. Seale attended Berkeley High School, and joined the U.S. Air Force in 1955. He spent three years in the Air Force before he received a bad conduct discharge for fighting with a commanding officer. Upon his arrival back in Oakland, Seale began working at different aerospace plants as a sheet metal mechanic, and attending night school to earn his high school diploma." So itinerant carpenter father; night school high school diploma. Wouldn't call that middle or educated class, I don't think.

Two more "exceptions that prove the rule"? (That's an expression I've always hated, by the way. How does an exception prove a rule? Rules are proven despite exceptions, not because of them. But I digress.)

More importantly to me, however, the question of who does or does not become a political activist, or, more to the point of your final comment, I think, an activist leader, does not speak to your assertion that growing up in poverty is likely to make someone a conservative. Perhaps it does often take education and training to become a leader or activist, political or otherwise.

But if your contention is that if you go into the heart of an American inner city you are going to find a preponderance of Republicans, well, I don't think the voting demographics would back you up on that.

41thorold
Editado: Abr 9, 2013, 5:57 am

>38 rocketjk:-40
...all of which takes us a long way away from "was Dickens a feminist?" :-)

I think it's a bit of a red herring, really. Unless you're a super-orthodox Marxist, it doesn't really matter if a revolution starts as a protest against some externally-imposed change (as most "grass-roots" movements do), or as a result of an intellectual conviction that change is needed (as was presumably the case for the Black Panthers). The only real difference is that a "conservative" revolution (e.g. against food prices, rent rises or wage cuts) has more chance of getting the popular support it needs to keep going.

Dickens definitely disliked change, and blamed it for most of the evils of his time. He hated railways and industry and organised education and trade unions and workhouses and just about everything else that was new in Victorian England (apart from cheap printing!). But at the same time he was aware that you couldn't reverse those changes, and that there had to be reform to undo at least some of their dehumanising influence. And he also had a strong dislike for some very traditional things, such as the more sclerotic bits of the legal system, electoral practice, and the civil service.

So you could describe him as a conservative, but it wouldn't be the whole story. Hard Times is the classic case in point: the first half of the book is all about the evils of capitalism, and the second half is mostly about the evils of socialism...

42madpoet
Abr 10, 2013, 11:29 pm

Charles Dickens a conservative? While he disliked many aspects of change (or "progress" as the Victorians termed it) it was because the poor did not benefit from the changes. The Industrial Revolution-- especially in its early stages was a time of immense suffering and misery for the working classes.

How could anyone read his novels and not think: this system (political, legal, educational, whatever) is badly in need of change! His novels were polemics for reform.

Little Dorrit: prison reform
Bleak House: legal reform
Nicholas Nickleby and Hard Times: educational reform

43thorold
Abr 11, 2013, 8:36 am

>42 madpoet:
Yes and no...
I don't think Dickens was concerned about the poor per se: he objected to anything that devalued human individuality and treated people as cogs in a machine. And usually illustrated it by comparing the present with some real or imagined past time when things were better. Most of the time the victims were working-class, but they didn't have to be (e.g. the pupils at Dotheboys Hall). And he never paid much attention to the oppressed working-class girls who would certainly be slaving away in the kitchens of his middle-class readers...
He didn't want educational reform in the conventional socialist or evangelical sense of giving kids the tools to learn trades/read the scriptures and save their souls: the Gradgrinds and Hedstones were already doing that. He wanted schools (or preferably "not-schools")that treated boys with respect and allowed room for imagination.