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A carregar... Mothers of the Novel (1986)por Dale Spender
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Lady Mary Wroath - Anne Weamys - Katherine Philips - Eliza Haywood - Sarah Fielding - Charlotte Lennox - Elizabeth Inchbald - Ann Radcliffe- Mary Wollstonecraft - Fanny Burney - Maria Edgeworth - Amelia Opie - Mary Brunton. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)823.0099287Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction By TypeClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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One of the ways in which feminism has enthusiastically practised sexism is in the denial of the arts of their gender. So that there was a period where it was de rigueur to be contemptuous of knitting, sewing, etc etc etc, arts practised by women, but by definition not art according to men, that gender having defined what art is, and by making it things that aren’t useful, thus having denied the very existence of women as artists. A brilliant move on their part which ‘feminists’ upheld for a long time. I decline to define myself as a feminist, thus escaping the frequently sexist nature of that ism. The logic was that they were denying that there was anything of value in the lives of their downtrodden mothers. Apparently that was a feminist, rather than a sexist, position.
Let’s suppose they have moved on from that fatuous stand. Have they? I hope so!
I’m at a knitting group, talking to a girl whose postgrad work was in the area of the pre-Mothers of the Novel. Before the Novel came into existence and women took it over as one of their artforms, their writing is hard to come by. But it is there. In the sixteenth century educated women in particular wrote letters and one form was particularly poignant. They would write to their children before they went into labour as they were such a good chance to die. Often they would urge their children to accept whatever replacement their husbands made for them, women being domestic labour which needed to be replaced upon its death.
Now women and their babies to be largely survive, but I have noticed on the internet directions to patterns for premature babies (normal baby patterns are too small for them) and patterns for babies that die at birth. How sad is that?
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I wonder how many of you who have been so derogatory here of writing that isn't to their taste realise how important women are to the novel. But for reasons which Spender discusses at length men have erased them from the very idea of literature by defining it in a way that excludes female writers and nothing much has changed, I'm surprised to see.
I have gotten involved in attempting to defend writing that isn't considered worthy of giving the time of day to here on goodreads. Dale Spender explains what is going on in an illuminating way.
Quoting my own book which is in my writings should you happen to wish to read more....
If Tompkins’ concern is to question our definition of literature in order to place Franc’s genre in the literary canon, Spender’s is to question our notion of literature in order to place women back into it. It is an eye-opening critique of the literary canon and literary criticism. Like Tompkins, by putting these back into a historical context, she establishes a tradition of female writers whom she judges as ‘good’ dating back to the very beginnings of the novel. It is clear from her work that this form of writing had not fathers, but mothers. Yet since last century these have been expunged from the records. The literary canon has denied their existence and attributed the development of the novel to men. Again it is tempting to quote Spender at length on this matter since it is germane to a consideration of Franc’s genre.
It is a process at work. By making literary criticism transhistorical it has been possible to remove women altogether from literature. By putting it back into history it is not only possible, but essential, to make women an important part of literature. In the 1700s women were the pioneers of the novel. The majority of novels were written by women, it was women who experimented with form and structure. It was the practice for male writers to take female pseudonyms, this practice reversing itself in the mid-nineteenth century.
This is no great surprise when one puts literature back into history and considers the position of women. As Spender puts it:
Given this, it is scarcely a surprise that literature written by women is bound to moralise, judge, comment – not merely to observe, but to attempt to change the course of history. One way or another those without power, those who are not in a privileged position, will not only want to, but need to, do this. It is equally unsurprising that it is men historically who perceive literature as something that watches. There is nothing much for them to want to change.
At the same time, however, it is men who are the judges of literary worth at every step. Spender quotes Woolf on the consequences of this:
It is not only how the female writer may wish to look at the world that causes these difficulties. It is also what they look at:
In part at least, argues Spender, because women, as a consequence of lack of access to it otherwise, needed substance from the novel, it is during this early period of the novel in which women writers dominated, that
She stresses that these female writers were at the time so successful both in terms of popularity and criticism that it was the male writers who competed with them, rather than vice-versa. Their audience was by no means limited to females. They were not perceived as ‘women writing for women’ even though their concern and perspective was often that of women.
This, again, is scarcely surprising if the human condition, relationships between humans and between humans and the world in which they live, is presumed to be the purpose of literature. The process of the removal of women from the literary canon no matter how they were perceived by their contemporary audience—a process by no means limited to these first women writers—is all the more fascinating to consider. In short what appears to be happening is that their subject matter is the ‘proper’ matter of literature and yet it is seen as something different when women write of it. They are writing of one thing and yet by virtue of nothing more than their gender—a point with which it is difficult to disagree when one reads Spender’s analysis— it becomes something else.
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