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December 17, 2005
girls can do anything boys can do better (authorship 17.1/25)
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. "Tradition and the Female Talent." The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 183-207.
1 sentence summary: (male) writers' anxiety about authorship was already complicated before they had to concieve of themselves as also in competition with (i.e. inclusive of) female writers' participation.
187. for "writers like james in america and wilde in england"…"the historical change was disquieting…because it had several ramifications. first, because women's new autonomy smashed the oedipal paradigm in which the mother represents a figure who is to be possessed rather than self-possessed…and perhaps even more important, because for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary sons the oedipal struggle to take place and the possession of the father was now in some sense doomed from the start, this historical sense reinforced the sense of belatedness…literary men had already been brooding for several centuries"
198. "perhaps the best example of the highbrow male modernists' disgust with the lowbrow female scribbler" is a parody by joyce; "more recently…nathaniel west…helps his newspaper reporters revenge themselves against their own nihilism by letting them savor stories about lady writers with three names…[and suggest about them that] "'what they all needed was a good rape'"
199. "perhaps the most daunting aspect of women's entrance into literary history was the fact that some female authors were neither scribblers nor facilitators; some, quite terrifyingly, were great artists."
202. "can it be that the literary sterility described by writers like beerbohm, huxley, and hardy translated itself, paradoxically enough, into fertile imagery of biological sterility, castration, and impotence in modernist delineations of such famous figures as eliot's fisher king...?" "our assessment of early twentieth-century intellectual history has been skewed because critics and scholars, whether consciously or not, have massively repressed the centrality of 'the woman question' in this period"
204. "as is so frequently the case in the history of sex relations, men perceive the smallest female steps toward autonomy as threatening strides that will strip them of all authority, while women respond to such anxious reaction-formations with a nervous sense of guilt and a paradoxical sense of marginalization….the female half of the dialogue is considerably more complicated than the male"
Posted by ttobryan at December 17, 2005 01:08 AM