‘Not Simple,Not Pure’: Revisioning of Mythical Wicked Women in the Stories of Sara Maitland

The British novelist, feminist and religious thinker Sara Maitland (b.1950) is renowned for her short stories, many of which involve the rewriting of fairy tale and classical and biblical myth. This article situates Maitland's retellings within the contemporary feminist tradition of literary revisioning, but emphasises that her retelling of old tales is distinguished by a deep—and often discomforting—engagement with questions of morality. This is rooted in Maitland's political commitment and Christian faith, and is particularly evident in her treatment of mythical female evil. Her short stories take a morally ambiguous approach, paying attention to the moral and psychological complexities of the wicked stepmothers in fairy tale, gorgons and child-killers of classical myth, and temptresses of the Hebrew Bible. Maitland's feminist revisioning of mythical wicked women does not flinch from their darkness, or impose simple ethical lessons, but at the same time she is (sometimes horribly) aware of their moral significance. This article examines the portrayal of feminist theology's concept of the ‘female sin’ of passivity in Maitland's revisioning of Delilah (in Daughter of Jerusalem, 1978) and ‘Helen of Troy's Aerobics Class’ (in On Becoming A Fairy Godmother, 2003); how the crimes of mythical wicked women are retold as being motivated by revenge against men in ‘Deborah and Jael’ (Daughter of Jerusalem), ‘Siren Song’ and ‘The Swallow and the Nightingale’ (Far North and Other Dark Tales, 2008). The latter of these raises issues of women's conflicting loyalties, which is also considered in ‘The Swans’ (2008). The taboos of incest and child abuse are explored powerfully and sensitively in ‘Jocasta’ (2003) and ‘The Wicked Stepmother's Lament’ (A Book of Spells, 1987), and resistance to simplistic moralising is encapsulated in the story of a menopausal Eve, in ‘Choosing Paradise’ (2003).     

Apostolic Minds and the Spinning House: Jane Ellen Harrison and Virginia Woolf's Discourse of Alterity

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) are two of the most iconic figures in British feminist history whose enduring influence have helped create and sustain a multitude of feminist discourses. Interestingly, both produced their landmark feminist studies in Cambridge when it was, arguably, the most aggressively anti-feminist institution in Britain at that time. Evidence of the kind of institutionalized disciplinary control Cambridge historically exercised on women can be found in the three Committals books (1823–1894) of the Spinning House (1631–1894) in the University archives. So called because the inmates were given wool to spin, the Spinning House was a penitentiary for young girls who were judged to be compromising the morals of the undergraduates. The Spinning House had its basis in the legal authority of the University which declared ‘That the University by virtue of their Charter sanctioned by Act of Parliament, have an undoubted right to cause the Public Street to be inspected, and loose and disorderly women to be taken up and sent to the Spinning House or the house of correction’. Against the background of the culture encapsulated by the Spinning House, women academics, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, were making tremendous efforts to bring about intellectual equality. And though the two—the spinner and the woman student—occupied mutually exclusive spaces, they were nevertheless held on the margins of the power structure that produced both. This paper examines the socio-historical context and the puritan intellectual politics of Cambridge against which feminist theories of Harrison and Woolf were produced to identify some of the methods with which they negotiated masculine orthodoxy and structured their feminist discourse of alterity.     

高 校 军 事 理 论 课 与 思 想政治教育 课 的 关 系 整合 研究

军事理论课作为公共必修课,目前虽在高校普遍开设,但也存在着师资队伍建设、教材教学内容、教学质量监管等方面的问题。思想政治课程与军事理论课在教学目标、教学方式、教学内容等方面具有一致性,因此要在教学管理、师资队伍、教学内容、课程体系等方面开展整合,打造教师队伍、构建教学体系、提升教学质量,实现\"两课\"共赢。     

The Female Body and Reviews of Women Pianists in 1950s London

Women pianists in London in the 1950s, performing mainstream repertoire (Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt and Chopin) as well as modern pieces which demanded stamina, physicality and bravura, were often the subject of negative reviews. The critics’ attitudes towards them seems to echo the prevailing Freudian mantra, ‘anatomy is destiny’: women, generally smaller than men, apparently possessing less power and mental capacity, were deemed unfit for this repertoire. But if some women pianists demonstrated ‘unusual’ (for women) physical and mental power, successfully performing long and difficult pieces, they too were damned by the critics, because they did not fit the traditional notion of femininity. In this article, the author demonstrates the magnitude of the effect of the cultural image of women on the reception of both the ‘feminine’ and ‘unfeminine’ women pianists in 1950s London.     

‘Keeping the Ruins Private’: Anna Kavan and Heroin Addiction

Abstract

In 1964, the number of registered heroin addicts in Britain was 753. One of these was Anna Kavan, née Helen Woods. Beginning her writing career under the name Helen Ferguson, she wrote conventionally realist novels that enjoyed modest commercial success. In 1939–40, after a number of serious breakdowns and suicide attempts, and now calling herself Anna Kavan, Woods/Ferguson left a Swiss sanatorium addicted to heroin, which had almost certainly been therapeutically prescribed for sleeping disorders and severe depression. From then until her death in 1968, when she was found collapsed over a box of heroin, Kavan had an intermittent but intense relationship with the drug. This essay examines the ways in which Kavan has been constructed as an ‘addict writer’, both by her biographers and critics, and how this designation has influenced critical readings of her work.