The Sudanese Woman

The nature of the relationship between (proto-)feminism and (anti-)imperialism is highly contested. A case in point is the work of Olive Schreiner, and the articulation of gender politics with (anti-)imperialism which has been subjected to repeated scrutiny in the last twenty years. One strand of criticism, exemplified by critics like Laura Chrisman, Anne McClintock and Carolyn Burdett, argues that Schreiner generally successfully integrates a (proto-)feminist politics with criticism of imperialism in her writing produced after The Story of an African Farm . However, her first novel is viewed as more problematic in this regard. While acknowledging it as a major early text of the women's movement, such critics see the novel as in large measure endorsing prevailing Victorian ideologies of racial hierarchy. Drawing on the methodology of Sub-altern Studies, Moore-Gilbert proposes a rather different interpretation of The Story of an African Farm . Following the lead of Ranajit Guha and his colleagues, he seeks to trace the impact of (the resistance of) the colonized subaltern on the colonizer's unconscious and how this is reflected in the colonizer's regimes of representation and self-image. He proposes that Waldo can be read 'catachrestically' as a figure of the (partially resistant) colonized who at the manifest level occupy only a marginal role in Schreiner's text. The aim is not to overturn readings of Waldo that see him as an exemplary 'modern', embodying many of the characteristics of western civilization at the time. Rather, the argument is that such a 'catchrestic' reading can co-exist simultaneously with these received interpretations of his role, thus corroborating the perception of the Subaltern Studies historians on the existence of conflicts and contradictions in the colonizer's unconscious that mark the (oppositional) presence of the (historically effaced) subaltern. Against their emphasis, however, Moore-Gilbert suggests that the colonizer's unconscious can also be the seat of 'progressive' drives. And the presence of such drives on Schreiner's novel suggests that its racial politics are more consonant with those of her later work than is commonly assumed.     

Woman and home in Australia

Jill Julius Matthews, Good and mad women: the historical construction of femininity in twentieth century Australia (George Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1984; Kerreen Reiger, The disenchantment of the home: modernising the Australian family 1880–1940 (Oxford University Press) Melbourne, 1985.     

The Woman on the Postage Stamp

Class(room) wars

The Taking Liberties Collective, Learning the Hard Way: Women's Oppression in Men's Education (Macmillan, Women in Society, 1989) £25 hardback, £7.95 paperback.

Ann Thompson and Helen Wilcox (eds) Teaching Women: Feminism and English Studies (Manchester University Press, Cultural Politics Series, 1989), £27.50 hardback, £7.95 paperback.

The past before us: twenty years of feminism

Feminist review, spring 1988

Ania Loomba, gender, race, renaissance drama

Cultural Politics Series, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1989

The perpetuation of myth

Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, Viking, £15.95     

Sonia Delaunay: Fashioning the Modern Woman

Focusing on questions of gender and modernity, Gronberg examines representations of Simultaneous fashions designed by the Paris-based artist Sonia Delaunay in the German illustrated press of the 1920s. Simultaneous dress was presented as a means of rendering woman 'modern' both through fashion and through association with Parisian artistic avant-gardism. Gronberg explores the figure of the fashionably dressed Parisian femme moderne in relation to 1920s concepts of the neue Frau. The identity of Sonia Delaunay as an artist turned professional designer marked her out as a 'modern woman' and was crucial in the promotion of Simultaneity to international audiences. Delaunay's persona as a 'modern woman' also related to her status as a wife. The German press depicted Sonia Delaunay and her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay, as a Knstlerehepaar, an artist-couple exemplifying contemporary notions of 'companionate marriage'. Gronberg shows how such concepts of the modern woman were important not only in marketing Sonia Delaunay's fashions but also in claims for Robert Delaunay's post-war painting as a renewed form of avant-gardism. The essay concludes by considering Paris as a milieu in which women interacted with each other professionally-as writers, artists and photographers-engaging with and reformulating the visual imagery of modernity. The production, promotion and consumption of Simultaneous fashion during the 1920s reveals the 'modern woman' as both subject and object of representation. A preoccupation with fashion could be as much to do with challenging and overcoming, as with acquiescing to, stereotypes of femininity.