Haunted by the Lady Novelist: Metafictional Anxieties about Women's Writing from Northanger Abbey to The Carrie Diaries

This paper argues that the development of the identity of the professional woman writer as a ‘lady novelist’ in the mid-eighteenth century has had a lasting and detrimental impact on the status of women's writing that lingers through to the present, particularly in the critical discourse surrounding chick lit. The first part of this paper discusses the figure of the lady novelist and traces her centrality to criticisms of women's writing from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. The second part of this paper then examines the haunting presence of the lady novelist in the metafictional works of seven representative women writers: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), and Candace Bushnell's The Carrie Diaries (2010). By drawing a through-line that connects these texts, I argue for a renewed understanding of the ways in which Western women writers from the eighteenth century to the present are unified by a pervasive anxiety about being a ‘lady novelist’.     

LOVING TO STRAIGHTEN OUT DEVELOPMENT: SEXUALITY AND ETHNODEVELOPMENT IN THE WORLD BANK'S ECUADORIAN LENDING

Gender staff in the World Bank -- the world's largest and most influential development institution -- have a policy problem. Having prioritised efforts to get women into paid employment as the ȁ8cure-allȁ9 for gender inequality they must deal with the work that women already do -- the unpaid labour of caring, socialisation, and human needs fulfilment. This article explores the most prominent policy solution enacted by the Bank to this tension between paid and unpaid work: the restructuring of normative heterosexuality to encourage a two-partner model of love and labour wherein women work more and men care better. Through a case study of Bank gender lending in Ecuador I argue that staff are trying to (re)forge normative arrangements of intimacy, a policy preference that remains invisible unless sexuality is taken seriously as a category of analysis in development studies. Specifically, I focus on four themes that emerge from the attempt to restructure heteronormativity in the loan: (1) the definition of good gender analysis as requiring complementary sharing and dichotomous sex; (2) the Bank's attempt to inculcate limited rationality in women such that they operate as better workers while retaining altruistic attachments to loved ones; (3) the Bank's attempt to inculcate better loving in men, such that they pick up the slack of caring labour when their (partially) rational wives move into productive work, and; (4) the invocation of a racialised hierarchy resting on the extent to which communities approximate ideals of sharing monogamous partnership. Aside from providing clear evidence that the world's largest development institution is involved in micro-processes of sexuality adjustment alongside macro-processes of economic restructuring, I also critique the Bank's sexualised policy interventions and suggest that they warrant contestation.     

Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus

Abstract

Anna Kavan's fictional portrayals of psychiatric breakdown and its treatment provide a unique perspective on the patient's experience of early to mid twentieth-century psychiatry. This article looks in detail at Kavan's time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome during the Second World War, observing how the solider-psychiatric patient becomes a figurehead for her radical politics in her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944), and a prominent protagonist in her stories. Through close reading of her correspondence, her journalism and her wartime stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945), it examines how the intersection of psychological trauma and physiological symptoms characteristic of effort syndrome surfaces in Kavan's writing of this period and in her own psychic responses to the war. It observes the importance of figurative language to her portrayal of war trauma and psychological breakdown, as her characters embody metaphor in their psychosomatic symptoms, and explores a twisted reconception of mind–body dualism prevalent throughout her writing of this period. It goes on to examine how the peculiar interaction of the physical and the psychological extends to the relationship between Kavan's characters and their external environment in her Blitz stories. Against the backdrop of the war-torn city, mind and body engage in ongoing conflict, affect and emotion bleed into her physical landscapes, and everyday objects become animated and hostile towards her protagonists.     

Unveiling the Forbidden: Same-sex Love as a Motif in Lydia Wahlström’s Writing

This article investigates how the historian and writer Lydia Wahlström (1869–1954) wrote about same-sex passions in a time when homosexuality was forbidden by law and tabooed in literature. There were of course also, during the first decades of the 1900s, many people who lived in same-sex relationships, some of them openly enough that this can still be discerned in the historical material. Lydia Wahlström was among them. She was active in the suffragist movement and one of its most prolific leaders, speakers, and writers. Wahlström was awarded a doctorate in history in 1898 and then became the director of studies at the Åhlinska School for girls in Stockholm. Alongside this, she wrote numerous articles and non-fiction books on a wide range of subjects as well as three romans-à-clef. In these novels, she wrote about the love that dared not speak its name, but she had to draw a veil over the forbidden motif in order to write about it. The interesting thing is that Wahlström did not mask the controversial motif more than that the observant contemporary reader could understand the underlying meaning in the novels and that it becomes even clearer to those who read her autobiography that was published many years later. This article deals with writing about same-sex love in a profoundly homophobic time.     

The trouble with ‘women in computing’: a critical examination of the deployment of research on the gender gap in computer science

The pessimistic scenario for ‘women in information communications technology’ and for ‘women in technology’ generally is even more paradoxical and insidious with respect to ‘women in computing’. Studies within this field not only report insignificant improvement in the proportion of women in Western countries’ computing fields but also alert us of a declining trend. Moreover, that decline has been accompanied – or even preceded – by years of research and programs that have specifically focused on increasing women’s participation in computing; however, they have not had the expected effect. More surprisingly, there has been a significant increase in the representation of women in all other science-related fields and professions. Our aim is to provide some clues to fight the feeling of inexorability that may be entailed by the research on women in computing. We will argue that part of the problem is related to the static nature of the research deployed around the problem of ‘women in computing’, primarily, the research constructed around the ‘leaky pipeline’ metaphor. We provide a synthesis of the critiques this research has received in recent decades and highlight research trends that render other landscapes visible when studying ‘women in computing’. These trends help us question how we are conducting research within this field and urge us to problematise assumptions about computing and gender that we may paradoxically continue to reproduce even while denouncing the paucity of women in computing and studying the reasons for this state of affairs. In short, we present the need for different researchers’ eyes that allow different landscapes of women and computing to be seen and produced.     

Cross-Currents: Elizabeth von Arnim,Max Beerbohm and George Bernard Shaw

Abstract

When Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Introduction to Sally appeared in 1926, the critical response was divided. Dame Ethel Smyth may have told von Arnim the book was her ‘masterpiece’ but some were less convinced; the reviewer in Punch, for instance, considered it ‘a coarse-grained fantasy’. By situating Introduction to Sally in a wider literary context that includes Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911 Beerbohm, Max (1964a), ‘To Reggie Turner, 3 November 1911’, in Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), Letters to Reggie Turner, London: Davis, p. 126. [Google Scholar]) and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914 Shaw, George Bernard (1914), ‘Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts’, Everybody’s Magazine, Vol xxxi, (5). [Google Scholar]), this article explores the personal connections between these three authors and the thematic cross-currents in these texts. Is von Arnim’s novel really as ‘coarse’ and ‘vulgar’ as some earlier critics suggest? Or is it a novel that successfully mixes the plausible with the artificial, the comic and the socially catastrophic, in ways that, more than a decade later, resonate with the work of her friends to highlight several continuing preoccupations?     

Wet and wobbly harmonies: music and saloon-life in the industrial workers of the world, 1905–1920

ABSTRACT

During the first fifteen years of its existence, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) gained a reputation for being an exceedingly musical labor organization. Where did this proclivity originate? This article complements and elaborates existing explanations by sourcing the roots of IWW music to the institution that was both historically and contemporaneously integral to working-class culture – namely the saloon. It demonstrates strong and persistent links with the culture of proletariat drinking establishments. First, it investigates the ease with which individuals and songs travelled between the recreational environments of the barroom and activist environments of the IWW. Second, by comparing the values and attitudes associated with the musical cultures of the IWW and the saloon, it demonstrates an enduring compatibility between these two working-class institutions. Finally, it demonstrates the value of these findings for historians of the IWW organization, labor historians, and theorists of social movements.     

数字“代工”：网络文学写手的另类劳动实践及其隐忧

随着网络文学平台的兴起,依托于平台的网络文学写作逐步发展成为一种新型职业形态。网文公司出现,并嵌入到网络文学生产过程中,重构了网络文学的生产逻辑。受雇于网络文学公司的续写作者,类似于传统工厂外包的数字“代工”,他们的劳动实践存在“概念”与“执行”和“作家”与“作品”的双重分离,正是这种另类的劳动实践使得续写作者成为网络文学生产过程中的“幽灵劳工”。网络写作的灵活性、工作自由的乌托邦幻象和劳动公平交易的表征,使得网络文学写手甘愿加入努力码字的续写作者队伍中。但是这一切并不能掩盖续写作者付出与回报的不对等,且处于权益受损和向上流动受阻的双重困境之中。