MARRIAGE ‘AMONG THE MURKANS’

Abstract Stella Miles Franklin (1879–1954) is best known for contributions to a uniquely Australian literary tradition. However, during her American years (1906–1915) when she worked in Chicago with the National Women's Trade Union League, Franklin wrote much unpublished fiction in the New Woman literary genre common to early-twentieth-century US women's traditions. This paper focuses on two such little-known unpublished stories: ‘Uncle Robert's Wedding Present’ (1908) and ‘Teaching Him’ (1909), discussing ways their entanglements with questions of marriage and economics are grounded in Franklin's work and personal life and in the intellectual influences that shaped her writing.     

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.     

‘A sort of Rathmines version of a Dior design’: Maeve Brennan,Self-Fashioning and the Uses of Style

This article explores the politics of style in the writing of Maeve Brennan. Brennan's concern with style, subjectivity and power is strikingly visible in her short stories and ‘Talk of the Town’ essays for the New Yorker. While in some of her short stories published in the New Yorker in the 1950s, Brennan seems to offer an extended critique of dandyism, elsewhere in her writing self-fashioning takes on an altogether more positive value and is steeped in the political as well as literary commitments of her work. The article argues that Brennan's interest in the politics of style, both personally and in her writing, is informed by the different strategies she deployed as an Irish woman writer establishing her place amongst a New York literary elite in the mid twentieth century.     

Vulnerability and Ontology

The question of the possibility of an anti-foundationalist approach to ethics has come to the forefront in recent discussions in the humanities. Two questions dominate these discussions. The first is how we can define agency, the necessary ground of ethical action apart from a transcendental subject. The second is how we can define a secure foundation for ethical judgements without universals. A relativistic ethics seems, by definition, futile. I take up both of these questions here with reference to the work of Judith Butler. I argue that in her post-Gender Trouble work Butler has defined an agent, an ‘I’, that is neither a social dupe nor a transcendental subject but, rather, both discursive and material. This ‘I’ provides the basis for Butler's turn to ontology as well as her analyses of vulnerability, precarity and cohabitation. These conceptions form the basis of her ethical position. I examine Butler's central argument that the material/ontological facts of human life necessitate the equal treatment of all human beings. In conclusion, I question whether Butler's position provides a sufficient basis for an antifoundational ethics. I argue that Butler is headed in the right direction but has not yet achieved her goal.     

Personal Narratives, Social Justice, and the Law

North American writer Joan Didion’s eloquent testimonial speaks to the significance of storytelling in our lives. Personal storiesmake our lives meaningful. Part of this is because our stories, wittingly or not, become the means through which we fashion our identities for listeners. Or, as scholars from many disciplines have argued, identity and selfhoodare narrative accomplishments. In this formulation, an individual constructs a sense of self by telling stories or “personal narratives,” which describe “the evolution of an individual life over time and in social context” (Maynes et al. in Telling stories: the use of personal narratives in the social sciences and in history. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2008, 2). While personal narratives contain unique autobiographical elements, the logics of storytelling and the values and beliefs of a particular time and place also influence the kinds of stories people tell. As feminist historian Mary Jo Maynes and her coauthors argue: “The stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual, but are told in historically specific times and settings and draw on the rules and models in circulation that govern how story elements link together in narrative logics” (2008, 2). Put another way, even the most idiosyncratic story is always in some way social: what narrators decide to tell is often guided by the expectations of audiences (real or imagined); the conventions of various genres (such as life history or autobiography); as well as the broader cultural narratives located in particular historical times and places. In this light, personal narratives at once provide evidence of a storyteller’s viewpoint and experiences as well as the social and cultural milieu in which they live.     

THE RADICAL POTENTIAL OF BECOMING-WOMAN AND INTRA-ACTION IN THE MUSIC OF ANNE BOYD

Anne Boyd (b. 1946) is recognised in the public domain as one of Australia's distinguished composers. Her work belongs in the Western art music tradition and emerges out of her entanglements with the Australian landscape and the music of South-East Asia. This article considers what some of these entanglements have produced and, in so doing, shifts the emphasis from questions of reflection and representation—in which Boyd's music might be understood to reflect in a representationalist mode those aspects of her identity that are bound with the Australian landscape—to exploring in a performative manner how her music offers glimpses into different aspects of the creative process in action. I consider Boyd's selected musical works and critique various biographical writings on Boyd, drawing on the work of Deleuze which I entangle with Barad's concept of intra-action. My aim is to offer a different model for thinking about the network of mutual engagements that are coimplicated in the music's becoming. I view Boyd's music as a becoming-woman, an animate flow and a dynamic process of intra-activity.     

‘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).     

Psychology,Evolution and the Traumatised Child

Epidemiological research indicates that adopted children are at increased risk of early sexual development. Evolutionary psychology tries to explain this connection in two ways: arguing that early stress hastens sexual maturity through a kind of embodied fear of death; or suggesting that early development is an adaptive response to improved life situations. Both explanations are problematic. In contrast, research by Porges [Porges, Stephen W. 2011. The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, Self-Regulation. New York: W.W. Norton] on the evolutionary neurophysiology of early childhood trauma provides important insights into the persistence of behavioural and physiological patterns in neglected and abused children and may go towards explaining early development. More broadly, this work also highlights new avenues for theorising the entanglements of body, brain and behaviour that are central to contemporary feminist thought.     

“I've always suffered from sirens'’: The cinema vamp and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood

The most important source for Robin Vote, the heroine of Djuna Barnes’ modernist novel, Nightwood (1936), is the vamp, whose heyday in the middle teens was also the period of Barnes’ highest productivity as a newspaper journalist. The vamp, as full‐grown femme fatale and “wild child,” appeared first in her early feature articles, later in short plays, stories, and poems. These and her stylish pen and ink sketches of vamps established her reputation as a “specialist.” She was one of the first to note that “vamping” was a habit of mind as well as a mode of fashion. Barnes’ interest in both manifestations of the vamp craze powered her conception of Robin Vote, a vamp malgré lui.     

Netta syrett's lesbian heroine

This article discusses Judgment Withheld (1934) in which Netta Syrett makes it clear that the most likeable character, Mimi Landsfeld, is a lesbian. This was unusual, other writers being too afraid of prosecution to depict lesbianism sympathetically, particularly after Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness was banned in 1928. The article also shows how Syrett combined her established reputation as a writer of popular fiction with offering her middlebrow readers varied and controversial portrayals of sexual relationships, including homosexuality. The article concludes with comments on Syrett's personal life, thereby placing her novels in context.     

Effeminate Edmund Burke and the masculine voice of Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the gendered and nationalist rhetorical strategies Mary Wollstonecraft used in her work The Vindication of the Rights of Man which was written as an open letter of response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France . While a number of scholars note Wollstonecraft’s adoption of a masculine voice in her systematic feminizing of Burke, this article also pays attention to the ways in which Wollstonecraft impugns Burke with the taints of being crypto-Catholic, Irish, and quasi-French. We notice how Wollstonecraft’s masculine voice is rational, combative, righteously passionate, middle-class, patriotically English and critically Protestant. We compare the fashioning of Wollstonecraft’s voice with contemporary political caricatures of John Bull and the cartoon depictions of Edmund Burke that appeared as Wollstonecraft was composing her VRM. Wollstonecraft’s VRM gained her considered attention and her critique of Burke’s character, (and what this article claims is her misreading of his aesthetic treatise), have been remarkably influential even to the present day. The characteristics of the distinct voice created in Wollstonecraft’s first Vindication are also evident in her second and more famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman. However, the rhetorical commitments entailed in Wollstonecraft’s public voice created challenges for her arguments in the second Vindication that demand careful attention.     

Tracing two generations in twentieth century Indian women's education through analysis of literary sources: selected writings by Padmini Sengupta

ABSTRACT

This article uses literary sources written by Padmini Sengupta, 1906–1988 (daughter of Kamala Satthinadhan, 1880–1950, educator, writer, and editor of the Indian Ladies’ Magazine) to map two generations of women in India from reformist backgrounds and their education and writing. Padmini's biography of her mother, The Portrait of an Indian Woman, 1956, is analyzed at length. Here, Sengupta offers at once a memoir of her own growing years and a biographical portrait of her mother Kamala Satthianadhan. Supplementing this analysis is an examination of how women's education is represented in Sengupta's novel Red Hibiscus, 1962. Padmini wrote many works of a non-fictional and biographical nature. In analyzing her writing, we also understand better how Indian women writers representing their own educational trajectories in the print and public sphere shortly after Indian independence lay the groundwork for the later development of women's history and Women's Studies in India.     

Cross-National Adolescent Multidimensional Life Satisfaction Reports: Analyses of Mean Scores and Response Style Differences

Although numerous cross-national studies have assessed life satisfaction among adults, similar studies using adolescent samples have been rare. To address this shortage of research, a total of 1338 youth adolescents from two individualistic nations (Ireland, USA) and two collectivistic nations (China, South Korea) were administered the Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (MSLSS: Huebner, 1994) to assesses general life satisfaction and satisfaction with family, friends, school, self, and living environment. Responses were analyzed to assess potential cross-national differences in (a) mean levels of life satisfaction, and (b) response styles, specifically acquiescence and extreme responding. Mean scores revealed positive ratings by adolescents from all four nations across all domains, with the exceptions of satisfaction with school experiences (Ireland, South Korean, USA), living environment (China, South Korea), self (South Korea), and general life satisfaction (South Korea). Results also revealed significant response style differences across all MSLSS domains. Significant gender and gender-by-nation effects were observed for both mean score and response style differences, although the effect sizes were small. The implications of these findings were discussed, particularly with respect to “individualistic” vs. “collectivistic” cultural differences. Rich Gilman is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology at the University of Kentucky. His research interests include positive well-being among youth, perfectionism, and socially ostracized adolescents. Scott Huebner is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of South Carolina. His research interests involve the conceptualization, measurement, and implications of positive psychological well-being constructs among youth. He is a fellow of Division 16 of the APA and the International Society for Quality of Life Studies. Lili Tian is Associate Professor at South China Normal University. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from Beijing Normal University. Her major research interests include adolescent's school well-being, acculturation of immigrant children and personality assessment. Nansook Park is Associate Professor at the University of Rhode Island. She received her Ph.D. from University of South Carolina. Her major research interests among youth include character strengths and virtues, positive experience and life satisfaction and how they are related to well-being, family functioning, health and education. Jenny O’Byrne received her BA in the Department of Counselling & Psychotherapy from the Dublin Business School. Recent research interests focus on child and adolescent development, and she recently completed her pre-clinical training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with the Lincoln Centre in London. Dina Sverko is a research assistant at the University of Zagreb (Croatia). She received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Triest (Italy). Her major research interests include personality assessment and health psychology. Miriam Schiff is lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor) at the Hebrew University School of Social Work and Social Welfare in Jerusalem. Her major research interests include trauma and substance use, and general mental health among adolescents in clinic settings. Heather Langknecht received her Ed.S. from the University of Kentucky in 2004. She currently works as a school psychologist at Virginia Beach Public Schools (Virginia). Her primary research interests are cross-national quality of life issues among children and youth.     

Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War

Abstract: This article explores the construction of Andrea Dworkin as a public persona, or a ‘feminist icon’, revered by some and demonized by others. It argues that in both her fiction and non-fiction, Dworkin engaged in a process of writing herself as an exceptional woman, a ‘feminist militant’ as she describes herself in the subheading of her 2002 memoir, Heartbreak. The article illustrates Dworkin's autobiographical logic of exceptionalism by comparing the story told in Heartbreak to the story of Dworkin's major novel, Mercy, which features a heroine, Andrea, who shares Dworkin's name and significant biographical details. While Dworkin has insisted that Mercy is not an autobiographical novel, the author undertakes a reading here of Mercy as the story of Dworkin if she had not become the feminist icon of her own and others' construction. In Mercy, Andrea unsuccessfully attempts to escape the silent, victimized status that Dworkin has insistently argued is imposed upon women. In her repeated victimization, Andrea functions for Dworkin as an ‘everywoman’ who both embodies Dworkin's world-view and highlights how Dworkin's own biography exists in tension with some of her central assumptions about women, gender and contemporary society.     

Who Am I and Where Am I From? Substitute Residential Home Children’s Insights into Their Lives and Individual Identities

Abstract

Decisions regarding children’s residential care reorganisation are primarily based on an adult’s perspective of children’s wellbeing and care. While these adults tend to be well-intended and base their decisions off relevant evidence, the children’s perspectives ‐ which reflects their actual lived experiences ‐ is almost never considered. However, since children are experts of their own lives, they should have the right to participate and express their opinion: Their point of view could be of great value in developing residential child care. In this article, we provide SOS children’s insights into their own life experiences and individual identities. The data was collected during an ethnographic research in one of Estonia’s SOS Children’s Villages (SOS CV). This article aims to answer to following research questions: 1. What are the main topics in SOS children’s stories when they talk about themselves and their everyday lives in substitute homes? 2. What kind of identity can be determined from children’s stories? 3. How can the subtext within the children’s stories be used to develop a child-centred residential care? In this article, we present and discuss several key-findings. First, it is important to note that there are gaps in the children’s life stories, as they sometimes lack information about important people and events in their lives. Second, this lack of adequate information can damage the children's identities and, in turn, undermine their development. Third, the opportunity to talk about important life events encourages the children to ask questions, as they are interested in obtaining additional information to complete the gaps. Fourth, the children’s stories indicate the shortcomings of substitute homes, related to both culture and communication.     

Boarding School Fictions: schoolgirls' own communities of learning

This article explores the fictional world of the schoolgirl annual in the interwar period and the significance of the imagined girls'-only spaces for their intended readership. The article takes the year 1929, the year of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and focuses on two annuals designed for the 12–15 market: School Friend and Schoolgirls' Own. The annual compendium of stories, a very British invention, drew on characters whose adventures were followed in the weekly schoolgirl comics and was published at Christmas, a time when there was little personal space available as families gathered together. The imaginary world of boarding schools such as Cliff House or Morcove offered readers an escape from the hierarchy of family life and expectations of girls' participation in the home. Using the background of Woolf's feminist polemic and a framework informed by the theoretical framing of space by feminist geographer Linda McDowell, the article teases out the meaning of the multilayered nature of stories created by men with no experience of single-sex girls' school, writing as women.     

She's old enough to be a beautiful young boy: Sarah Bernhardt,breeches roles and the poetics of aging

This essay argues that Sarah Bernhardt's choice to play young male roles late in her career served as a radically anti-agist feminist response to the limiting and often demeaning professional and social opportunities afforded aging women. While scholarship has attended to Bernhardt's cross-dress roles through the lens of gender, this essay highlights her “breeches” roles, in particular Hamlet and L’Aiglon as cross-age and cross-gender. By examining “aging” as the contextual mode by which gender functioned, we open up new terrain with which to examine and appreciate Bernhardt's significance in the scope of theatre history, women's history and aging studies. In the title roles of Hamlet and L’Aiglon, Berhnardt assumed youth and male-ness on stage, which both highlighted her offstage socially perceived deficits (aged and female) and challenged the designation of those identities as deficient; performance threw into flux what had been assumed static. And the public responded. Far from honoring the assumed cultural hetero-normative contract that aging women acquiesce public visibility, Bernhardt's breeches roles (re)constructed her body as female (from aging/sexless) and demanded audience members’, male and female, desiring gaze.     

Stevie Smith and Her Dancing Girls

Abstract

What constitutes a good Stevie Smith poem? The question bothered the author herself and it can bedevil the reader too, with evaluative quandaries often compounding interpretative ones. Smith's uncertainty about the relative merits of her poems informed publication decisions, and this in turn has resulted in certain compositions being overlooked in critical assessments of her achievement. This article takes as a test-case example a hitherto largely neglected poem, ‘The Ballet of the Twelve Dancing Princesses’, and through sustained close reading makes the case that the poem, unpublished in Smith's lifetime, may be one of her finest pieces. Through an analysis of the poem's cultural and historical context, its manifold ambiguities, its imagery and atmosphere, its coded engagement with the fabular and the strange effects achieved through rhythm and rhyme, the poem is shown to offer a complex, psychologically suggestive response to issues which exercise Smith in many of her poems, including the tension between innocence and knowledge, between the child and the adult, between the capricious and the calculated, and between the ‘frivolous’ and the ‘ominous’. The difficulty of determining how ironically and how seriously Smith engages with some of the latent preoccupations of her poem, such as the power of sorcery and the supernatural, the growth of sexual awareness in young girls and (possibly) the approach of the Second World War, is taken as symptomatic of the tendency of Smith's poems to at once invite and defy exegesis. Taken together, these various concerns and characteristics provide the grounds for considering one of Smith's overlooked poems as one of her most effective. Yet the conclusion seeks to complicate this assessment by cross-questioning the criteria by which Smith's ‘success’ as a poet may be determined.