Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Pastor’s Wife: A Reassessment

Abstract

The Pastor’s Wife (1914) may seem at first reading simply another depiction of a woman struggling for liberation in the decades following the work of Thomas Hardy and Henrik Ibsen, being the story of how Ingeborg Bullivant escapes from an English patriarchal home, only to find herself trapped in another one in Germany. The novel, however, marks a turning point in Elizabeth von Arnim’s career; it is a novel that looks back to previous themes while anticipating those to come. It demonstrates, with comedy and bitterness, themes of alienation and exile; satirizes German codes and class; and provides a lyrical Romantic vision of the natural world. It also presents the married woman as a prisoner in a way that anticipates Vera (1921). The novel can also stand alone as an underrated classic that plays an important part in the history of English literature. Published at the beginning of high modernism, it shows, unlike the work of some canonized writers of the time, a fusion of realism and modernism. This essay argues that the novel is a proto-feminist work that is radical in its portrayal of women’s experience and influenced by literary naturalism in its childbirth scenes, but pessimistic about possibilities for change. The essay shows how the novel is modernist in its depiction of the alienated experience of the city; uses nineteenth-century realism in its narrative structure and comedy; and yet is forward-looking in its use of endings. A book that begins as a comedy but ends as a tragedy, The Pastor’s Wife deserves equal recognition with the work of H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster, writers with whom von Arnim was connected and by whom she was influenced.     

Legislative Capacity and Credit Risk

Legislatures differ in their institutional capacity to draft and enact policy. While strong legislatures can increase the congruence of policy outcomes to the electorate's preferences, they can also inject uncertainty into markets with their ability to alter the political economic landscape. We argue that this uncertainty will manifest in a state's ability to borrow and hypothesize a negative relationship between legislative capacity and creditworthiness. Using ratings of general obligation bonds issued by the American states over nearly two decades and data on the institutional capacity of state legislative assemblies, we find support for the claim that having a legislature that is better equipped to affect policy change increases credit risk evaluations. The results we present broaden our understanding of the importance of legislative institutions, the determinants of credit risk, and the economic implications of democratic responsiveness.     

Subcontracting,facilitating and qualities of regional power: the UK’s partial pivot to Asia

Asia Europe Journal - This article explores the UK’s foreign policy “pivot” to Asia, a decade after its tentative beginnings. This pivot is understood to be Britain’s...     

Public servants or police soldiers? An analysis of opinions on the militarization of policing from police executives,law enforcement,and members of the 114th congress U.S. house of representatives

Despite the dramatic rise in use of militarized weapons, equipment, and tactics by police departments across the nation, no study has examined the opinions of those responsible for designing, funding, and implementing police militarization in the United States. Therefore this study collected and analyzed opinion data from 465 key stakeholders from the 114th Congress U.S. House of Representatives, law enforcement executives, and local police officers regarding police militarization. Results suggest that while most practitioners and policymakers favor police militarization, Congress and law enforcement differ in support of critical issues such as oversight of military procurement programs, use of surplus military weapons and vehicles, and overall support for the militarization of policing in the United States.     

Does Anthropology Still Exist?

In response to Roger Sandall’s critical analysis, the problematic notion of culture in modern anthropology is examined in terms of cultural resistance to globalization. The example of McDonaldization is taken to be a potent instance of cultural globalization. Three conditions for successful cultural resistance to cultural standardization are proposed. The first is cultural in the shape of a strong aesthetic tradition of (national) resistance. This dimension involves some degree of cultural conservatism. The second condition is political, namely a viable and robust civil society that provides the basis for decisive (cultural) leadership. The third element is the involvement of the state in policies that promote and sustain a national heritage. Without this state involvement, global market conditions will largely shape the erosion of local and national cultures. Without a political response to cultural globalization, global market commodities will in all likelihood oust local goods and services. Those societies that lack both a strong aesthetic and an effective political leadership can offer little effective resistance to negative globalization and their local traditions are quickly destroyed. This argument is then examined in terms of a number of societies especially Turkey, China and Japan where the erosion of national cultures is proceeding rapidly. These critical assertions against global standardization require a strong first-order notion of culture which modern anthropology appears to be unable or unwilling to provide.

A Plague on Both Your Houses

In response to Eugene Goodheart’s essay “Neo-Darwinism and Religion”, this essay criticizes both sides of the debate for their posing of false dichotomies. Atheist neodarwinists are illogical in arguing that the necessary chance emergence of physical constants that could produce a universe with intelligent life disproves the existence of God, since the same chance emergence would also necessarily produce a universe corresponding to traditional definitions of God. Religious anti-evolutionists are wrong in rejecting evolutionary accounts of the emergence of human religious instincts, since that emergence is a strong argument for the reality of what those instincts seem designed to register. Finally, Goodheart, as a humanities scholar, is somewhat blind to the distinguished history of writers, artists and scholars who found the highest spiritual inspiration in natural science.

The relationship between income and material hardship

This paper examines the relationship between income and the extent of material hardship and explores other factors that might affect hardship. Using panel data from the Women's Employment Study, we examine the incidence of material hardship from 1997 to 2003 among current and former welfare recipients. We then consider the extent to which income is associated with hardship. We show that hardship decreases monotonically across quintiles of the income distribution for several income measures. When we measure income as the average across the 6‐year study period, a 10 percent increase in average income is associated with a 1.1 percentage point decrease in the likelihood of experiencing a hardship, a drop of about 3.4 percent. We also find that the relationship between transitory changes in income and hardship is weak. These results are consistent with findings based on a nationally representative sample of disadvantaged households from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. Our results indicate that observable factors, such as measures of mental health, are more strongly related to hardship than current income. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Delivering Lasting Peace, Democracy and Human Rights in Times of Transition: The Role of International Law

¹The increasing scope of international legal regulation, particularlyin the field of human rights, has facilitated the impositionof sustained policies of domestic reform aimed at entrenchinginternationally accepted standards of governance in transitionalsocieties. At the point of such societal change, however, thesymbolism of who makes and enforces the law is important. Thequestion of the relationship between national and internationallaw is therefore one that bears scrutiny. This article examinesthe theoretical basis upon which such policies are based, namelythe idea of a liberal peace, considering the extent to whichthe blanket implementation of international standards can addressthe need of transitional societies to reestablish the legitimacyof both political and legal authority in order to ensure thefuture protection of human rights.     

Debating Agrarian Capitalism: A Rejoinder to Albritton

Despite the multiple usages of star anise, a spice harvested from trees native to northeast Vietnam and southeast China, and notwithstanding its potential as a ‘flex crop’ due to being a key component in the pharmaceutical production of the anti-influenza drug Tamiflu, little is known about who cultivates this spice and how it reaches consumers around the world. Putting commodity chain analysis literature into conversation with recent ‘flex crop’ debates, we analyse the roles of actors along star anise commodity chains originating in rural, upland northern Vietnam. Our qualitative fieldwork reveals the intricate and idiosyncratic nature of these commodity chains upon which ethnic minority cultivator livelihoods depend, and which connect uplands and lowlands through manifold linkages. Cultivators, intermediaries, wholesalers, exporters and marketplace traders are constantly having to renegotiate their positions along these chains to maintain viable livelihoods due to uncertain financial returns and shifting demands. Adding to livelihood insecurities, financial gains have fluctuated wildly over time. The segmented knowledge individuals have of these commodity chains keep many in a vulnerable position, while the Vietnamese state's approach to promoting this commodity as a way to improve local livelihoods is questionable.     

A National Picture of Prison Downsizing Strategies

Abstract

Many states faced fiscal pressures on their corrections budgets as the country entered a deep recession in 2008. A 2011 survey by the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA) asked corrections officials in all 50 states about changes in correctional facilities, focusing on closures, new facilities, and altering existing facilities as a response to budget pressures. States employed a combination of these strategies. Between fiscal year (FY) 2007–2008 and FY 2011–2012, 148 facilities were closed, 29 new facilities were opened, and 23 states added 22,740 beds to existing facilities, resulting in about a 19,000 net bed reduction overall. Closures did not necessarily appear to be related to fiscal pressures or always related to reductions in the prison population. Despite the Great Recession, correctional funding is still a large part of state expenses and many states’ correctional populations continue to grow.