The Flesh Made Word Female Figures and Women's Bodies

by Michie, Helena

• ISBN13: 9780195060812
• ISBN10: 0195060814
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1990-02-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Helena Michie's provocative new work looks at how women's bodies are portrayed in a variety of Victorian literary and non-literary genres--from painting, poems, and novels, to etiquette, books, sex manuals, and pornography. After identifying a series of codes and taboos that govern the depiction of women in such activities as eating and working, she then turns to the physical descriptions of Victorian heroines, focusing on those parts of their bodies that are erased, and on those that become fetishized in conventional description. Her vivid analysis moves forward in time with a consideration of 20th-century "second wave" feminism and a discussion of the poetics of the body as articulated by feminist writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Making use of feminist, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic accounts of the figure of woman, and the relation of the body to the text, The Flesh Made Word offers fresh readings of works by writers as diverse as the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Trollope, Hardy, Adrienne Rich, Olga Broumas, Audre Lorde, and Louise Gluck.

Author Biography

Helena Michie is Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University

Table of Contents

Introduction: Constructing the Frame	p. 3
Ladylike Anorexia: Hunger, Sexuality, and Etiquette	p. 12
Becoming Public Women: Women and Work	p. 30
Calling and Falling: Vocation and Prostitution	p. 59
Body, Figure, Embodiment: The Paradoxes of Heroine Description	p. 79
Re-membering the Body: Feminist Theory and Representation	p. 124
Notes	p. 151
Bibliography	p. 167
Index	p. 175
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