Fixing Patriarchy

by Hall, Donald E.

• ISBN13: 9780814735374
• ISBN10: 0814735371
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-11-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

The 1840s, 50s, and 60s: three decades during which the British feminist movement saw some of its most intense activity of the nineteenth-century, and readers find some of the most monstrous, troubling representations of women by male writers in all of literary history. In Fixing Patriarchy, Donald E. Hall suggests that feminism at mid-century posed intertwined social, economic, political and psychological threats to patriarchy. Hall explores the metamorphic nature of Victorian definitions of masculinity and femininity through an analysis of male authors such as Dickens, Tennyson, Kingsley, Thackeray, Hughes, Collins, and Trollope in dialogue with Victorian feminists and other women writers.Synthesizing historical research with pertinent queer, feminist, post-structuralist, and materialist theories, Hall locates both startling admissions of moral fallibility and violent strategies of retrenchment and containment of this perceived threat to the male social body. Fixing Patriarchytraces parallels among Victorian discourses of religion, science, economics, and aesthetics, as it explores a cultural dynamic of un-fixedness and heightened desires for fixity.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Female Trouble: Nineteenth-Century Feminism and a Literature of Threat	p. 1
'Betsy Prig ... Try the Cowcumbers, God Bless You!': Hierarchy, Transgression and Trouble in Martin Chuzzlewit	p. 21
Reading Tennyson Reading Fuller Reading Tennyson: The Anti-Feminism of The Princess	p. 44
Kingsley as Negotiator: Class/Gender Discord/Discourse in Yeast and Alton Locke	p. 63
Gender in the Marketplace: Contestation Accommodation in Thackeray's The Newcomes	p. 87
'None of Your Eyes at Me': The Patriarchal Gaze in Little Dorrit	p. 107
Becoming One's Own Worst Enemy: Muscular Anxiety in Tom Brown's Schooldays	p. 131
From Margin to Center: Agency and Authority in the Novels of Wilkie Collins	p. 151
Great Expectations and Harsh Realities	p. 175
Conclusion: Trollope on Women/Women in Trollope	p. 196
Notes	p. 213
Bibliography	p. 223
Index	p. 233
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