INTELLECTUAL WOMEN AND VICTORIAN PATRIARCHY: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot

by Deirdre David ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1987

A temperate, acutely analyzed but stolidly written examination of the ideological conflicts confronting three representative women intellectuals writing in the years from 1832 to 1879. David scrutinizes the oeuvres of political journalist and travel writer Harriet Martineau, poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and novelist George Eliot; she then demonstrates the complexities and tensions in their ambivalently subversive and complicit attitudes towards the patriarchal culture, which both enfranchised them as celebrated thinkers and denigrated the status of their ultimate contribution. Central to her approach is her care to distinguish herself from the separatist ""gynocritical"" school of feminist literary criticism, which extracts meaning from women's writings considered out of historical context and assumes authors' indifference to issues of cultural supremacy. David, by contrast, makes a virtue of her subjects' semi-evolved condition in the social web: ""The conscious resistance to Victorian patriarchy becomes that much more heroic and interesting in the context of the inescapable cooperation with it."" David has clearly read comprehensively and thought deeply about the life and works of her subjects, but her book is heavy going. Its exposition is steeped in the prose of academic literary criticism; chapters bear such titles as ""The Social Wound and the Politics of Healing,"" and sentences are studded with jargon like ""icon"" in all its noun and verb forms, and the plastic and ubiquitous ""topos."" Readers will be irritated and finally bored by the insistent repetition of her major theses in various permutations; they'll be suspicious of the excuses she seems to make for her subjects, as when she speaks of the perceptions of Carlyle, Mill, and other male writers as embodying ""a more radical and ironic perspective than that available to Martineau."" Nevertheless, scholars interested in the advancement of critical thought on these three writers will find her revisionist insights worth consulting.

Pub Date: May 1, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Cornell Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1987

Categories: NONFICTION