Women and Fictional Historiography
Session Coordinator: Lynette Felber
Department of English and Linguistics
Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne
Fort Wayne, IN 46805
felber@ipfw.edu
History as "Mere Fiction" in Catharine Sedgwick’s The Linwoods
“If history then is mere fiction,” writes Isabella Linwood to her friend Bessie Lee in Catharine Sedgwick’s historical romance of the American Revolution, The Linwoods (1835), “why may we not read romances of our own choosing? ” In this paper, I suggest that the novel itself, in both its structure and themes, forms Sedgwick’s elaborate response to this question. Written during a period in which works of history or historical fiction accounted for more than eighty percent of the best-selling books in the country, and in which historians and novelists alike blurred the boundaries between history and fiction as ways of knowing, The Linwoods, in its self-consciousness about its own generic status, continues the interrogation of the meaning of “history” that Sedgwick began in her better-known novel, Hope Leslie (1827). In that earlier work, Sedgwick imagined history not simply as a branch of knowledge but as a particular kind of experience, one that I call the experience of anachronism. The Linwoods extends this complex conception of history through a rendering of what many early republicans viewed as the defining American experience: the Revolution. As I read her fictions of history, Sedgwick emerges not just as another nationalist chronicler, but as one of the antebellum period’s most astute theorists of “history.”
Jeffrey Insko
Oakland University
insko@oakland.edu
Rehabilitating Aphra Behn in Nineteenth-Century Germany
In 1849 Luise Mühlbach (1814-1873), one of the most successful authors of historical fiction in nineteenth-century Germany, wrote a biographical novel about Aphra Behn (1640-89), England’s first professional woman writer. Mühlbach counters gender-prejudiced literary historiography that portrayed Behn as a writer of sexually indecent Restoration plays. She offers an anti-slavery version of Behn’s slave novella, Oroonoko (1688), and then rewrites biographical events to fashion Behn into a proponent of women’s rights. In this hybrid of biography, historical novel, and artist novel, Mühlbach revises the negative image of Behn as an improper, unfeminine literary model, and rehabilitates her as the originator of a female tradition of socially engaged literature. This paper examines Mühlbach’s recuperation of Behn within the context of liberal appeals for political reform in the period leading up to the German revolution of 1848.
Mühlbach recognized in Behn’s maligned reputation as a literary woman an opportunity to polemicize against prescriptive conceptions of female authorship. Mühlbach contests gendered literary history and canon formation and challenges male cultural hegemony in the institutions of art. Her reassessment of Behn’s controversial literary legacy and life represents a struggle for authority in what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as the “literary field” of cultural production.
Judith E. Martin
Southwest Missouri State University
jem914f@smsu.edu
Wealhtheow Maþelode : Speaking Herself into the Anglo-Saxon Literary-Historical Record
In their 2002 book, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England, Clare Lees and Gillian Overing argue that, due to the scarcity of women in Old English texts, "the specific nature and conditions of women's 'absence' from the record can point*to elements of their 'presence'" (6). True, representations of women are rare and often not representative of the every-day woman's life. When they do appear, women are often silent. In order to talk about women in Old English, most scholars consider Judith, Juliana, or Elena, three religious women, two biblical and one a later saint. However, these religious figures are not the only historically significant Anglo-Saxon women.
Women rarely speak in Beowulf, the poem that makes up 10% of remaining Old English poetry. In the more than 3,000 lines of this poem, only one woman's voice is heard, that of Wealhtheow, wife of Hrothgar and Queen of the Danes. Alexandra Hennessey Olsen claims that women in Beowulf play one of five possible roles: hostess, peaceweaver, ritual mourner, goader, and counselor. In this paper, I will examine the historical presence of Anglo-Saxon literary women through the single voice of Wealhtheow. Women's speech is far more present in the literature than we actually 'hear.' They are not as absent or as silent as we think.
**Mathelian means "to formally speak"
Dana Oswald
The Ohio State University
oswald.29@osu.edu
The Fair Jewess and the Less Interesting Rowena: Race, Femininity and History in Ivanhoe
Despite, or perhaps because of, its incredible popularity, Ivanhoe has received little critical attention. What little criticism exists tends to focus on Scott’s “howlers” – where historiography departs from history – and particularly on Scott’s “greenwood,” that is, King Richard’s forays into Sherwood Forest. What is missing from the greenwood, is, of course, women. But women are not absent from Ivanhoe, and the ways in which Scott writes femininity (and female agency) into history deserve further attention.
My paper examines the racial and historical pressures informing Scott’s representation of Rebecca and Rowena. The transgressive possibility inherent in Rebecca – socially forbidden as a Jewess, but privately appealing as a virtuous and beautiful woman – must be eliminated in order for England to be English. In turn, Rowena’s subjectivity is effaced in the final paragraphs of the novel to the “fair Saxon” and “fair descendant of Alfred”. The tension between a public nationalized identity and a private ahistorical identity located in these women must be read against the masculine history performed by the greenwood plot to determine the historical and cultural work Ivanhoe performs.
Jen Camden
The Ohio State University
camden.4@osu.edu