Pub Date : 2023-01-20DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2022.2163396
Simone C. Drake
There are some things I am unapologetic about. One of those things is my disinterest in framing my academic work with the theories of dead white men. As a scholar of Black cultural studies, I am often perplexed by the logic that theories born out of spaces and epistemes that have contributed to Black oppression could be useful for my efforts to investigate and analyze ways Black people negotiate that oppression. I approach this work recognizing Black people as active agents, so I think it only appropriate to privilege the ways in which we ourselves do this work, often as both metaphorical and literal efforts to save our lives. Thus, when teaching Black cultural studies courses, I have no qualms telling graduate students, “There is nothing Derrida or Foucault can tell me that Morrison does not do better.” Elaborating, I explain that for the type of research I do, the creative and intellectual oeuvre of Toni Morrison, for example, is amazingly rich and far more relevant to the global Black experience than the theorizing done by most dead and living white men. This of course does not mean I frown upon being familiar with the scholarship of dead (or living) white men, but I do not privilege it when doing critical Black studies, as I find the impetus and essence of whitewashed critical theory to often be counterintuitive and to fall short when theorizing the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and nation. I embrace Barbara Christian’s enduring 1987 interrogative: “For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism?’” (77). I know who I do it for; I do it for people who look like me and move through the world being judged for looking like me. This essay considers the theoretical function of Morrison’s creative work as a method for studying Black cultural texts that are steeped in a Black feminist tradition that Morrison both inherited and passed on. As both a cultural producer working across multiple genres and one of the most astute cultural critics, Morrison is a force to be reckoned with, but she is not an anomaly. She is situated within a continuum of Black feminist cultural theorizing that, through the disruption of hegemonic epistemologies, interrupts whitewashed discourse that triggers eruptions of alternative ways of knowing and being in Black women’s cultural productions. In this essay,
{"title":"On Foremothers, Muses, and Black Feminist Theorizing","authors":"Simone C. Drake","doi":"10.1080/00497878.2022.2163396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2022.2163396","url":null,"abstract":"There are some things I am unapologetic about. One of those things is my disinterest in framing my academic work with the theories of dead white men. As a scholar of Black cultural studies, I am often perplexed by the logic that theories born out of spaces and epistemes that have contributed to Black oppression could be useful for my efforts to investigate and analyze ways Black people negotiate that oppression. I approach this work recognizing Black people as active agents, so I think it only appropriate to privilege the ways in which we ourselves do this work, often as both metaphorical and literal efforts to save our lives. Thus, when teaching Black cultural studies courses, I have no qualms telling graduate students, “There is nothing Derrida or Foucault can tell me that Morrison does not do better.” Elaborating, I explain that for the type of research I do, the creative and intellectual oeuvre of Toni Morrison, for example, is amazingly rich and far more relevant to the global Black experience than the theorizing done by most dead and living white men. This of course does not mean I frown upon being familiar with the scholarship of dead (or living) white men, but I do not privilege it when doing critical Black studies, as I find the impetus and essence of whitewashed critical theory to often be counterintuitive and to fall short when theorizing the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and nation. I embrace Barbara Christian’s enduring 1987 interrogative: “For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism?’” (77). I know who I do it for; I do it for people who look like me and move through the world being judged for looking like me. This essay considers the theoretical function of Morrison’s creative work as a method for studying Black cultural texts that are steeped in a Black feminist tradition that Morrison both inherited and passed on. As both a cultural producer working across multiple genres and one of the most astute cultural critics, Morrison is a force to be reckoned with, but she is not an anomaly. She is situated within a continuum of Black feminist cultural theorizing that, through the disruption of hegemonic epistemologies, interrupts whitewashed discourse that triggers eruptions of alternative ways of knowing and being in Black women’s cultural productions. In this essay,","PeriodicalId":45212,"journal":{"name":"WOMENS STUDIES-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL","volume":"52 1","pages":"210 - 226"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43841691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-20DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2022.2162520
Ryan H. Sharp
In her “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Toni Morrison develops the “unspeakable” while critiquing the U.S. American literary canon’s Whiteness – or, more directly, White U.S. American authors’ marginalization and exclusion of Blackness in the U.S. literary canon – arguing that “Canon building is empire building” (8). In her lecture-turned-essay, race itself is the “unspeakable thing,” in particular how racial matters remain silenced due to the sociopolitical climate and racial anxieties resulting from the collective traumas of slavery and its afterlives, and the “unspoken” signifies how Blackness haunts U.S. American literature and society – the proverbial “ghost in the machine” (8). One of Morrison’s chief tactics for speaking the unspeakable in her own literary work is her employment of the nonhuman to identify and challenge the ontological violence upon which the U.S. master narrative’s curation of Blackness is built. It’s the Whiteness in Song of Solomon (1977) that is representative of the overwhelming and oppressive brutality of White supremacy – the white bull; the white peacock; the divinity candy, traditionally white, that turned Guitar to anything sweet for how it reminds him of his mother’s pandering performance after the White sawmill owner responsible for his father’s death gives her $40 dollars as compensation. It’s Claudia’s blue-eyed baby doll and the Shirley Temple cup that symbolize internalized racism in The Bluest Eye (1970). It’s the personification of 124 to demonstrate the breadth and continuity of U.S. slavery’s hauntings and Mister the Rooster who is offered a dignity that is denied Paul D in Beloved (1987). And still more. Morrison (re)codifies these objects and figures such that they function metaphorically to illuminate aspects of the anti-Black climate that surrounds us – what Dr. Christina Sharpe theorizes in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) as “the weather” – and problematize and complicate U.S. American literature and culture’s limited and limiting framing of Blackness, while contemporaneously calling out the construction of Whiteness as the privileged, “natural” state that too often operates under a cloak of invisibility. The exploration of the nonhuman is familiar within the study of Black literature and culture. In Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), Alexander G. Weheliye
托尼·莫里森（Toni Morrison）在她的《说不出的事》（Unspeakble Things Unspeakn）中发展了“无法言说的”，同时批评了美国文学经典的白人——或者更直接地说，美国白人作家在美国文学经典中对黑人的边缘化和排斥——认为“经典建设就是帝国建设”（8）。在她由演讲变成的文章中，种族本身是“无法言说的东西”，特别是由于奴隶制及其后果的集体创伤所导致的社会政治气候和种族焦虑，种族问题如何保持沉默，而“无法言说”则意味着黑人如何困扰着美国文学和社会——众所周知的“机器里的幽灵”（8）。莫里森在自己的文学作品中说出难以言说的东西的主要策略之一是，她利用非人类来识别和挑战本体论暴力，而美国主流叙事对黑人的策划正是基于这种暴力。正是《所罗门之歌》（1977）中的白人代表了白人至上主义的压倒性和压迫性暴行——白牛；白孔雀；神性糖果，传统上是白色的，它让吉他变成了任何甜食，因为它让他想起了他母亲在白人锯木厂老板对他父亲的死亡负有责任，给了她40美元作为补偿后的迎合行为。在《最蓝的眼睛》（1970）中，克劳迪娅的蓝眼睛娃娃和雪莉·坦普尔杯子象征着内化的种族主义。它是124的化身，以展示美国奴隶制的广泛性和连续性，以及在《宠儿》（1987）中被剥夺尊严的公鸡先生。还有更多。Morrison（重新）编纂了这些物体和人物，使其具有隐喻性的功能，以阐明我们周围反黑人气候的各个方面——Christina Sharpe博士在《觉醒：论黑人与存在》（2016）中将其理论化为“天气”——并使美国文学和文化对黑人的有限和有限框架产生问题和复杂化，同时将白人的构建称为特权的“自然”状态，这种状态往往是在隐形的外衣下运作的。在黑人文学和文化研究中，对非人类的探索是很常见的。在《人身保护法-维斯库斯：种族化集会、生物政治和黑人女权主义人类理论》（2014）中，亚历山大·G·韦赫利耶
{"title":"The Unspeakable in Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination","authors":"Ryan H. Sharp","doi":"10.1080/00497878.2022.2162520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2022.2162520","url":null,"abstract":"In her “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Toni Morrison develops the “unspeakable” while critiquing the U.S. American literary canon’s Whiteness – or, more directly, White U.S. American authors’ marginalization and exclusion of Blackness in the U.S. literary canon – arguing that “Canon building is empire building” (8). In her lecture-turned-essay, race itself is the “unspeakable thing,” in particular how racial matters remain silenced due to the sociopolitical climate and racial anxieties resulting from the collective traumas of slavery and its afterlives, and the “unspoken” signifies how Blackness haunts U.S. American literature and society – the proverbial “ghost in the machine” (8). One of Morrison’s chief tactics for speaking the unspeakable in her own literary work is her employment of the nonhuman to identify and challenge the ontological violence upon which the U.S. master narrative’s curation of Blackness is built. It’s the Whiteness in Song of Solomon (1977) that is representative of the overwhelming and oppressive brutality of White supremacy – the white bull; the white peacock; the divinity candy, traditionally white, that turned Guitar to anything sweet for how it reminds him of his mother’s pandering performance after the White sawmill owner responsible for his father’s death gives her $40 dollars as compensation. It’s Claudia’s blue-eyed baby doll and the Shirley Temple cup that symbolize internalized racism in The Bluest Eye (1970). It’s the personification of 124 to demonstrate the breadth and continuity of U.S. slavery’s hauntings and Mister the Rooster who is offered a dignity that is denied Paul D in Beloved (1987). And still more. Morrison (re)codifies these objects and figures such that they function metaphorically to illuminate aspects of the anti-Black climate that surrounds us – what Dr. Christina Sharpe theorizes in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) as “the weather” – and problematize and complicate U.S. American literature and culture’s limited and limiting framing of Blackness, while contemporaneously calling out the construction of Whiteness as the privileged, “natural” state that too often operates under a cloak of invisibility. The exploration of the nonhuman is familiar within the study of Black literature and culture. In Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), Alexander G. Weheliye","PeriodicalId":45212,"journal":{"name":"WOMENS STUDIES-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL","volume":"52 1","pages":"192 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42986039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-03DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2022.2156507
Jesse A. Goldberg
To live and write after Toni Morrison is to by necessity live and write in deep contemplation about endings and aftermaths and – if we are to learn from the ways that Morrison’s novels play seriously with time such that singular endings often refuse closure and instead fracture into myriad timelines moving in multiple directions and interrupting the reader’s expectations of a conclusive ending to a logical progression – beginnings. It is in this spirit that I first began the thinking that takes shape in this essay. In fall 2019 (the first semester after Morrison’s passing), I taught Beloved in “Intro to Literary Analysis,” and in spring 2020 I taught N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season in “Afrofuturism.” As a literary scholar and a prison abolitionist, I am obsessed with endings – of narratives, of the carceral state. But the experience of teaching these two novels that I love during an academic year which presented a guaranteed ending to my own nonrenewable contingent faculty contract, which then proceeded to become a year of multiple endings as in-person classes were nixed before the end of the spring semester by the COVID-19 pandemic, primed me to recognize echoes of Morrison’s invocation of the “four horsemen” in Jemisin’s elaboration of apocalypse as “a relative thing.” I want to ask, what does it mean that for some of the characters in Beloved, the world ended that day that the four horsemen came into Baby Suggs’s yard, even as for Schoolteacher and the world that sustains his dominance life moves on? And not only does the
{"title":"Living After, and Before, the End of the World: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth","authors":"Jesse A. Goldberg","doi":"10.1080/00497878.2022.2156507","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2022.2156507","url":null,"abstract":"To live and write after Toni Morrison is to by necessity live and write in deep contemplation about endings and aftermaths and – if we are to learn from the ways that Morrison’s novels play seriously with time such that singular endings often refuse closure and instead fracture into myriad timelines moving in multiple directions and interrupting the reader’s expectations of a conclusive ending to a logical progression – beginnings. It is in this spirit that I first began the thinking that takes shape in this essay. In fall 2019 (the first semester after Morrison’s passing), I taught Beloved in “Intro to Literary Analysis,” and in spring 2020 I taught N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season in “Afrofuturism.” As a literary scholar and a prison abolitionist, I am obsessed with endings – of narratives, of the carceral state. But the experience of teaching these two novels that I love during an academic year which presented a guaranteed ending to my own nonrenewable contingent faculty contract, which then proceeded to become a year of multiple endings as in-person classes were nixed before the end of the spring semester by the COVID-19 pandemic, primed me to recognize echoes of Morrison’s invocation of the “four horsemen” in Jemisin’s elaboration of apocalypse as “a relative thing.” I want to ask, what does it mean that for some of the characters in Beloved, the world ended that day that the four horsemen came into Baby Suggs’s yard, even as for Schoolteacher and the world that sustains his dominance life moves on? And not only does the","PeriodicalId":45212,"journal":{"name":"WOMENS STUDIES-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL","volume":"52 1","pages":"173 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48414899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-03DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2022.2155963
Teresa Ramoni
Over the course of a three-year period beginning in 1798, Charles Brockden Brown wrote and published seven novels. While the texts of this impressive oeuvre are often linked for their shared Gothic elements and lauded for their ability to capture the zeitgeist of the New Republic, there is another, more obvious, thread that ties them together: their names. Indeed, each of Brown’s full-length novels is titled after a person. This cast of eponymous characters includes, for instance, the male protagonists Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly; the lesser-known Stephen Calvert and mononymous Ormond; and the female subjects of Brown’s final two novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot. Wieland, a Gothic tale about the tragic events that befall a family in Mettingen, Pennsylvania, also partakes in this titling tradition, albeit in ways that are more nuanced. For while Theodore – the man whose fanatical religious beliefs provoke him to enact the murderous wishes of a mysterious, and perhaps purely imagined, voice – is called “Wieland” throughout Brown’s novel, his appellation is also a surname that belongs to and is shared by a number of individuals, one of them being the novel’s narrator, Clara. Wieland’s title, an ambiguous signifier that simultaneously evokes and erases its female narrator’s presence, serves as an apt metaphor for the discourse surrounding Brown’s first novel. For while Wieland has been consistent in generating robust scholarship, that conversation has been quick both to miss and misrepresent Clara. In a slew of mid-to-latetwentieth-century articles, Clara was maligned by scholars who described her as neurotic, malicious, and mad. For example, Walter Hesford maintains that Clara is motivated by her “repressed guilt and incestuous desires” (234). William Manly writes that she is on the verge of “insanity” (318). And James Russo argues that the “confessed madwoman,” Clara, is “indirectly responsible” for all of the tragedy in Wieland, holding her accountable for both Carwin’s schemes and her brother’s killings and suicide (60). According to
{"title":"“To Mimic My Voice”: Gender, Power, and Narration in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland","authors":"Teresa Ramoni","doi":"10.1080/00497878.2022.2155963","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2022.2155963","url":null,"abstract":"Over the course of a three-year period beginning in 1798, Charles Brockden Brown wrote and published seven novels. While the texts of this impressive oeuvre are often linked for their shared Gothic elements and lauded for their ability to capture the zeitgeist of the New Republic, there is another, more obvious, thread that ties them together: their names. Indeed, each of Brown’s full-length novels is titled after a person. This cast of eponymous characters includes, for instance, the male protagonists Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly; the lesser-known Stephen Calvert and mononymous Ormond; and the female subjects of Brown’s final two novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot. Wieland, a Gothic tale about the tragic events that befall a family in Mettingen, Pennsylvania, also partakes in this titling tradition, albeit in ways that are more nuanced. For while Theodore – the man whose fanatical religious beliefs provoke him to enact the murderous wishes of a mysterious, and perhaps purely imagined, voice – is called “Wieland” throughout Brown’s novel, his appellation is also a surname that belongs to and is shared by a number of individuals, one of them being the novel’s narrator, Clara. Wieland’s title, an ambiguous signifier that simultaneously evokes and erases its female narrator’s presence, serves as an apt metaphor for the discourse surrounding Brown’s first novel. For while Wieland has been consistent in generating robust scholarship, that conversation has been quick both to miss and misrepresent Clara. In a slew of mid-to-latetwentieth-century articles, Clara was maligned by scholars who described her as neurotic, malicious, and mad. For example, Walter Hesford maintains that Clara is motivated by her “repressed guilt and incestuous desires” (234). William Manly writes that she is on the verge of “insanity” (318). And James Russo argues that the “confessed madwoman,” Clara, is “indirectly responsible” for all of the tragedy in Wieland, holding her accountable for both Carwin’s schemes and her brother’s killings and suicide (60). According to","PeriodicalId":45212,"journal":{"name":"WOMENS STUDIES-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL","volume":"52 1","pages":"269 - 286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46489866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-03DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2022.2148104
Jina Moon
Victoria Cross’s (Annie Sophie Cory) fourth and most successful novel Anna Lombard (1901) portrays interracial sexual desire and miscegenation in the British Indian Empire during the late 1800s. The eponymous protagonist is a white Englishwoman whose secret marriage to a dark-skinned Pathan husband and their mixed-race progeny complicate an English officer’s goal of marrying and attaining ideal domesticity with her. Along with anxieties about the Other throughout the British territories, the fear of degeneration and, in particular, miscegenation dominated fin-de-siècle England. Within this historical framework, Cross daringly describes the interracial coupling of a white woman and a native man – a relationship that blurs racial hierarchies crucial for maintaining an empire. Furthermore, in an apparent rejection of English masculinity, the novel depicts an Englishman’s failure in a courtship competition with an (alleged) “savage.” These scandalous and outrageous portrayals of racial relations and gender reversals – commonly, British men had sexual relations with native women and were in control of English women – are unprecedented in either male or female Victorian authors’ literature. This essay argues that Cross’s unique identity as a woman born and raised in India with Anglo-Saxon blood and an English education positioned her in an ambivalent state of hybridity, ideal for bringing an insider’s knowledge of India and England to both cultures. As an AngloIndian woman, Cross was placed in the ambiguous position of both an imperial agent and a subordinate woman. Her own twofold life enabled her to critique not only British stereotypes of Others but also the racial hegemony and the sexual double standards imposed, in particular, upon white women in the imperial colonies. In the process, this essay further argues that Cross expanded upon the New Woman rhetoric – commonly considered pro-imperialistic – by bringing in a criticism of British imperialism, providing an opportunity to overcome racial blindness and to unite beyond race, class, and gender. In the imperial context in which sexuality served as
{"title":"Interracial Sexual Desire and Miscegenation in Victoria Cross’s Anna Lombard","authors":"Jina Moon","doi":"10.1080/00497878.2022.2148104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2022.2148104","url":null,"abstract":"Victoria Cross’s (Annie Sophie Cory) fourth and most successful novel Anna Lombard (1901) portrays interracial sexual desire and miscegenation in the British Indian Empire during the late 1800s. The eponymous protagonist is a white Englishwoman whose secret marriage to a dark-skinned Pathan husband and their mixed-race progeny complicate an English officer’s goal of marrying and attaining ideal domesticity with her. Along with anxieties about the Other throughout the British territories, the fear of degeneration and, in particular, miscegenation dominated fin-de-siècle England. Within this historical framework, Cross daringly describes the interracial coupling of a white woman and a native man – a relationship that blurs racial hierarchies crucial for maintaining an empire. Furthermore, in an apparent rejection of English masculinity, the novel depicts an Englishman’s failure in a courtship competition with an (alleged) “savage.” These scandalous and outrageous portrayals of racial relations and gender reversals – commonly, British men had sexual relations with native women and were in control of English women – are unprecedented in either male or female Victorian authors’ literature. This essay argues that Cross’s unique identity as a woman born and raised in India with Anglo-Saxon blood and an English education positioned her in an ambivalent state of hybridity, ideal for bringing an insider’s knowledge of India and England to both cultures. As an AngloIndian woman, Cross was placed in the ambiguous position of both an imperial agent and a subordinate woman. Her own twofold life enabled her to critique not only British stereotypes of Others but also the racial hegemony and the sexual double standards imposed, in particular, upon white women in the imperial colonies. In the process, this essay further argues that Cross expanded upon the New Woman rhetoric – commonly considered pro-imperialistic – by bringing in a criticism of British imperialism, providing an opportunity to overcome racial blindness and to unite beyond race, class, and gender. In the imperial context in which sexuality served as","PeriodicalId":45212,"journal":{"name":"WOMENS STUDIES-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL","volume":"52 1","pages":"304 - 319"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45967743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2022.2134130
Thadious M. Davis
Mark Twain could not have anticipated the longevity of the term “the gilded age” when he coined it in his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. Neither he nor his coauthor, Charles Dudley Warner, could have predicted that their satire of a family’s attempt to sell 75,000 acres of land in Tennessee to speculators in Washington, D.C. would result in the naming of an entire period between the 1870s and 1900 or in the calling out of the materialism and corruption of industrialists and politicians. The novel did engage romance along with social satire and political criticism in its caricatures of individuals engaged in land speculation and various schemes to get rich; however, it did not address the “captains of industry” and “robber barons,” as the wealthy Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Leland Stanford, and Cornelius Vanderbilt came to be called for their transformation of steel, banking, oil, railroads, and shipping into formidable industrial and corporate powers. Reform-minded individuals, however, voiced their opposition to the unmistakable greed apparent in corporate growth and industrial expansion at the expense of workers and weaker competitors. Progressives called attention to corruption and graft in urban political arenas and to health and sanitation hazards in home and work environments that were not isolated incidents, but rather recurring news events vying with personal scandals for headlines in tabloids, scandal sheets, and dailies. Yet, here we are today well into the twenty-first century and Mark Twain’s labeling has never been more popular with readers and media-savvy audiences. The television costume drama, Gilded Age on HBO, has carried the name of the era into more homes with viewers eager to watch the ensconced wealthy characters and social climbing newcomers make their way through New York social spaces and navigate the mores of a challenging landscape. Women are central to this visual dramatization of the age. This showcasing of issues affecting women and gender roles may perhaps be a subliminal residue from Mark Twain’s narrative contribution in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today and his creation of the central figure, Laura, an adopted daughter of
{"title":"From Mining Ore to Uncovering Gilt: Cecelia Tichi’s Gilded Age Novels","authors":"Thadious M. Davis","doi":"10.1080/00497878.2022.2134130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2022.2134130","url":null,"abstract":"Mark Twain could not have anticipated the longevity of the term “the gilded age” when he coined it in his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. Neither he nor his coauthor, Charles Dudley Warner, could have predicted that their satire of a family’s attempt to sell 75,000 acres of land in Tennessee to speculators in Washington, D.C. would result in the naming of an entire period between the 1870s and 1900 or in the calling out of the materialism and corruption of industrialists and politicians. The novel did engage romance along with social satire and political criticism in its caricatures of individuals engaged in land speculation and various schemes to get rich; however, it did not address the “captains of industry” and “robber barons,” as the wealthy Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Leland Stanford, and Cornelius Vanderbilt came to be called for their transformation of steel, banking, oil, railroads, and shipping into formidable industrial and corporate powers. Reform-minded individuals, however, voiced their opposition to the unmistakable greed apparent in corporate growth and industrial expansion at the expense of workers and weaker competitors. Progressives called attention to corruption and graft in urban political arenas and to health and sanitation hazards in home and work environments that were not isolated incidents, but rather recurring news events vying with personal scandals for headlines in tabloids, scandal sheets, and dailies. Yet, here we are today well into the twenty-first century and Mark Twain’s labeling has never been more popular with readers and media-savvy audiences. The television costume drama, Gilded Age on HBO, has carried the name of the era into more homes with viewers eager to watch the ensconced wealthy characters and social climbing newcomers make their way through New York social spaces and navigate the mores of a challenging landscape. Women are central to this visual dramatization of the age. This showcasing of issues affecting women and gender roles may perhaps be a subliminal residue from Mark Twain’s narrative contribution in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today and his creation of the central figure, Laura, an adopted daughter of","PeriodicalId":45212,"journal":{"name":"WOMENS STUDIES-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL","volume":"52 1","pages":"125 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44101276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：