Rachel Carnell

Feminism and the Public Sphere in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The bipartite narrative structure of Anne Bronte9s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) has been interpreted recently as an attempt to subvert the traditional Victorian rubric of separate spheres. Reconsidering this novel in terms of Jurgen Habermas9s concept of the eighteenth-century public sphere broadens the historical context for the way we understand the separate spheres. Within Bronte9s critique of Victorian gender roles, we may identify a reluctance to address the Chartist-influenced class challenges to an older version of the public good. In hearkening back to an eighteenth-century model of the public sphere, Bronte espouses not so much a twentieth-century-style challenge to the Victorian model of separate spheres as a nineteenth-century-style nostalgia for the classical liberal model of bourgeois public debate. At the same time, the awkward rupture in Bronte9s narrative represents the inherent contradictions between the different levels of discourse-literary, political, and scientific-within the public sphere itself and the complex ways in which these contradictions are both accorded and denied cultural power.

Clarissa's Treasonable Correspondence: Gender, Epistolary Politics, and the Public Sphere

The undecided Events are sufficiently pointed out to the Reader, to whom this Sort of Writing, something, as I have hinted, should be left to make out or debate upon. ... It is not an unartful Management to interest the Readers so much in the Story, as to make them differ in Opinion as to Capital Articles, and by Leading one, to espouse one, another, another, Opinion, make them all, if not Authors, Carpers.1

The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative & Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750 (review)

ion, but ‘‘the embodied status of the individual.’’ Ms. Conway points to Clarissa’s dealings with the prostitutes and to references to Mme. de Maintenon, mistress to Louis XIV. In Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sophia Western, mistaken for the Jacobite Jenny Cameron, is aligned rhetorically with an apolitical Gwyn. Richardson and Fielding thus both ‘‘realized that the political divisions that haunted England in the wake of the ’45 remained unresolved.’’ Moreover, ‘‘Clarissa and Tom Jones gain their power from an awareness that the answers to the questions raised by the Restoration and its aftermath could only ever be partial and incomplete.’’ Ms. Conway persuasively demonstrates that ‘‘Courtesan narrative opens a window onto a continent of religious controversy and sexual politics that offers no safe harbours for those travelling its coastlines.’’ The achievements of her text are manifold. Rachel Carnell Cleveland State University

The Seduction Narrative in Britain by Katherine Binhammer. (Review)

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