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- Forselius, Tilda Maria, 1952
(författare)
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The body and the decent inner self: Letters by Julie Björckegren, wife of a Swedish Mayor, 1789-91
- 2006
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Ingår i: Women's Writing. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0969-9082 .- 1747-5848. ; 13:1, s. 121-138
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The body of the individual aroused special interest in discourses of the European Enlightenment. One of the questions at stake in literary, rhetorical and epistolary practices concerned what can be inferred about a person's inner self on the basis of his or her bodily appearance. In the second half of the 1700s, the new epistolary rhetoricians recommended that letter writers throw off the stiff personas of classical rhetoric and instead perform the discourse of the heart. The proposed performance, however, was constrained by new parameters, not least strong gender biases. The impact of these cultural discourses are discussed in relation to letters written between 1789 and 1791 by Julie Björckegren, the wife of a Swedish mayor, to Count Carl Sparre, her former lover. Her writing about her body and her social roles is interpreted as a self-reflective practice formed within the constraints of the rhetorical and cultural context. By this practice she shapes her subjectivity and constructs her self as a bourgeois woman.
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| 2. |
- Hansson, Heidi, 1956-, et al.
(författare)
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Lady Audley's secret, gender and the representation of emotions
- 2013
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Ingår i: Women's Writing. - : Taylor & Francis Group. - 0969-9082 .- 1747-5848. ; 20:4, s. 441-457
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The relation between gender, emotion and normative ideals is a prominent theme in British sensation fiction of the 1860s, and a central concern in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). But despite critical assent concerning the importance of emotions in the text, there are no focused studies of their meaning and narrative function. This study explores how representations of anger and shame convey gender specificity and how the way characters express and perform emotions interplay with constructions of social power in the novel. Braddon’s work contains more examples of women than men exhibiting signs of anger and more instances of men than women showing shame which means that anger might be understood as female and shame as a male quality in the text. The contexts where these emotions occur indicate the opposite, however. Women displaying anger are shown to transgress gendered conduct codes, whereas men mostly experience shame because of women’s misbehaviour and as their guardians. Although the distribution of instances when male and female characters show anger or shame could initially be understood as a manifestation of the disruptive qualities of the sensation genre, such an interpretation is undermined by the gendered relations between emotional expression, power and control in the novel.
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