Gender, Art and Death

Sanjeeda Hossain

 

Name of the Book: Gender, Art and Death

Author: Janet Todd

Publisher: New York: Continuum

Year of publication: 1993

Number of pages: 183

 

Janet Todd, one of the leading authors on seventeenth and eighteenth Century women writers, discusses gender issues in relation to art and death in her book Gender, Art and Death. She investigates prominent female authors’ biographies from the Restoration to the Romantic era to offer insights into changing constructions of gender and identity. Patriarchal authority tried to bind creative female spirits, but they battled all adversaries with courage. Todd, in her book, explores how women authors evolved themselves, from being mere writers into inventors of discursive strategies, to transform self-expression into literary art. This book introduces us to phenomenal women authors emerging with a new definition of art where idea of death plays a crucial part.

Todd begins her discussion with playwright and prose fiction author Aphra Behn’s view on art and death. The initial two chapters of the book discusses her promotion of theatrical pornography like other public female writers of the Restoration era. However, unlike many of them, she desired reputation and lasting fame through her literary work. According to the male ideologies of her time, audiences considered her and her actors as whores. Nevertheless, this relation between feminine sex and text gave her a specialized gendered voice. Ironically, Behn’s characters of pure women were played by lewd actresses. Though it was a form of degradation, it was also women’s empowerment because the 1622’s royal warrant, ordered women to replace earlier boy actors playing women’s parts. Nevertheless, this relation between the female sex and text gave her a specialized gendered voice.

However, she knew that to men belong fame because they control history through masculine authority. Moreover, she claimed that she was forced to write for money at an age when women were excluded from classical male education. Therefore, as a method to achieve permanence as an artist, she combined heroic male death with art, in her prose. In seventeenth century, when male death was associated with honour, Behn produced heroes like Oroonoko as failed rebels dying a noble death. Furthermore, she wrote on the politics of the slave trade: a topic of male interest then. As conventions demanded, she created virile male characters but could not construct strong female heroines. Her women die violently, but her men die with glory. Todd in her research finds Aphra Behn as an inspiration for female writers because she is arguably the first author to question male conventions through feminine writing.

After Behn, prominent female heroines were created by male authors. Though these women were the main protagonists, they were portrayed as malleable and passive— subservient to male desire. A perfect example of such a character is recounted in Chapter 3 titled “Pamela: or the bliss of servitude”. The unforgettable Pamela, created by Samuel Richardson, belongs to the group of numerous maids deflowered by their masters in the first half of the eighteenth century. She was complaint and religious, and she becomes her master’s wife through her feminine virtue. A wife from the master’s own class will be equally spoiled, indulged and headstrong. In contrast, Pamela is a perfect wife as she lends her uprightness to her master. Besides, she is unequal to her master; she proves that the wife is the extension of the maid below the man. Thus, Pamela is a proper wife not despite of her servanthood but because of it. The more Pamela humbles herself the more majestic her master becomes. Pamela is good because she plays the victim of her tyrant male master to balance the social order.

In this way, from the 1660’s onwards women entered the literary market with male constructed images of womanhood, but as soon as female authorship and readership expanded, women wanted to portray their own reality. Therefore, during the eighteenth century, the most favoured genre for female authors was autobiography. Autobiographies affirmed identity; as readers read them, they acknowledged the mind of the female author. Todd discusses Susannah Gunning who, after being banished from her husband’s house, supported her ill daughter through the writing of her autobiography. She uses sentimental techniques like motherhood as a woman’s most profitable and justificatory image to other women. The next chapter on Mary Ann Radcliffe, highlights this issue of motherhood from the view of an unfortunate woman from the lower middle class. The Memoirs of Mrs Mary Ann Radcliff (1810) is also an autobiography but it focuses more on women’s social and economic reality as well as their empowerment and their awareness of civic rights.

Chapter 6 titled “Mary Wollstonecraft and the rights of death”, deals with the great proponent of women’s right: Mary Wollstonecraft, who realized that though morality, religion and customs were shaken after the French Revolution, revolutionary living was limited to women. She was profoundly affected by political situations around her and penned Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Nevertheless, in real life, she could not ensure these rights for herself. She developed grave self-pity over her dependence as a governess. She was so disgusted with life that she preferred death as a last appeal or justification to a despised world.  Therefore, she adopted suicide as a valorous and noble deed; she found rational and active suicide better than surrender. Wollstonecraft adopted suicide as a form of self-assertion.

However, after her death due to complications in child birth, Wollstonecraft’s’ obtuse husband William Godwin gave his wife’s story a sentimental and romantic turn, but as his step daughter Fanny commits suicide, he invents lies to hide her death. Godwin’s Memoir in 1798 revealed Wollstonecraft’s affair with Gilbert Imlay and her attempts of suicide after being abandoned with their daughter Fanny. A revelation of this incident was one of the factors responsible behind her death. Chapter 7 mentions that in October 1816, at the age of twenty-two, Fanny Wollstonecraft travelled to Swansea and killed herself in an inn. Begotten by free unmarried parents, she was a child of the Revolution. After Wollstonecraft’s death, Godwin remarried amongst endless financial crisis. Fanny was ridiculed in the house as an illegitimate daughter. She was also another victim of Percy Shelley’s escapades, the progeny of Wollstonecraft’s melancholy and a great reader of romances. After her death, Shelley wrote a poem on her titled ‘On F. G’ proclaiming that Fanny died of love for him. His partner Mary Shelley in chapter 4 of Frankenstein tells the story of Justine who resembles her dead half-sister: kind, good-hearted, but tortured by an unloving mother. In her next novel Matilda, she models Matilda after Fanny. Her book Lodore has an intelligent character named Fanny.  She was often associating Fanny with her dead mother. Though Fanny was not herself a writer, her death gave her immortality through the art of writing.

Todd discusses in chapter 8, how the passions of Wollstonecraft were held at bay and the softer, delicate side of women’s life was explored through family life and the domestic world by the end of the eighteenth century. Major genres of literature tend to drift when women begin writing in them. For example, the genre of the novel was transformed with women’s authorship and readership. As a result, the genre of sensibility was born. The cult of sensibility brought the woman at the centre of culture by associating the feminine with the sentimental, but Jane Austen opposed sentimentality in all its forms.

According to Todd, though Austen uses the traditional sentimental plot, techniques of sentimental novels are subverted in her writing; she silences the excessive female voice. For instance, the letter, in particular, was the sentimental form associated with women. However, Austen uses letters as a mode of expression mostly by men. In her Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet can be heard a good deal without letters. It is men like Darcy who are silent and misunderstood in speech, and it is they who express their inner selves and desires in letters. Letters were taken from women by Austen, and given to men who already had the pen quite firmly in their hands.

However, Austen’s successor Virginia Woolf finds her unsettling due to her disregard for sentimentality. Todd remarkably discusses this topic in Chapter 9 titled “Who’s afraid of Jane Austen?” Suffering and sensibility characterize women for Virginia Woolf. When she creates her own female artists, in most cases, they are doomed. For example, her invention: Judith Shakespeare, the wonderfully gifted sister of Shakespeare, commits suicide. Her individual women are unconventional: incompatible to usual womanly existence. They are basically mediums for the readers to view Woolf’s own mind since they behave at her command. Then again, she preaches that a writer should not use personal suffering to rivet readers’ sympathy and curiosity. Paradoxically, she grumbles at Austen’s impersonality. However, she claims that Austen’s usual opposite Charlotte Bronte disturbs the text with her intrusive pain by elevating suffering and sensibility. Also, Woolf relates to Wollstonecraft’s misery. For her, she is the creature of injustice, “the fighting feminist, and a passionate lady in distress” (Todd 157). In contrast, Jane Austen lacks the ardour of both Bronte and Wollstonecraft. Austen is not sentimental, and she shows no embarrassment or discomfort at conventional values.

Woolf praises Austen as an artist and stresses her perfection; yet, the praise is often strangely negative. Firstly, Austen does not preach. Secondly, she has no personal life in her novels. Thirdly, she has a sureness of tone. She is classic and aware in creating a universal, perfect prose. Although Woolf deplores critics who make Austen domestic and ladylike, she dislikes her for her steadiness. In A Room of One’s Own, she discovers that Austen never had a room of her own. She wrote at the living room, being subject to all kinds of casual interruption. Moreover, if Woolf has an androgynous vision, Austen is merely devoid of gender; she hardly seems to be a woman writer. Woolf is ambivalent and uneasy about Austen because she fails to match Woolf’s views on women writers.

On one hand, Woolf’s biography questions art as a delusion: an absurd belief in the essential male canon; on the other hand, Austen is cynical of the male customs. For example, re-establishment of patriarchal rule, and communities being depended on male financial control— have always been a subject of her criticism. Woolf was conscious of writing modern fiction. She was unable to settle herself with the male definition of Art, and she invented completely a different form of writing. However, the conventions of the traditional novel: precise plot, characters and dialogue— interrogated her achievements. Male critics like E. M. Forster noted that she avoided plot and by doing so, she invited criticism (Todd 174). Austen with her supreme craft of mastering plots was always somewhere there to mock her. This mockery along with her anxieties of a war-devastated England was unendurable for Woolf; she killed herself by drowning. In contrast, Austen gently laughed at the follies of patriarchy. Her approach of criticising male authority is different from Woolf. Nevertheless, both Austen and Woolf together have reformed the feminine art of writing.

These biographies that Todd presents in relation to gender, race and class mesmerize the readers and inform them about a distinct feminine literary culture. It shows how the culture of writing became rapidly feminized and how women claimed power and self-identity through writing. Todd’s bibliographical research informs us how writing became a profession, and a path towards independence for women.  She comments in her introduction that a reconstruction of the past after some archival study and a wide reading over a long period of time initiates authority (Todd 7). This authority judges these women writers from various angles. However, it might violate the reading of their literary texts. Depending a lot on the biographic speculation of authors can damage the joy of reading; this often hinders the relationship between the reader and the text. Nevertheless, Todd does not only give her own views, but she also brings upon multiple perspectives from various critics: thus, inviting the readers to take part in her conjectures.

Gender, Art and Death is a book on the women writer’s gradual desertion from the male convention and the formation of their singular identity. By dismantling the concepts of art and death, Todd wonderfully presents these female author’s struggles with tradition and patriarchy over the centuries. Their endeavours inspire women to nurture their feminine strength.

 

 

Work Cited

 

Austen, Pride. Pride and Prejudice. Edited by Vivien Jones, Penguin Classics, 2003.

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.

Godwin, William. Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: J. Johnson; and G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798.

Osman, Sharifah Aishah. Bandit Queens and Eastern Sisters: Byronic Heroines and British Nationalism, 1770-1840. PhD Thesis. Boston University. 2005.

Radcliffe, Mary Anne. The memoirs of Mrs. Mary Ann Radcliffe in familiar letters to her female friend. Edinburgh: Manners & Miller, 1810.

Richardson, Samuel. Pamela, Or, Virtue Rewarded: In a Series of Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to Her Parents, and Afterwards in Her Exalted Condition, between Her, and Persons of Figure and Quality, Upon the Most Important and Entertaining Subjects, in Genteel Life. London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1801.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus: the 1818 Text. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Shelly, Mary Wollstonecraft. Lodore. London: Richard Bentley, 1835.

Shelly, Mary Wollstonecraft. Mathilda. University of North Carolina Press, 1959.

Todd, Janet. Gender, Art and Death. New York: Continuum, 1993.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. London: J. Johnson, 1792.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929. Print.