An Ethic of Innocence: Pragmatism, Modernity, and Women's Choice Not to Know (SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

"In An Ethic of Innocence, author Kristen Renzi provides a novel interpretative framework for reconsidering the epistemic claims of women in transatlantic literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. It is the first scholarly study of the ways in which gendered choices "not to know" have been represented, and critically received, within modern literature. The book grounds itself in the late nineteenth century's changing political and generic representations of women. Ultimately, it contends that these turn-of-the-century feminine figures who choose not to know, despite having been critically overlooked or dismissed as conservative or backward, can actually represent and model crucial pragmatic strategies by which modern and contemporary subjects navigate, survive, and even oppose gender oppression. Renzi offers a feminist theory of ignorance that sheds light on the misunderstood or overlooked epistemic practices of women in literature"-- Provided by publisher Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction: The Problem of Modern Female Innocence 14 Not-Knowing as Trope-cum-Trap 17 Epistemologies of Not-knowing, Ethics of Innocence 21 Glossing Not-Knowing 27 Not-Knowing as Fin-de-Siècle Story, Gendered Story 32 Not-knowing: Feminist Irritant or Surprising Salve? 37 An Ethic of Innocence 42 Part One: Negotiated Living 48 Chapter One: A Pragmatist’s Dilemma: The Collusion between Myth and Reality in the Tale of the Hull House Devil Baby 50 Progressive Blinders and Settlement Tensions 54 Pragmatist Principles and the Genres of Jane Addams 58 The Devil Baby Tale: Old Magic Meets New Protest 66 Inspired by the Devil Baby: Generic and Affective Gaps 71 Reading like Addams: Pragmatism, Knowledge, and the Turn-of-the-Century Woman 79 Chapter Two: Coming of Age via Critical Complaint: Reading Women’s Choices Not to Know in Realist Bildungsroman 84 Critical Complaints: Loving, Choosing, and Living Wrongly 88 Pessimistic Optimism: Charity’s Choice of Agency over Affect 96 Veiled Sass: Maud Martha’s Covert Protests 100 Recasting Trauma: Arvay’s Mental and Bodily Manipulation 107 Suspect Optimism, Grievable Lives 113 Chapter Three: A Failure of Sympathy or of Narrative? Naturalism’s Jaded Women and the Narrative Cycle of Domestic Violence 118 Why Does She Stay? / Why Doesn’t She Leave? Agents and Victims within the Cyclical Tale 119 Nineteenth-Century Activism Meets McTeague’s Battered Women 127 Jaded Power, Unsympathetic Agency 135 Female Masochism and Naturalism’s Everyday Romance 141 Miserable yet Miserly Womanly Love 145 Chapter Four: The Legacy of Naturalism, a Cycle of Leaving: Reading Agency in the Passive, Empty Woman 148 Naturalism’s Modern Legacy and the Passive Woman Alternative 150 Challenging the Narrative of Success: A Passive Agency? 156 Min’s Cycle of Leaving 163 Narrativizing the Cycle, Changing the Question 165 Part Two: Pragmatic Fantasies 170 Chapter Five: Are Women People? Discourses of (Non)Personhood in Suffrage Poetry and Protest 172 Are Women People? Alice Duer Miller’s Dual Question 176 Pragmatism’s Process: Creating, Not Recognizing, Personhood 181 Thinking with the Pragmatists: Aesthetic and Political Value in Mary Richardson’s Avant-Garde Protest 190 Creating the Female Person: Where a Pragmatist Might Go from Here 200 Chapter Six: Making Women, Making Humans: Fantasies and Melancholic Mourning in Modern Sex Changes and Sex Losses 206 Unbound Sex, Transformed Society: 208 Grieving Communities: Sex Losses within Sex Changes 213 Sex Difficulties: Male Modernity’s Resistance to Loss, Reluctance to Mourn 215 Uncomfortable Gender, Disallowed Sex: “The Man Who Became a Woman” 217 Toward a Melancholic Mourning, or a Mournful Melancholia 225 An Image, a Path, and an Opening: Proud Man 229 Toward a Human Woman 237 Chapter Seven: Allowing Innocence? Belief, Knowledge, and the Modern Community 240 Allowing “Innocence”: The Dreamer and the Community 244 To Be or Not to Be Human: A Pragmatist’s Dilemma 249 The Romance of Community: Can It Be Real[ized]? 252 Ambiguous Innocence: Its Warning, Its Hope, Its Charge 256 Notes 262 Works Cited 274 Index 292 An Ethic of Innocence examines representations of women in American and British fin-de-siècle and modern literature who seem ?not to know? things. These naïve fools, Pollyannaish dupes, obedient traditionalists, or regressive anti-feminists have been dismissed by critics as conservative, backward, and out of sync with, even threatening to, modern feminist goals. Grounded in the late nineteenth century?s changing political and generic representations of women, this book provides a novel interpretative framework for reconsidering the epistemic claims of these women. Kristen L. Renzi analyzes characters from works by Henry James, Frank Norris, Ann Petry, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and others, to argue that these feminine figures who choose not to know actually represent and model crucial pragmatic strategies by which modern and contemporary subjects navigate, survive, and even oppose gender oppression