Outside the pale : cultural exclusion, gender difference, and the Victorian woman writer

Elsie B. Michie here provides insightful readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, writers who confronted definitions of femininity which denied them full participation in literary culture. Exploring a series of abhorrent images, Michie traces the links between the Victorian definition of femininity and other forms of cultural exclusion such as race and class distinctions. "In his 1850 article "Prostitution," W.R. Greg asserts that nineteenth-century society conceived of prostitutes as "far more out of the pale of humanity than negroes on a slave plantation or fellahs in a Pasha's dungeon." Elsie B. Michie here provides insightful readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, writers who confronted definitions of femininity which denied them full participation in literary culture. Exploring a series of abhorrent images - Frankenstein's monster, a simianized caricature of the Irish, the menstruating woman alluded to in debates on access to higher education, and the fallen woman - Michie traces the links between the Victorian definition of femininity and other forms of cultural exclusion such as race and class distinctions." "Michie considers a range of fiction written in the period 1818-1870, paying particular attention to changes in the construction of gender which coincided with changing attitudes toward colonial and class relations. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Teresa de Lauretis, Catherine Gallagher, Mary Poovey, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, she maps out connections between two excluded territories, one defined by gender and the other by class, race, and economics. Michie transforms our understanding of familiar novels including Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch in which the two themes are articulated together, as she illuminates political, economic, and social issues connected to models of difference." "Literary theorists, feminist scholars, Victorianists, and others interested in cultural studies and the history of the novel will welcome this perceptive and engaging book."--Jacket Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: "Excluded from Discourse and Imprisoned within It": The Position of the Nineteenth-Century Woman Writer 1. "Matters That Appertain to the Imagination": Accounting for Production in Frankenstein 2. "The Yahoo, Not the Demon": Heathcliff, Rochester, and the Simianization of the Irish 3. "My Story as My Own Property": Gaskell, Dickens, and the Rhetoric of Prostitution 4. "Those That Will Not Work": Prostitutes, Property, Gaskell, and Dickens 5. "High Art and Science Always Require the Whole Man": Culture and Menstruation in Middlemarch Conclusion: Products, Simians, Prostitutes, and Menstruating Women: What Do They Have in Common? Works Cited Index