Robin Hackett, Vassar College
Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 1999), 263-280.

This article offers a perverse reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet VII as an early twentieth-century British feminist and pacifist like Virginia Woolf might read it.  The essay argues that Woolf’s The Waves (1931) encourages its readers to reread the sonnet as a story of imperialism. The essay demonstrates exhaustively why such a reading is warranted by the evidence surrounding and within The Waves. The argument thus returns to the problem of nationhood and shows how Woolf’s novel does the work of pressing readers to evaluate the imperialist and patriarchal force of Shakespeare’s use of a son-sun metaphor. Against Shakespeare’s promise of perpetual eminence for his heroically beautiful addressee, Woolf pursues an antithetical theme of cyclic individuation and reincorporation.

Karen Kaivola, Stetson University
Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 1999), 235-261.

This article on Woolf’s representations of androgyny undertakes the challenge posed by Kari Weil’s Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (1992) to theorize androgyny as one intermixed figure among others, linking the cultural work androgyny performs through gender to that performed by tropes of racial hybridity, hermaphroditism, and sexual inversion. The analysis is historicized through contextualization in the political development of liberal constitutionalism (and the reconceptualization of the individual that was one of its effects) and in turn-of-the-century anxiety over intermediate or impure forms of identity, fears that were fed by the convergence of nationalism and scientific rationalism. This major reassessment of androgyny in Woolf’s texts concludes with a sophisticated reapplication of Wendy Brown’s concept of a “(fictional) egalitarian imaginary” to Woolf’s representations of “intermixed” identities.

Margaret Bruzelius, Harvard University
Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 1999), 215-233.

This essay addresses the figure of the Virgin Mary as a uniquely powerful emblem of agonized motherhood that pervades Western consciousness. Taking as central examples, on the one hand, the early twentieth-century Chilean poet (and Nobel Prize winner) Gabriela Mistral’s poetry and, on the other hand, French theorist Julia Kristeva’s discussions of maternity, this essay probes the ways in which both writers locate the source of Mary’s power in her passive maternal suffering, even as each uses the Marian tradition to create a powerful female voice. The essay critiques the profoundly entrenched association of motherhood and suffering, a legacy of Mariolatry that identifies “true” maternity with suffering.

Gloria T. Randle, Michigan State University
Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 1999), 215-233

This article reads Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900) as not only uncovering what is political in the African American domestic but also considering female-female psychological dynamics as a locus of political reproduction and potential reform. The essay focuses, first, on the way Grace Montfort’s narrative offers a critique of the cult of true womanhood. The paper then turns to the ways the discrepant relations of Ma Smith to her children William and Dora replicate gender inequities, both psychologically and socially, though they also foster unconscious resistance in Dora. Finally, the paper uncovers Dora and Sappho’s immanently Sapphic relationship with each other—a relationship that provides a subversive alternative to the marriages with which the novel more predictably concludes.

Karen Hollinger and Teresa Winterhalter, Armstrong Atlantic State University
Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 1999), 173-192.

This article looks at Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 classic, Little Women, in order to confront the 1994 film adaptation with the long embattled history of women and feminism that the film ignores. This article recovers not only Alcott’s ambivalent portrayal of domesticity—where a woman’s self-expression must be subdued to self-abnegation focused on helping others—but also the rich, difficult history of feminist efforts to describe and re-describe this ambivalence. These ambivalences are lost in the 1994 feminist triumphalism of Robin Swicord and Gillian Armstrong’s film. Against the desire of contemporary women to see themselves no longer torn between little womanhood and nonconformity, to see ourselves instead as women with the ability to transform even the legacy of a restrictive past into a history of female triumph, this paper resurrects the novel itself: thick with patriarchally complicit aspects of nineteenth-century gender ideology.