BiblioVault - Books about Women in literature

Hawking Women

Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture

Sara Petrosillo

The Ohio State University Press, 2023

While critical discourse about falconry metaphors in premodern literature is dominated by depictions of women as unruly birds in need of taming, women in the Middle Ages claimed the symbol of a hawking woman on their personal seals, trained and flew hawks, and wrote and read poetic texts featuring female falconers. Sara Petrosillo’s Hawking Women demonstrates how cultural literacy in the art of falconry mapped, for medieval readers, onto poetry and challenged patriarchal control. Examining texts written by, for, or about women, Hawking Women uncovers literary forms that arise from representations of avian and female bodies. Readings from Sir Orfeo, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Machaut, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and hawking manuals, among others, show how female characters are paired with their hawks not to assert dominance over the animal but instead to recraft the stand-in of falcon for woman as falcon with woman. In the avian hierarchy female hawks have always been the default, the dominant, and thus these medieval interspecies models contain lessons about how women resisted a culture of training and control through a feminist poetics of the falconry practice.

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Hawthorne and Women

Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition

John L. Idol

University of Massachusetts Press, 1999

Nathaniel Hawthorne is notorious for complaining in a letter to one of his publishers that a "damn'd mob of scribbling women" was stealing his audience. Elsewhere, he referred to women authors as "ink-stained Amazons" who were "without a single exception, detestable," and once expressed his wish that all women be "forbidden to write, on pain of having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster-shell."

This collection of original essays presents a more complex and positive view of Hawthorne's attitudes toward women, demonstrating his recognition of the crucial role that women played--as critics, reviewers, readers, and authors--in building a national readership that made his writing career so successful.

The book begins with an examination of the influence exerted by the women in Hawthorne's immediate family. It goes on to explore his links to a broad range of women writers, as well as his attitudes toward the female characters he created. Among the authors discussed are Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison.

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He Knew She Was Right

The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope

Jane Nardin

Southern Illinois University Press, 1989

Trollope’s mother, wife, and a friend he loved platonically most of his life provided him three very different views of the Victorian woman. And, according to Jane Nardin, they were responsible for the dramatic shift in his treatment of women in his novels.

This is the first book in Sandra Gilbert’s Ad Feminam series to examine a male author. Nardin initially analyzes the novels Trollope wrote from 1855 to 1861, in which male concerns are central to the plot and women are angelic heroines, submissive and self-sacrificing. Even the titles of his novels written during this period are totally male oriented. The Three Clerks, Doctor Thorne, and The Bertrams all refer to men. Shortly after meeting Kate Field, Trollope wrote Orley Farm, which refers to the estate an angry woman steals from her husband and which marks a change in the attitudes toward women evident in his novels.

His next four books, The Small House at Allington, Rachel Ray, Can You Forgive Her?, and Miss Mackenzie, prove that women’s concerns had become central in his writing. Nardin examines specific novels written from 1861 to 1865 in which Trollope, with increasing vigor, subverts the conventional notions of gender that his earlier novels had endorsed.

Nardin argues that his novels written after 1865 and often recognized as feminist are not really departures but merely refinements of attitudes Trollope exhibited in earlier works.

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Hemingway and Women

Female Critics and the Female Voice

Lawrence R. Broer

University of Alabama Press, 2003

Female scholars reevaluate gender and the female presence in the life and work of one of America’s foremost writers

Ernest Hemingway has often been criticized as a misogynist because of his portrayal of women. But some of the most exciting Hemingway scholarship of recent years has come from women scholars who challenge traditional views of Hemingway and women. The essays in this collection range from discussions of Hemingway’s famous heroines Brett Ashley and Catherine Barkley to examinations of the central role of gender in his short stories and in the novel The Garden of Eden. Other essays address the real women in Hemingway’s life—those who cared for him, competed with him, and, ultimately, helped to shape his art. While Hemingway was certainly influenced by traditional perceptions of women, these essays show that he was also aware of the struggle of the emerging new woman of his time. Making this gender struggle a primary concern of his fiction, these critics argue, Hemingway created women with strength, depth, and a complexity that readers are only beginning to appreciate.

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Heroines of Popular Culture

Edited by Ray B. Browne

University of Wisconsin Press, 1987

From life and literature come the heroines of this volume. The essays demonstrate that women can fit the role of hero as defined by Joseph Campbell: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder, fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won, the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Contributors to this volume cover a wide range of heroic women.

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How to Suppress Women's Writing

By Joanna Russ; foreword by Jessa Crispin

University of Texas Press, 2018

Are women able to achieve anything they set their minds to? In How to Suppress Women’s Writing, award-winning novelist and scholar Joanna Russ lays bare the subtle—and not so subtle—strategies that society uses to ignore, condemn, or belittle women who produce literature. As relevant today as when it was first published in 1983, this book has motivated generations of readers with its powerful feminist critique.

“What is it going to take to break apart these rigidities? Russ’s book is a formidable attempt. It is angry without being self-righteous, it is thorough without being exhausting, and it is serious without being devoid of a sense of humor. But it was published over thirty years ago, in 1983, and there’s not an enormous difference between the world she describes and the world we inhabit.”
—Jessa Crispin, from the foreword

“A book of the most profound and original clarity. Like all clear-sighted people who look and see what has been much mystified and much lied about, Russ is quite excitingly subversive. The study of literature should never be the same again.”
—Marge Piercy

“Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer, a writer of real moral passion and high wit.”
—Adrienne Rich

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Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject

Juliet Flower Maccannell

University of Minnesota Press, 1999

Proposes an ethics of the feminine through an examination of women’s writing.

The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Subject was first published in 1999. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

How can a girl become a woman today—an ethical woman and a member of society—without being either a victim or a manipulator? Reflecting on this question, Juliet Flower MacCannell takes us for the first time beyond the flawed models for “becoming woman” left to us by Freud and Sade.Having previously explored the logic of feminine sexuality, MacCannell sets out in the Hysteric’s Guide to locate an ethics of the feminine. She does this by examining instances of the (often hysterical) feminine confrontation with (usually perverse) masculine subjects, confrontations that represent crucial scenes in the constitution of female sexuality. Her study takes us into Sadean ethics and the prescriptions of Freudian psychoanalysis; post-Enlightenment colonialism; racism during and after World War I; genocidal fascism in World War II; and the slowing of time and generation during the Cold War.MacCannell treats contemporary art, fiction, and theory, considering works by Arendt, Angelou, Rousseau, Kant, Stendhal, Kleist, Hitchcock, Atwood, Klein, Chodorow, Adorno, and Duras. Ultimately, this book reasserts “becoming woman” as an issue that has, until now, been denied for want of a feminine ethic relevant to contemporary life.

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