Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Women in Culture and Society)

Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Women in Culture and Society) by Homans, Margaret. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780226351063.

As the title suggests, Bearing the Word looks with particular intensity at the intersections of womens reproductive and literary roles. Through close readings of works by Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Homans explores the variety of ways in which nineteenth-century women writers attempted to reclaim their own experiences as paradigms for writing. In so doing, Homans responds to questions raised by contradictory assumptions in current feminist theory. Contents: Representation, Reproduction, and Womens Place in Language. - Building Refuges: Dorothy Wordsworths Poetics of the Image. - The Name of the Mother in Wuthering Heights. - Dreaming of Children: Literalization in Jane Eyre. - Bearing Demons: Frankensteins Circumvention of the Maternal. - Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sisters Instruction. - The Author as Mother: Bearing the Word as Nineteenth-Century Ideology. - Figuring the Mother: Madonna Romolas Incarnation. - Mothers and Daughters I: Gaskells Stories of the Mothers Word and the Daughters Fate. - Mothers and Daughters II: Wives and Daughters, or "Two Mothers." - Mothers and Daughters in Virginia Woolfs Victorian Novel. Includes bibliographical notes and index.