Vol. 12 No. 16 · 30 August 1990
pages 20-22 | 2431 words
Out of the house
Dinah Birch
- The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 by Janet Todd
Virago, 328 pp, £12.99, April 1989, ISBN 0 86086 576 2
- Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian Britain by Mary Poovey
Virago, 282 pp, £12.99, February 1989, ISBN 1 85381 035 5
- The Woman Question. Society and Literature In Britain and America, 1837-1883: Vols I-III edited by Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder
Chicago, 146 pp, £7.95, February 1989, ISBN 0 226 32666 7
- Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood by Cynthia Eagle Russett
Harvard, 245 pp, £15.95, June 1989, ISBN 0 674 80290 X
How can women come to a better understanding of their cultural situation? What needs to be changed, and why? The questions are as urgent as ever, despite wishful rumours to the contrary. Numerous books about women continue to appear, offering diverse models of thought to those looking for counsel. Psychoanalytical and deconstructionist critics have been among the most glamorous figures in the crowd, encouraging women to examine the complex linguistic processes that compose feminine subjectivity. These strategies give a new dimension to what has long been perceived as women’s domain: the inward life, placed in a primarily familial setting. To privilege the private over the public as such critics do may be interpreted as a feminist gesture. But it’s a self-limiting challenge, for their language often chooses to exclude the wider community, operating in terms of jokes and quarrels shared within a closely-knit intellectual family. The repressive fathers are simply shut out, excluded by language.
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Letters
Vol. 12 No. 19 · 11 October 1990
From Sue Collinson
Dinah Birch, in her review of Mrs Humphry Ward (LRB, 30 August), makes some finely-judged points about the problems which feminist historians need to overcome in order to ‘grow in confidence and maturity’. As she says, ‘detailed historical scholarship of the kind needed to substantiate new women’s histories’ demands months of patient and meticulous research. How sad, therefore, that her own comments then retreat into the sort of dismissive polemicism which allows men not to have to take women’s history seriously. Her remarks concerning the 19th-century psychiatrist Henry Maudsley lack both substance and the substantial research that she has just advocated. Led on, presumably, by the tenor of Cynthia Eagles Russett’s work, she appears unable to resist making a most unscholarly pounce upon the doctor, declaring that it is ‘one of the more cheering ironies of history that a man like Henry Maudsley, eminent psychiatrist and virulent misogynist, has turned out to be such a friend to feminism. His writings provide an apparently inexhaustible mine of pronouncements on women, compounded of such stupidity and malice that simply to quote him will always help to clinch a feminist argument with a flourish.’
Henry Maudsley was many things but he was neither stupid nor malicious. Through his writings he gave to his profession, and to the 19th century, the most extraordinary insights as to what it was like to be mentally ill. His descriptions of the suffering associated with delusion, dementia and depression mark a turning-point, for both patient and practitioner, in the history of English psychiatry. His work was indeed influenced by a dark pessimism and misogyny which declined, with the century, into a bitter, Fin-de-Siècle hopelessness, but this was not directed exclusively, or even particularly, at women. Maudsley’s belief was that ‘no one can escape the tyranny of his organisation.’ Perhaps a more interesting irony for feminist historians is Maudsley’s early advocacy of a woman’s right to hold a periodic ‘open season’ on men. He certainly acknowledged PMT as a clinical condition which had a ‘notable effect upon the mind and body’. Feminist history cannot eat its cake and have it.
Sue Collinson
Birkbeck College, London WC1
