Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Summary
It is an irony surprisingly true that a single woman in want of a home must possess the power to disenchant the suitor seeking entry to her abode. If she is to survive happily, the woman must transform what her beloved perceives as possessing his domestic comfort into preserving her domestic law. Her transformation is not a tease, but rather the sacrifice of her own desire in order to live in the company of others. This study identifies the home, traditionally perceived as feminine space, dangerously under siege by an intrusive masculine will that intriguingly precipitates a feminine spiritedness to protect the hearth.
In Letitia Elizabeth Landon's 1835, “The Fairy of the Fountains,” Melusine's fairy bower, explicitly forbidden to her lover on the seventh day of every week, is permeated by the pilgrim Raymond, exposing the fairy's deepest secret revealed on her day of bathing: she is a mermaid, a beguiling enchantress, but as reptilian monster, a disturbance to social decorum. A similar unsettling intrusion occurs in Emily Brontë's 1847 Wuthering Heights when the traveler Lockwood enters the deceased Catherine's childhood bed. His brazen disturbance awakens the beautiful, but demonic ghost of Catherine. Home invasion becomes further provocatively visible in Ghost, a 1990 sculpture in which Rachel Whiteread inverts an emptied home's interior, literally casting outward a room's anatomy, if you will, for public scrutiny. From Romantic to contemporary times, the home, the site of preserving the female's governance, is also an elegiac space of feminine displacement.
Four ideas cohere this study: 1) the home belongs to feminine law; 2) a happy reign within the home depends on masculine allegiance to this law; 3) breaking this law first disrupts feminine domestic order and second, this breakage weakens masculine power dependent on the home as his own enduring fortress; 4) feminine law is complex not because it is driven by a woman's autonomous choice, but because it is dictated by a societal construct which demands female leadership according to strict expectations imposed on her from without.
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- Information
- Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives , pp. 237 - 252Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2021