An academician's incisive reading, delivered in high scholarese, of
the subtext underlying depiction of the female form in Victorian
literature and art, and contemporary feminist poetry. Although
Michie writes from a feminist's perspective, she admits to a
longstanding obsession with the Victorian novel, and this
fascination, rather than any political motivation, powers her
study. Consequently, the latter part of the book, where she
examines the work of Jong, Grahn, Sexton, and other feminist poets,
conveys less energy and conviction than her earlier exploration of
Victorian literature itself. It is in this microscopic picking at
the Victorian practice of creating a distance between the female
body and reader - through metaphor, cliche, and fetishism - that
Michie excels. She begins by examining Victorian representations of
women at the dinner table and in the workplace, pointing out that
by eliminating virtually any description of a woman eating, and by
equating any serious female career interest with prostitution,
Victorians created a prototypical anorexic, meek woman - in effect,
making the female body disappear. She then surveys the actual
descriptions of the female body in Victorian arts, driving home
through myriad examples her thesis that parts of the body -
particularly hair, arms, and hands - stood in for the whole: an art
based on fetish and metaphor; practices, Michie argues, necessarily
if unwittingly inherited by feminist writers because of the limits
of language itself. An exemplary work of committed scholarship, but
so corseted by academic jargon that few lay readers will slip into
it with ease. (Kirkus Reviews)
Helena Michie's provocative new work looks at how women's bodies
are portrayed in a variety of Victorian literary and non-literary
genres--from painting, poems, and novels, to etiquette, books, sex
manuals, and pornography. After identifying a series of codes and
taboos that govern the depiction of women in such activities as
eating and working, she then turns to the physical descriptions of
Victorian heroines, focusing on those parts of their bodies that
are erased, and on those that become fetishized in conventional
description. Her vivid analysis moves forward in time with a
consideration of 20th-century "second wave" feminism and a
discussion of the poetics of the body as articulated by feminist
writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Making use of feminist,
poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic accounts of the figure of
woman, and the relation of the body to the text, The Flesh Made
Word offers fresh readings of works by writers as diverse as the
Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Trollope, Hardy, Adrienne Rich,
Olga Broumas, Audre Lorde, and Louise Gluck.
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