The Body Writes Back: Self-Possession in Mr. Meeson’s Will
[...]Garrett Stewart reads Mr. Meeson’s Will as part of a “strain of late Victorian writing concerned with the entrance of the woman into the marketplace of ideas” (157), a “parable of gendered inscription” (160), and an example of how Victorian novelists reduce the female figure to an inscribed bod...
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| Published in: | Nineteenth-Century gender studies 2013-04, Vol.8 (3) |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | [...]Garrett Stewart reads Mr. Meeson’s Will as part of a “strain of late Victorian writing concerned with the entrance of the woman into the marketplace of ideas” (157), a “parable of gendered inscription” (160), and an example of how Victorian novelists reduce the female figure to an inscribed body, a “material exhibit for the deciphering masculine voyeur” (157). If we understand tattooing as an unstable technology of self-fashioning, we can read Augusta’s tattoo as a generative condition. [...]while this article joins prior feminist interpretations that attend to Haggard’s uneasy figuring of the woman writer, by analyzing the novel’s ironic linkage of “savage” practices of cultural inscription—the tattoo and the publishing industry’s exploitation of hack writers—I show that Mr. Meeson’s Will is important within Haggard’s oeuvre for the way it imagines a kind of liberation for its heroine, granting her an unprecedented degree of self-possession through her vocation as a popular writer. [ 6 ] As I’ve indicated, recent feminist readings of Mr. Meeson’s Will focus on the tattoo as a disciplinary device, a literalization of the concept of cultural inscription described in Foucauldian terms as a body “totally imprinted by history” (qtd. in Butler 1999, 165). [...]Augusta’s tattoo, like all traces of cultural inscription, also functions as a generative condition, locating her in social networks that are themselves unstable, and giving her the capacity to change those networks. |
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| ISSN: | 1556-7524 |