Sex and money; reading and shopping, work and marriage, domestic realism and imperial fantasy, unsexed women and unmanned men, feminism and anti-feminism, separate spheres and same-sex desire, the gender of literature.

This is a small seminar with emphasis on class discussion. While the class is intended primarily for concentrators in English, History and Literature, Women's Studies, and Literature, interested freshmen and non-concentrators are also welcome.

30 Jan Introduction

6 Feb.  Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813) (Vols. 1-2)
13 Feb. Pride and Prejudice (complete)
20 Feb. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848) (chapters 1-9)
        *Mrs. [Sarah] Ellis, The Daughters of England (1842), Chapter 4
        *John Ruskin, “Of Queens' Gardens” (1864)
        *John Stuart Mill, speech before the House of Commons, 20 May 1867
        *Mrs. Humphry Ward et al., “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage” (1889)
        *Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1857), 3-32
[Response paper #1 due for entire class]
27 Feb.Mary Barton (complete)
6 Mar. No class [begin reading The Woman in White]
13 Mar. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860)
        *from My Secret Life (anonymous, 1902), 18-21, 140-49
        [Response paper 2a due]
20 Mar. Middlemarch (1872), Books 1-3
        [Response paper 2b due]

[Spring break]

3 April Middlemarch, Books 4-6
        John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women
        *Barbara Leigh Smith, “A Brief Summary of the Laws concerning Women” (1854)
        [Response paper 3a due]
10 Middlemarch (complete)
        *Florence Nightingale, “Cassandra” (1860)
        [Response paper 3b due]
17 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)
        *Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843), pp. 172-74
        [Response paper 4a due]
24  Bleak House
        [Response paper 4b due]
1 May Henry James, In the Cage (1898)

* denotes a reading in the coursepack, available from Gnomon Copy

Requirements: active participation in class discussion; four 2-3-pp. response papers (signup sheet for even or odd weeks will be distributed on Feb. 13); 8-10-pp. final paper

Texts on order at the Coop:
Pride and Prejudice (Norton)
Mary Barton (Oxford)
The Woman In White (Oxford)
Middlemarch (Bantam)
Bleak House (Penguin)
Subjection of Women (MIT)
In the Cage (Random House)

The two greatest nineteenth-century European novels open with aphorisms about marriage:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina)

This course asks why love and sex have been so central to the novelistic tradition – but also, reciprocally, what role the novel played (and still plays) in shaping our thinking about gender.

The seminar focuses on women: as writers, readers, narrators, characters; as wives, prostitutes, workers, shoppers. But it also asks how men's lives were reshaped by the gendered subcultures invented in the Victorian period, exemplified in politics by the ideology of "separate spheres," in economics by the new figure of the masculine breadwinner, and in urban geography by the development of the world's first suburbs. Closer to home, we'll explore what the new division of labor between women's domestic duties and men's involvement in political and economic life meant for a genre like the novel, committed at once to representing individuals' most private thoughts and to reforming English society. In short, we'll discuss both how Victorian realism changed models of gender and how those ideas changed the form and function of fiction.

In order to gain a sense of the discourses with which the novel competed and collaborated, we'll discuss medical debates about contraception and childbirth, political polemics about suffrage and divorce, and economic controversies about women's work and women's leisure. Reading includes a mystery novel (The Woman in White), a courtship novel (Pride and Prejudice), and a political novel (Mary Barton), two long novels that attempt to make sense of the structure of society (Middlemarch and Bleak House), and shorter excerpts from cookbooks, legal writings, political speeches, and pornography.