Curious Subjects: Women and the Trials of Realism

by Hilary M. Schor

While nineteenth-century literary scholars have long been interested in women's agency in the context of their legal status as objects, Curious Subjects makes the striking and original argument that what we find at the intersection between women subjects (who choose and enter into contracts) and women objects (owned and defined by fathers, husbands, and the law) is curiosity. Women protagonists in the novel are always both strange objects worthy of our interest and actors who are themselves actively curious--relentless askers of questions, even (and perhaps especially) when they are commanded to be content and passive. What kinds of curiosity are possible and desirable, and what different kinds of knowledge do they yield? What sort of subject asks questions, seeks, chooses? Can a curious woman turn her curiosity on herself? Curious Subjects takes seriously the persuasive force of the novel as a form that intervenes in our sense of what women want to know and how theycan and should choose to act on that knowledge. And it shows an astonishingly wide and subtly various range of answers to these questions in the British novel, which far from simply punishing women for their curiosity, theorized it, shaped it, and reworked it to give us characters as different as Alice in Wonderland and Dorothea Brooke, Clarissa Harlowe and Louisa Gradgrind. Schor's study provides thought-provoking new readings of the most canonical novels of the nineteenth century-- Hard Times, Bleak House, Vanity Fair, Daniel Deronda , among others--and pushes well beyond commonplace historicist accounts of British culture in the period as a monolithic ideological formation. It will interest scholars of law and literature, narratology, and feminist theory as well as literary history more generally.

288 pages, Paperback

First published December 14, 2012

Reviews

[Michael Meeuwis · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a really good book sort of encased in other things here. The really good book examines female curiosity across the Victorian novel, arguing--unexpectedly, and convincingly--for the centrality of the Bluebeard myth to Victorian culture. (E.g. curious girl marries man, becomes more fully-fledged person by entering his secret room, where she finds something dreadful.) You can imagine how this maps onto the marriage plot, but probably never noticed how frequently this story gets referenced, by name, in Victorian texts. When it's reading Victorian novels, the text is sure-footed and intriguing.

And then there's the other material. The book seems hell-bent on cramming in references to contemporary novels, television, whatever. Mostly, there is a kind of Victorianist backhanded compliment: Victorian novels get sustained treatment, while everything else for the most part gets a paragraph or two. Without sustained discussion, hardly-more-than-offhand references to things like Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse" make this this the are book published in 2013 that seems, as of early March 2014, kind of outdated. Without more work on this television series--and on other books--I found myself sort of lost whenever they came up. Also, although the book often makes reference to John Stuart Mill and other contemporary political philosophers, it occasionally fails to engage with these at any length, either. There's even a point where a character from DIckens' novel "Hard Times" is said, "really" to in fact be Mill himself; this seems a limitation both of the character and of Mill (189).

Finally, the book suffers from that "mission creep" that a lot of academic novel studies present. In an argument that is never really returned to in depth, the first chapter claims that the book's subject "is not only that without curiosity there would never be any such thing as the realist novel, but that it was the novel that brought the modern feminist subject into being" (2). After reading, I am resolutely convinced of the first point, but still find the second point problematic. By what mechanism could we imagine this process happening? Why does the book take on such a burden of proof? However much this book thereby speaks to the mainstream of Victorian Studies, I can't imagine that such moments would prevent people working in other disciplines from taking it seriously.

[Mills College Library]

823.80935 S374 2013