Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity - Hardcover

Newman, Beth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0821415484 ISBN 13: 9780821415481

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Subjects on Display Explores A Recurrent Figure at the heart of many nineteenth-century English novels; the retiring, self-effacing woman who is conspicuous by her inconspicuousness. Beth Newman draws upon both psychoanalytic theory and recent work in social history as she argues that this paradoxical figure, who often triumpha over more dazzling, eye-catching rivals, is a response to the forces that made personal display a vexed issue for Victorian women. Chief among these is the changing socioeconomic landacape in which the ideal of the modest woman outlived its usefulness as a class signifier even as it continued to exert moral authority. The problem cannot be grasped in its full complexity, Newman shows, without considering how the unstable social meanings of display interacted with psychical forces - specifically, the desire to be aeen by others. This desire is fundamental to both masculine and feminine subjectivity, but feminist theorists have been reluctant to address it. Nor has it been explored in contemporary scholarship on vision and visuality, which tends to identify subjectivity with the position of the observer rather than the observed. Through a consideration of fiction by Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Newman shifts the inquiry toward the observed in the experience of being seen. In the process, she reopens the question of the gaze and its relation to subjectivity. Subjects on Display will appeal to scholars and students in several disciplines as it returns psychoanalysis to a central position within literary and cultural studies.

About this title

Review:

"This book is highly original, making a very significant contribution to the fields of Victorian and feminist, as well as psychoanalytic and historicist literary studies."

About the Author:

Beth Newman is an associate professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where she was named a Ruth Sharp Altschuler Distinguished Teaching Professor. A founding member of the Dallas Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, she has published articles on nineteenth-century fiction as well as an edition of Jane Eyre for Bedford Books.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0821415484
• ISBN 13: 9780821415481
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224