Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing

As the title suggests, ‘Bearing the Word’ looks with particular intensity at the intersections of women’s reproductive and literary roles. Through close readings of works by Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Homans explores the variety of ways in which nineteenth-century women writers attempted to reclaim their own experiences as paradigms for writing. In so doing, Homans responds to questions raised by contradictory assumptions in current feminist theory.Representation, Reproduction, and Women’s Place in Language. – Building Dorothy Wordsworth’s Poetics of the Image. – The Name of the Mother in Wuthering Heights. – Dreaming of Literalization in Jane Eyre. – Bearing Frankenstein’s Circumvention of the Maternal. – Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sisters’ Instruction. – The Author as Bearing the Word as Nineteenth-Century Ideology. – Figuring the Madonna Romola’s Incarnation. – Mothers and Daughters Gaskell’s Stories of the Mother’s Word and the Daughter’s Fate. – Mothers and Daughters Wives and Daughters, or “Two Mothers.” – Mothers and Daughters in Virginia Woolf’s Victorian Novel.Includes bibliographical notes and index.