Representing femininity

the long version

Corbett's study explores the relationship between women's experience and the social institutions and cultural forms in which that experience is publicly represented. Challenging the assumption that middle-class Victorian and Edwardian women were confined solely to domesticity, Corbett examines the rhetorical strategies of self-representation by women who participated in public life. She argues that those strategies enabled such women writers as Harriet Martineau, Mary Howitt, and Anne Thackeray Ritchie to create an autobiographical and cultural paradigm privileging private life over public life, effectively redrawing the boundaries between those ostensibly separate spheres. Considering works by autobiographers of the suffrage movement, Corbett shows how feminist activists used their texts to critique the dominant model of bourgeois individualism in both political and autobiographical terms. In addition to a wealth of autobiographical texts, Corbett utilizes "non-literary" texts to illustrate how actresses accommodated their self-representations to the requirements of the professionalizing Victorian theatre. By drawing upon a diverse range of sources, Corbett broadens the scope of material available for analysis, seeking to engage questions of gender, class, and subjectivity not only in a strictly literary context, but also in a wider cultural and historical field. In this way she opens to view a broad range of self-representations by women that have been unduly slighted in feminist historical, cultural, and literary analysis.