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State University of New York Press - Kristen L. Renzi

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216 pages

English

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An Ethic of Innocence examines representations of women in American and British fin-de-siècle and modern literature who seem "not to know" things. These naïve fools, Pollyannaish dupes, obedient traditionalists, or regressive anti-feminists have been dismissed by critics as conservative, backward, and out of sync with, even threatening to, modern feminist goals. Grounded in the late nineteenth century's changing political and generic representations of women, this book provides a novel interpretative framework for reconsidering the epistemic claims of these women. Kristen L. Renzi analyzes characters from works by Henry James, Frank Norris, Ann Petry, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and others, to argue that these feminine figures who choose not to know actually represent and model crucial pragmatic strategies by which modern and contemporary subjects navigate, survive, and even oppose gender oppression.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Problem of Modern Female Innocence

Part I. Negotiated Living

1. A Pragmatist’s Dilemma: The Collusion between Myth and Reality in the Tale of the Hull House Devil Baby

2. Coming of Age via Critical Complaint: Reading Women’s Choices Not to Know in Realist Bildungsroman

3. A Failure of Sympathy or of Narrative? Naturalism’s Jaded Women and the Narrative Cycle of Domestic Violence

4. The Legacy of Naturalism, a Cycle of Leaving: Reading Agency in the Passive, Empty Woman

Part II. Pragmatic Fantasies

5. Are Women People? Discourses of (Non)Personhood in Suffrage Poetry and Protest

6. Making Women, Making Humans: Fantasies and Melancholic Mourning in Modern Sex Changes and Sex Losses

7. Allowing Innocence? Belief, Knowledge, and the Modern Community

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

Royaume-Uni

États-Unis

Great Britain

Stephen Ireland

United Kingdom

Ireland

Reino Unido

United States of America

USA

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	01 septembre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438475981
Langue	English

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An Ethic of Innocence
SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Pamela K. Gilbert, editor
An Ethic of Innocence
Pragmatism, Modernity, and Women’s Choice Not to Know
KRISTEN L. RENZI
Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1858–1924). Large Boston Public Garden Sketchbook: A woman in a veiled hat , 1895–1897. Robert Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Renzi, Kristen Lucia, author.
Title: An ethic of innocence : pragmatism, modernity, and women’s choice not to know / Kristen L. Renzi.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018045848 | ISBN 9781438475974 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438475981 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: American literature—19th century—History and criticism. | American literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Women in literature. | English literature—19th century—History and criticism. | English literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Knowledge, Theory of, in literature.
Classification: LCC PS217.W64 R46 2019 | DDC 810.9/3522—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045848
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Debbie, Cecilia, and Lucy, three primary role models in my life; and to Josephine Jane, who is already an excellent teacher
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Problem of Modern Female Innocence
P ART O NE N EGOTIATED L IVING
Chapter One A Pragmatist’s Dilemma: The Collusion between Myth and Reality in the Tale of the Hull House Devil Baby
Chapter Two Coming of Age via Critical Complaint: Reading Women’s Choices Not to Know in Realist Bildungsroman
Chapter Three A Failure of Sympathy or of Narrative? Naturalism’s Jaded Women and the Narrative Cycle of Domestic Violence
Chapter Four The Legacy of Naturalism, a Cycle of Leaving: Reading Agency in the Passive, Empty Woman
P ART T WO P RAGMATIC F ANTASIES
Chapter Five Are Women People? Discourses of (Non)Personhood in Suffrage Poetry and Protest
Chapter Six Making Women, Making Humans: Fantasies and Melancholic Mourning in Modern Sex Changes and Sex Losses
Chapter Seven Allowing Innocence? Belief, Knowledge, and the Modern Community
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
This book emerged from work I first pursued in my dissertation at Indiana University, under the direction of Jennifer Fleissner. Our conversations over the years about innocence, female agency, and fin-de-siècle literature pushed this project in directions I could not have taken it alone, for which I am grateful. I am also deeply indebted to Shane Vogel for his years of mentorship, both on this project and in my graduate and early career work in general—his support and careful critique have made me a better thinker and writer. I also benefitted immensely from the reading and commentary of other dissertation committee members—Ranu Samantrai, Judith Brown, and Ross Gay—and a handful of peers who helped me in many stages of the project, particularly Lee Anne Bache, Carrie Sickmann Han, Elizabeth Hoover, and Michael Lewis. In addition, I am grateful to Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences, its English Department, and the Wertheim family for providing me with fellowship funding to focus on this project in its early stages.
I am also grateful for the readership and advice of colleagues of mine at both Michigan State University and Xavier University who have helped me to develop this manuscript, in particular Zarena Aslami, Gabriel Gottlieb, Ellen McCallum, Jennifer McFarlane-Harris, and Natalie Phillips. Special appreciation and thanks also go to my faculty mentor at Xavier University, Norman Finkelstein, for his help and support in readying the book for submission, and to the members of the research support group for early-career female faculty at Xavier: Shannon Lafayette, Wendy Maxian, Mollie McIntosh, Niamh O’Leary, and Annie Ray. I am also grateful for a Faculty Development Leave granted to me by Xavier University in Spring 2017, which provided me with the concentrated time needed to finish this manuscript. In addition, I appreciate the support of my editor, Amanda Lanne-Camilli; series editor Pamela K. Gilbert; and the SUNY Press staff in bringing this manuscript to press. I would also like to express my appreciation for my two anonymous reviewers, whose careful commentary and useful critique on this manuscript have allowed me to revise it for the better.
I thank the journal SubStance for allowing me to reprint part of an article I published with them in 2013—“Safety in Objects: Discourses of Violence and Value—The Rokeby Venus and Rhythm 0 ” (41.1, no. 130: 120–45). I also thank the University Press of Florida for allowing me to reprint part of my chapter, “On Jane Addams’s Feminist Pragmatism,” published in 2018 in American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity , edited by Melanie Dawson and Meredith Goldsmith.
In addition to the extensive support of the academy that I have been lucky enough to receive, I also want to acknowledge the other realms of support that have been crucial to the development of the project’s core theoretical ideas and to bringing this book to fruition. In particular, my volunteer work at Bloomington, Indiana’s Middle Way House, a rape crisis and domestic violence center, during my years as a graduate student at Indiana University deeply influenced the conceptual framework of this project; special thanks to Toby Strout, Leila Wood, Tina Cornetta, Lauren Taylor, and the many other Middle Way House staff, clients, and volunteers, whose influence contours these pages.
The support of my close friends and family, who have been kind enough to listen to many iterations of these ideas and to continue to help me refine them, deserves more thanks that I can express: love and appreciation to Michael Lewis, Lee Anne Bache, Jonathan Lund, Carrie Sickmann Han, John Han, Natalie Phillips, Suparna Chatterjee, Amit Sen, Debbie and Tony Renzi, Steve and Una Renzi, Cecilia and Stan Tomaszewski, and Lucy Renzi. Finally, I would not have been able to complete this manuscript in its current form without the support, love, and intellectual engagement of my husband, Gabriel Gottlieb, who has buoyed both the philosophical discourse of the project and my spirits when the work has seemed overwhelming. As I sit on our couch, nestled between him and our two-week-old daughter, Josephine Jane, I am grateful for the comfort and security of home that they, and our four-legged companions, provide to me. It is my hope that the world Josephine will one day inhabit will offer more generous options for comfort and security to women than it does today: materially, emotionally, and, of course, epistemically.
Chapter 1 modifies and extends a chapter published previously in American Literary History and the Turn Toward Modernity (2018) edited by Melanie V. Dawson and Meredith L. Goldsmith, 144–71. It is reprinted with permission by the University Press of Florida.
Chapter 5 modifies and extends an article published previously entitled “Safety in Violence” that is reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Copyright © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System. This article was first published in SubStance 42.1 (2013), 120–45.
Introduction
The Problem of Modern Female Innocence
I find it very pleasant not to know. A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see—that’s my idea of happiness.
—Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (235)
Not-knowing—the who, what, when, where, why, and how of it—anchors this study. Which means, of course, that knowledge also grounds it. As with any binary, knowledge intimately connects and relates to its opposite of ignorance, and the study of one entails the study of the other. That scholars in multiple disciplines who are concerned with knowledge have not, as a matter of course, also developed comprehensive theories of not-knowing is unsurprising only if we acknowledge an epistemophilic bias that pervades traditional epistemology, much scholarly enterprise, and—arguably—modernity itself. As defined by philosopher Cynthia Townley in A Defense of Ignorance: Its Value for Knowers and Roles in Feminist and Social Epistemologies (2011), epistemophilia is an “excessive love for knowledge” that “tends to take all ignorance to be remediable, and best remedied, so the proper response to ignorance is to replace it with knowledge” (xii, xiii). To understand why this bias has been so pervasive, we must merely highlight our negative associations with tradition and ignorance, associations that are noncoincidentally also deeply linked to gendered, racialized