Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists

by Donald E. Hall

The 1840s, 50s, and 60s: three decades during which the British feminist movement saw some of its most intense activity of the nineteenth-century, and readers find some of the most monstrous, troubling representations of women by male writers in all of literary history. In Fixing Patriarchy, Donald E. Hall suggests that feminism at mid-century posed intertwined social, economic, political and psychological threats to patriarchy. Hall explores the metamorphic nature of Victorian definitions of masculinity and femininity through an analysis of male authors such as Dickens, Tennyson, Kingsley, Thackeray, Hughes, Collins, and Trollope in dialogue with Victorian feminists and other women writers.Synthesizing historical research with pertinent queer, feminist, post-structuralist, and materialist theories, Hall locates both startling admissions of moral fallibility and violent strategies of retrenchment and containment of this perceived threat to the male social body. Fixing Patriarchytraces parallels among Victorian discourses of religion, science, economics, and aesthetics, as it explores a cultural dynamic of un-fixedness and heightened desires for fixity.

416 pages, Paperback

First published September 25, 1996

Reviews

[Lorraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is interesting. Hall looks at a variety of novels by male authors (and follows Dickens over the course of a couple decades) that feature female characters; he charts the way that male anxieties about the changing role and rights of women show up in these novels in ways that both "fix" (repair) and "fix" (keep in place) the patriarchy. Hall is also interested in the way in which male anxiety about women leads to homophobia.

I haven't read some of the texts he discusses, but his argument is cogent even where I'm not familiar with the primary text. I enjoyed the discussion of Man and Wife in particular; Hall thinks the book is one of Collins's worst (awwww, I like it) but sees it as interesting commentary on Kingsley's muscular Christianity.

Worth a read.

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a look at how fiction writers sought to understand and undermine English patriarchal heritage and power.