The Gender of Modernity

by Rita Felski

In an innovative and invigorating exploration of the complex relations between women and the modern, Rita Felski challenges conventional male-centered theories of modernity. She also calls into question those feminist perspectives that have either demonized the modern as inherently patriarchal, or else assumed a simple opposition between men’s and women’s experiences of the modern world.Combining cultural history with cultural theory, and focusing on the fin de siècle, Felski examines the gendered meanings of such notions as nostalgia, consumption, feminine writing, the popular sublime, evolution, revolution, and perversion. Her approach is comparative and interdisciplinary, covering a wide variety of texts from the English, French, and German sociological theory, realist and naturalist novels, decadent literature, political essays and speeches, sexological discourse, and sentimental popular fiction. Male and female writers from Simmel, Zola, Sacher-Masoch, and Rachilde to Marie Corelli, Wilde, and Olive Schreiner come under Felski’s scrutiny as she exposes the varied and often contradictory connections between femininity and modernity.Seen through the lens of Felski’s discerning eye, the last fin de siècle provides illuminating parallels with our own. And Felski’s keen analysis of the matrix of modernism offers needed insight into the sense of cultural crisis brought on by postmodernism.

Genres: Feminism, Gender, Theory, Nonfiction, Gender Studies, History, Criticism

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 21, 1995

About the author

Rita Felski is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and editor of New Literary History. Felski is a prominent scholar in the fields of aesthetics and literary theory, feminist theory, modernity and postmodernity, and cultural studies.

Felski received an honors degree in French and German literature from Cambridge University and her PhD from the Department of German at Monash University in Australia. Before coming to the University of Virginia in 1994, she taught in the Program for English and Comparative Literature at Murdoch University in Perth. She served as Chair of the Comparative Literature Program at Virginia from 2004 to 2008.

From 2003-2007 Felski served as U.S. editor of Feminist Theory. She has also served on the editorial boards of Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Criticism, and Echo: A Music-Centered Journal. Her work has been translated into Korean, Russian, Polish, Swedish, Hungarian, Italian, Croatian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Turkish.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Jes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an amazingly clear and nuanced book. Highly recommended for anyone working on late 19th century lit to present, or anyone who has ever frantically Googled "what is modernity." Felski is my new academic crush.

[Kristin Canfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am always impressed by books that claim to make a large scale intervention and follow through on that promise. So much good stuff here I'll definitely return to it often. Also, new record for how many times "always already" occurs in a monograph?

[Qian Xie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book examines the gendered dimensions of modernity through an analysis of both fictional and non-fictional texts produced between 1880 and 1914, encompassing works from high culture as well as popular literature. The first half of the book (Chapters 2–4) is primarily devoted to close readings of gendered representations of modernity as they repeatedly appear in fin-de-siècle male-authored texts. The second half (Chapters 5–7) shifts its focus to women writers’ own representations of the relationship between modernity and femininity, which is articulated not only at the level of thematic content, but also through narrative style and literary technique.

At the outset, Felski surveys two dominant gender paradigms in the conceptualization of modernity. The first is the male paradigm, represented by thinkers such as Marshall Berman, which posits modernity as inherently masculine. Within this framework, women are associated with tradition, conservatism, and inertia, becoming figures that the modern subject—energetic, emancipated, and self-fashioning—must transcend. The second is the female paradigm, exemplified by Gail Finney, which conceptualizes modernity as fundamentally feminine. From this perspective, women are closely aligned with modernity, and the gender politics of modernity are crystallized in two emblematic figures: the feminist and the hysteric.

Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, attempt to reconcile the exclusivity of these two paradigms by arguing that the masculine dimension of modernity (identified with rationalization) and its feminine counterpart (associated with pleasure) are merely two sides of the a single coin. However, Felski identifies several critical limitations in their analysis. These include a neglect of social agents’ interpretive agency, an insufficient attention to the polysemous nature of cultural texts, and an unstable positioning of gender that ultimately continues to privilege masculinity as the foundation of social life. Felski suggests that these limitations stem from a broader intellectual tendency to seek a single, underlying logic to explain Western historical development.

While such analyses successfully illuminate the male-dominated nature of modern social development, they arrive at conclusions that attribute agency almost exclusively to men, casting women as powerless and marginal. In doing so, they exclude women’s distinctive roles and active contributions within historical processes. Against this backdrop, Felski defines the aim of her own study as uncovering the complex and often contradictory relationships between modernity and femininity through an examination of diverse representations from late nineteenth-century English, French, and German contexts, rather than constructing a totalizing feminist myth of modernity.

Reading this book is by no means an easy task. I read the first half of the book with considerable care, while engaging with the latter chapters in a more cursory manner. Many of Felski’s arguments are nevertheless highly stimulating. My initial interest in the book was sparked by Chapter Seven, which I believed to focus on female masochism. It is the psychological configuration that resonates strongly with many works of women’s literature I have read over the past two years. Upon finishing the book, however, I discovered that this expectation was based on an error in the Chinese table of contents. Felski’s discussion centers on female sadism rather than masochism, and does not, in fact, engage with masochism as a form of “perversity.” Despite this initial misreading, this book remains a valuable and rigorous intervention into feminist modernity studies, precisely because it resists reductive binaries and foregrounds the multiplicity of gendered experiences within modern culture.

[fei]

Read the introduction, the chapter on consumerism ("Imagined Pleasures: The Erotics and Aesthetics of Consumption") and the part of "Love, God, and the Orient: Reading the Popular Sublime" which focused on the Orient in the modern European imagination.

[Ke]

第一本读完了但是不愿意打分的书籍。第一遍通读感觉掌握了大约30、40%的内容。会把作者具体介绍的书籍读完，再来重新啃这本书。
内容联系到了之前读到的hysteria，并介绍了当时的时代背景，作家们都愿意把自己归类为歇斯底里派。还提及了女性角色通过勾引男性，掌握对自己身体的控制权，联想到东京电力的女职员在工作之余卖春。

[Angela Tan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good example of feminist criticism

[Chaniya Yang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiring!!! So many points to scrutinise and extend!