Deseo y ficción doméstica

by Nancy Armstrong

Si una de las conquistas principales del feminismo de los años 70 fue el reconocimiento de que "lo privado es público", el libro de Nancy Armstrong convierte lo que era un eslogan político en un presupuesto epistemológico y un punto de partida analítico: su trabajo pretende demostrar que la historia del desarrollo de la novela (de los siglos XVIII y XIX) no puede entenderse si se prescinde de la historia de la sexualidad y de la producción de esa nueva tipología de mujer, que encarnó una idea de intimidad funcional para una clase media en posición de dominio y poder.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Feminism, Theory, Criticism, History, 20th Century

Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Nancy Armstrong is a scholar, critic and professor of English at Duke University.

Reviews

[Ginny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of chewing needed for me to digest this very erudite but challenging analysis. I agree that women's writing of domestic fiction provides much important data for human history. Perhaps only by critically examining novels written during the extensive gendering of the last 250 years can we understand the political impact of such novels on both writers and readers.

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Desire and Domestic Fiction assigns a lot of historical agency to 19th century domestic fiction, and especially to the women who wrote such novels, and the female subjects at the center of those novels. Armstrong argues that these novels produced the modern subject and produced that subject as specifically female. As she asserts, “writing for and about the female introduced a whole new vocabulary for social relations” (4). The novels (starting with Richardson’s Pamela), which drew first on conduct manuals, replaced “political” antagonisms with the sexual contract. By removing sexual negotiations from the realm of the political, a new modern form of political power was produced. Specifically, psychological issues of character replaced other categories to explain the relationship between men and women. She explains that the major underlying argument here is that “modern culture depends on a form of power that works through language – and particularly the printed word – to constituted subjectivity.” Her examination of the politics of the way the texts instruct the reader to read adeptly demonstrate her point here. Certainly the rise of the middle class is central here.
Armstrong balances a theoretical approach with close and interesting readings of well-known novels (Jane Eyre, Wurthing Heights, Emma, etc), and historical context. I appreciate the way the self and the subject are tied to material as well as ideological histories here.

[Oisín · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nancy Armstrong's excavation of (primarily) 19th-century literature is formidable, I am blown away by how perceptive this book is. By examining the rich textual detail that lies beneath the surface of public discourse, as represented in these books, Armstrong is able to form a convincing argument that in both how women write and are written into culture, one can see the formation of middle-class cultural hegemony. Aside from the occasional bouts of "Po-Mo"-brain (for example, arguing that any numerical detail is an inherently male category), Armstrong seldom strays from the parameters of her study, which is fortunate as the book is hard enough to follow as it is. It gave me a headache at several points, but in a good way. If you like Foucault, strong textual analysis, or women; I would recommend.

[Rochelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Armstrong argues that sexual perversion in domestic spaces in Victorian novels reflects the political upheaval and social unrest of the period. The transformation of the political/social into the sexual is a universalizing gesture. She uses Foucault to argue for the socially constructed nature of desire.

[Differengenera · Rating 4 out of 5]

the 19th century novel in england and the bourgeois subjectivity it inculcates provides a means of dissolving class distinctions, the consensual marriage contract seeking to negate the coercive social contract under the rule of capital

[Emma Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Foundational. Very much a product of its time. Reading it validated the fact that I am becoming conversant in the field; I had some familiarity with all of the primary texts Armstrong close read (or even just mentioned)! Especially useful to me were the early bits about Richardson but most personally enjoyable was (unironically) the chapter on Emma. Looking forward to diving into the responses this generated amongst scholars, because I'm sure lots of further study was churned up by the questions Armstrong asks and the thesis she puts forward (which even she admits is very much in need of elaboration/refinement). I appreciated this exploratory kind of approach and the call for action she writes into her conclusion, where she reminds us that the work her book has started to do is far from conclusive. The way Armstrong traces the development of politics and gender in connection to one another in the context of the novel over the course of the 19th century was especially helpful to me as someone studying 18th century texts who needs to work at thinking more about the afterlives of those texts and the ideas developed within them.

[Maddie Lacy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely an important intervention in studies of the novel. This book is dense and Armstrong’s argument is complicated, but her main point (I think) is that historically specific constructions of women and female sexuality were narrativized as forces of control in the idealized, middle-class home, which led to the rise of the middle-class novel and articulated class conflict in England at the beginning of the 19th century. In her words, “the modern individual was first and foremost a woman.” That’s for sure a bold claim, but it’s interesting to see how many different ways she approaches it.

[Charlotte Fiehn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting Read

An interesting meditation in the development of the novel, incorporating Foucault’s ideas about sexuality and control, and examining how the novel, up until the twentieth century, sometimes promote, sometimes challenged the subjugation and confinement of women.

[Jennevieve Culver · Rating 2 out of 5]

kinda boring tbh Nancy I expected better

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Armstrong argues that the middle class domestic WOMAN is the INDIVIDUAL par excellence of the 18c and 19c--the domestic woman is the individual that Watt argues that the novel creates. She looks at conduct books and domestic fiction for how these discourses form GENDER and SEXUAL IDENTITY as the identity categories that "matter most"--building off of Foucault and his argument that the 18c and 19c see a sexual revolution in cultural monitoring/policing of sexual behavior. Although Armstrong's argument risks blaming women for building her own domestic prison and thus enabling her own subordination, I think Armstrong does a lot to show how domesticity consolidates *a lot* of power for femininity and women in Victorian discourses (many of which we still live today). I can't totally get on board with the ways that Armstrong views the novel both as agent of historical change and evidence of historical change. Something seems tautological there--but that's a critique of many histories of the novel. Overall, bravo.

[Countess of Frogmere · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the back cover:
"In this strinkingly original treatment of the rise of the novel, Nancy Armstrong argues that the novels and nonfiction written by and for women in 18th- and 19th-century England paved the way for the rise of the modern English middle class. Examining the works of such novelists as Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and the Brontes, she reveals the ways in which these authors rewrote the domestic practices and sexual relations of the past to produce the historical conditions making modern institutional power seem not only natural but also humane, and therefore desireable as well as necessary."

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great look at historical novels, particulary from the 18th and 19th centuries in England, and the implications of how they both reflected and created women's roles in the home and in society. It also addresses acceptable expressions and conceptions of desire. It's much more interesting than my blurb right here sounds.

[Victoria]

This book confused and frustrated me enormously. What, exactly, is "domestic fiction"? It is never clearly defined, but the term is used from the opening sentence as though it were already understood by the reader. Armstrong's writing took a great deal of effort to read and follow, and her arguments often didn't make sense to me.

[Sue Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ian Watt argued that it was the rise of the middle class with its emphasis on individualism that made the novel possible. Armstrong makes the case that the novel provided an impetus for the rise of the middle class.

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great text for examining gender roles, identity and politics in Victorian England.