In some of these discussions, gender roles still arise, but even they can get delightfully complex with gender indiscriminate juxtapositions. If one examines these apparently ill-fitting texts closely, one sees dramatic similarities and differences that can give rise to surprising and provocative classroom discussions of fiction, history, and of power. The progression is imperfect because we don't see nineteenth-century fiction moving seamlessly from one category to the next furthermore, many texts that we don't see fitting into any of these categories at all are listed on the syllabus. Here Shannon Wooden proposes a syllabus that selects texts according to their interest in mystery, suspense, crime, or detection, and organizes them more or less chronologically from the Gothic to detection to sensation to horror. The story is ripe for feminist analysis and class discussion of gender issues, however the number of texts to which "Good Lady Ducayne" can be tied, and the number of potential analytical conversations which can then result, is impressive when one disregards gender as a theme. Bella Rolleston leaves the text as ignorant as she began it, not even knowing the source of her own illness or how close she came to dying. Easily, one can imagine "Good Lady Ducayne" as contributing to a conversation about Victorian class and gender struggles. She is young however, and healthy, in the bloom of youth, and she is soon situated with a very wealthy, impossibly old woman, the titular Ducayne, who takes her to Italy as a companion. She is as unlikely a heroine as she is an employable woman: dull, unskilled, unimaginative. "Good Lady Ducayne" is a darkly comic tale about Bella Rolleston, a poor girl seeking work to support herself and her mother. At the same time, her work in sensation fiction marks the development of a subgenre, employs themes that have fascinated readers and writers for centuries, and reveals terrific anxieties in the cultural imagination then and now. As critics have noted, her work and her life did indeed give insight into women's lives in the nineteenth century, so, with the advent of academic feminism, many of her works have re-appeared in print and have received critical attention by feminist scholars. Her work, it may be argued, betrays occasional aesthetic imperfections however, she produced a tremendous amount of published work, and it was enthusiastically received by female and middle-brow readers. Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels and stories exemplify some of the main issues surrounding women's texts and their place in literature: aesthetic value, intellectual challenge, universality, and contemporary popularity.
0 kommentar(er)
