SER FEMINISTA NÃO É UMA ESCOLHA:

Este artigo reflete a discussão sobre o feminismo ao longo tempo. A luta das mulheres por participação, voz, equidade e respeito na sociedade existente há séculos, desde as “bruxas” perseguidas na idade média até as lutas travadas nas ruas para conquistar o direito ao voto. Concordamos com a filósofa francesa existencialista Simone de Beauvoir (1949), “ninguém nasce mulher, torna-se mulher”. Logo, condicionar o ser mulher ao simples fato de ter nascido do gênero feminino resume sua imagem a uma condição de sexo frágil ou segundo sexo, fadada a executar tarefas enfadonhas, reprodutivas e sem remuneração. Para Judith Butler (2010) o ser humano não tem a sua essência ou identidade definida ao nascer, pois primeiro existimos e a partir de nossa orientação sexual é que definimos a nossa essência. Considerando que o homem é um ser social e que se constrói a partir da socialização e das interações, como as mulheres poderiam se constituir como figuras ativas na sociedade, já que o seu papel se limitou por séculos, a ser desempenhado no seio da família e de forma invisível, delineando a falta de equidade e igualdade de participação na sociedade? Já na década de 20, um século atrás, a revolucionária russa Alexandra Kollontai (2011) abordava a importância de alternativas públicas, como restaurantes e lavanderias para que a mulher pudesse se libertar dos trabalhos domésticos, ao mesmo tempo que defendia a importância de se estabelecer uniões entre pessoas livres. Discutir o feminismo igualitário é dialogar com uma realidade insurgente e plural onde grande parte das mulheres encontram-se inseridas e atuando num cenário de desigualdade, violência, fome e desemprego ainda mais agravado pela pandemia ocasionada pelo Novo Corona vírus, que teve início no final de 2019 e ainda assola países no mundo inteiro. Enquanto base da construção teórica, serão tomados como referência ativistas e filósofos como Flora Tristan (1838), Mary Wollstonecraft (1971), Neuma Aguiar (1984), Mikhail M. Bakhtin (2014) Olimpe Gouges (2017), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2017) e Emma Watson (2017), bem como outros que versam sobre este tema e impulsionam um sentimento de sororidade na condução da transformação das estruturas sociais.

DEVOTIONAL DISCOURSE AND FEMALE AUTHORSHIP: FROM THE STEELE CIRCLE TO MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

The article brings into discussion the case of a few exceptional women who wrote, published, and became popular in the Age of Reason as poets, critics, and activists. They were considered as Nonconformist because they belonged to the Baptist or Unitarian Church and did not follow the mainstream Church of England views. On the other hand, the end of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of Romantic aesthetics and of a number of nature poets. The questions this article attempts to answer refer both to the influence of the Biblical discourse on a group of women’s literary and non-literary productions and to the way in which the emerging Romantic aesthetics also impacted their work. How did devotional poetry go along Romantic principles and feminist views? Anne Steele’s and Mary Steele’s poetry, Mary Scott’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist agenda will be highlighted in the analysis.

The Madness of Free Indirect Style

This chapter considers the emergence of moral therapy in early psychiatry in order to argue that the Romantic-era innovation of free indirect style shares an affinity with eighteenth-century psychiatric diagnosis and case records. While the origin of free indirect style is often ascribed to Jane Austen, the chapter finds emergent forms of free indirect style appearing in psychiatric notebooks by mad-doctors practicing moral management, as well as in the political literature of the 1790s and in Romantic-era realist prose fiction. Free indirect style has a monitory function that abetted the psychiatric practice of moral management in the late eighteenth century: as a strategy for mediating the voice of a speaker in a text, free indirect style allowed early psychiatrists, who believed madness was transmitted orally, to regulate their patients’ conditions by moderating their speech. Free indirect style continues to bear the traces of the madhouse in novels by Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen. The chapter thus uncovers pathological traces underlying the representational device that has been called the novel’s most distinctive formal feature. Free indirect style also thus inaugurates the association of the novel with the patient’s narrative, anticipating modern discussions of “psycho-narration” as a medico-literary formal device. Ultimately, free indirect style allows the writer to intimate forms of pathology that the reader is invited to, in effect, diagnose.

Romantic Autopsy

Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading charts how medicine influenced the literature of British Romanticism in its themes, motifs, and—most fundamentally—forms. Drawing on new medical specialties at the turn of the nineteenth century along with canonical poems and novels, this book shows that both fields develop analogies that saw literary works as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. Such analogies invited readers and doctors to produce a shared methodology of interpretation. The book’s most distinctive contribution is protocols of diagnosis: a set of practices for interpretation that could be used by doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand fiction and poetry. In Romanticism, such interpretive protocols crossed between the emergent medical fields of anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology, and the most innovative literary texts, including the lyrics of William Wordsworth and John Keats, the elegies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Alfred Tennyson, and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. Romantic poems and novels were read through techniques designed for the analysis of disease, while autopsy reports and case histories employed stylistic features associated with poetry and fiction. Such practices counter the assumption of a growing specialization in Romanticism, while suggesting that symptomatic reading (treating a text’s superficial signs as evidence of deeper meaning), a practice still debated today, originated from medicine. Romantic Autopsy provides an original account of the life and afterlife of Romantic-era medicine and literature, offering an important new history underlying modern-day approaches to literary analysis.

A razão como ordem social

O iluminismo reconhecido como período das luzes, emancipou a razão humana livre de qualquer submissão. Apesar da ideia universalizante, não era assim para as mulheres. Kant em muitos escritos deixa clara sua visão de que a mulher, relacionada ao “belo”, é desprovida de virtudes, manifestando suas ações a partir da emoção, e nunca guiadas pela razão. No mesmo período, Mary Wollstonecraft escreve Reivindicação dos Direitos da Mulher, em que argumenta sobre a posição da mulher na sociedade e de que modo sua exclusão do campo da razão afeta a vida social. Diante disso, o presente texto busca realizar um diálogo entre a teoria kantiana e as ideias de Wollstonecraft, para em um segundo momento, apresentar as novas perspectivas feministas sobre questões envolvendo a posição da mulher na sociedade e a igualdade de gênero.

“Georeferencing” and Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s narrative strategy (on the material of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”)

The article approaches the narrative strategy employed by a famous American horror-writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft in his only novel “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” (1927) and introduces new terms – “georeferencing” and “georeference.” By the latter we mean a toponymical allusion, i. e. an implicit reference to the precedential text incorporated in a toponym (e. g. the author mentions Transylvania to make a georeference to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”). Lovecraft employs georeferencing and other forms of literary allusions to medieval legends, as well as to famous gothic novels written by his predecessors Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gustav Meyrink, Bram Stoker, etc. to create a meaningful context for his own novel. His goal is to create a common hypertextual universe, which can and will be productively navigated by a prepared reader. This strategy makes it possible for the reader to uncover hidden logics behind the fragmentary discourse and even foresee the outcome of the central battle between the principal characters. Lovecraft’s sophisticated intention and expert plot-structuring allows us to view “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” as a daring Modernist writing of the period, as well as to reassess Lovecraft’s reputation and cultural impact on the US literature of his time.

The Ethics and Economics of Middle Class Romance

This article shows the philosophical kinship between Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft on the subject of love. Though the two major 18th century thinkers are not traditionally brought into conversation with each other, Wollstonecraft and Smith share deep moral concerns about the emerging commercial society. As the new middle class continues to grow along with commerce, vanity becomes an ever more common vice among its members. But a vain person is preoccupied with appearance, status, and flattery—things that get in the way of what Smith and Wollstonecraft regard as the deep human connection they variously describe as love, sympathy, and esteem. Commercial society encourages inequality, Smith argues, and Wollstonecraft points out that this inequality is particularly obvious in the relationships between men and women. Men are vain about their wealth, power and status; women about their appearance. Added to this is the fact that most middle class women are both uneducated and encouraged by the conduct literature of their day to be sentimental and irrational. The combined economic and moral considerations of Wollstonecraft and Smith show that there is very little room for love in commercial society as they conceived it.

Reenacting the Pamphlet War in an Age of Turmoil

Published in 1790, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France triggered a pamphlet war whose major players included Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and the artist James Gillray. The debate that ensued about the French Revolution, which Percy Shelley called “the master theme of the epoch in which we live,” was fundamentally a debate between past and present, between tradition and the needs of a living culture, and between the status quo and innovation. This essay describes an attempt by the author to reenact the Pamphlet War at the US Air Force Academy to help cadets negotiate these tensions at their institution and, in doing so, participate in the work of Romanticism. The essay also suggests ways Romanticists could harness the Pamphlet War to engage political and cultural debates in our own age of upheaval and turmoil. Finally, it offers the Pamphlet War as a vehicle for debating the state of the field and the work of the Romantic classroom itself.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley conceived of the central idea for Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus—most often referred to simply as Frankenstein—during the summer of 1816 while vacationing on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It is her first and most famous novel. Although the assertion is debatable, some scholars have argued that Frankenstein is the first work of modern science fiction. Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein in response to a “ghost story” writing contest between herself, Percy Shelley, Percy Shelley’s physician and friend John Polidori, and Lord Byron, who were trapped indoors reading German ghost stories as the result of inclement weather. Polidori’s contribution to this contest, “The Vampyre: A Tale” (1819), influenced the development of Gothic literature. According to Shelley, she drew inspiration from a nightmare she had, which she attributed to discussions she overheard between Percy and Byron regarding experiments with electricity and animation. Shelley began working on the novel when she returned home to England in September, and the book’s first edition was published anonymously in 1818. Shelley’s father William Godwin made minor revisions for a second edition in 1821; and Shelley herself made more substantial changes for the third edition in 1831. The story is told through an epistolary frame, and follows Victor Frankenstein, a university student of the “unhallowed arts” who assembles, animates, and abandons an unnamed human-like creature. The creature goes on to haunt his creator both literally and metaphorically. Over the past two hundred years, the story has been widely influential, and re-interpreted in various forms of culture and media. In literary studies, scholars have discussed which edition of the text is the “truest” to Mary Shelley’s intended vision. The novel has been analyzed for its messages about human pride and hubris, the pursuit of knowledge, the nature/nurture question, as put forth by Rousseau, ethical questions in medicine and science, and family, gender, and reproduction, among other topics.