Unknown Speaker 00:01 gang idolatry cautioned against Romans find symbolism suspect, celebrate the contingent and more go over the cosmic. They tend to favor with each letter talk and encounter over a pledge or a contract, a meeting over the advice of wedlock. They exalt with motivated dying intention of this duel of amateurs in the freedom of a relation which recognizes differences between the duelist one thought, who is not me and one she is not. They seem to prefer the bulky knowledge the visceral particularity of marriage over its metaphorical possibilities. And here's a snippet from Dan dines on our marriage. What symbol comes anywhere near suggesting? No, the notion of art won't fit it unless when it's embodied. For depression there is meaningful and take such joy in the slopes and crannies that every bony gesture is generous for all lacy with veins and nerves. These new songs from the bride tend to revel in less monumental meetings, less neurotically charged passions, less drama, there is more humor, more irony, more pleasure, more commitment to process and movement in these new epithelium in the entire history of women's poetry on marriage. Unknown Speaker 01:13 give time to listen to one more moment that I go through Patricia's Patricia stories is written what I take to be perhaps the most compelling of contemporary epic millennia independent is marriage speech. That's the last one you have a poem which I would like to read with you by way of conclusion. The poem is both of his own life, and I'm rewriting the role in Mozart's The Magic Flute by assigning to her not Aria, but speech. I mean, that does not have much of a voice in Mozart's opera to begin with. She also reaches her highest registers inspired by the thought of the suicidal tryst with her brain death at the heart of that too, until she is persuaded to desist by the boys who bring her to her real Bridegroom and reverse her fortunes throughout Mozart's opera as in the traditional ethnic bohemian, as in traditional indica Lamia, the bride is in the grip of forces which act upon her amoenus marriage speech, by contrast, avoids the high notes of ARIA, presenting an honest but agnostic of the blame as she calls it, in the level tones of committed human speech. This poem earns the right to read ascribe to really torches of the traditional harmony or at the close by thoroughly revising an actual convention of meaning in her own voice replaces the genres certainties with conditionals by contracting her own marriage otherwise with her new husband to be. The poem moves from romantic death marriage to a real life lasting one from the steely certainty of blade to the malleable golden wedding back from cynicism and despair to a praise of love conventional but many COVID no language controls the possibility known as invest. Dubai T sustain connection that questionable reality, unlikely but possible, like resurrection. The venture requires vigilance and change on both sides. I'm going to read just a little piece of this poem Gardo my husband did the literal sex against the male bias toward the Ravens spasm of heroic loss, said captains gathered at the last feast to applaud the old lion shed final roar and toss love on the fire, extended Holocaust suspiciously similar to male orgasm. You see, the carnal parallel I make, so I to for my husband's sake, will discipline my woman's love of endless possibility. The mind adds blind absorption and sensation the response now he momentous to any cynics predatory Kiss by which our love of fresh beginning generation follows bad directions and misprinted signs to that much using three way promiscuity. Remember to that love contains but is not an emotion is not romance. That color photograph of smiling couple on a short vacation was kisses are purchased pretty souvenirs and gabled shops with good news of the ocean. Love is in supreme form, concentration. Enough of this, raise the veil Beloved, now I've made it dark enough to kiss and teach those guests we rendered skeptical, love passionate as doubt as radical by these hands in a perfect light, receive a resonance of knowledge through flipping the palms, lucid embrace, read by this uncertain flame read by this uncertain flame, achieve description of a face. Pray that we withstand the shock of blessing assembled friends with lowered heads pray urgently that we may make good the crucial and aesthetic risk we take following brilliant torches to this bed. This poem does not only evoke and reinvest the new meaning the Chambord conventions and the traditional epic blending ideas of generation right of innocence and perfection, monogamy and lifelong commitment of Hymenaeus torches signifying publicity and social compact. I mean this marriage speech speech also names love as a kind of knowledge rather than simply a feeling as the lucid seeing face to face which feeds psyche to love erupts in him to love her as a full illumination of what happens in that uncertain space between persons as a humorous recognition of and commitment to change our inheritance of gendered responses in love. Finally as the crucial and ecstatic, specific and personal list we take now in following Highness torches to the marriage. Unknown Speaker 05:21 One more paragraph. The history of the epic Millennium as this recuperation of women's variants has been designed to demonstrate is incomplete without the record of challenges to its generic orders that women poets have left was his legacy. My research indicates that the overt prohibition against writing highly modified ceremonial poetry has been less causal in the exile of women poets from the Canon than an excessively rigorous definition of poetic genre. As the spectrum of responses indicates a Theory of Genre might profitably invite more telling an individual stories and less taxonomy of a generic form. Winning poets are to take their rightful places as makers of the canon, we must use inclusivity rather than a gender bias exclusivity as a criterion of value. We need to ask why female revision of genre has been viewed as a defacing of it a judgement which disqualifies women's and the millennia as contributions to the tradition. We also need to understand how the criterion of generic purity has gone hand in hand, with an idealization of woman as object of love and the poetry of marriage, as erotic and aesthetic purity, were equivalent and equally crucial to preserve. Equally important for genre theory is the refusal of the female African lady to make a pure generic statement. Although women's ethical Lamia share important themes, elements of critical stance in the south location, they do not set up I am relieved to say an alternate reified canon of ovarian replace a fabric strategies. The questions I embrace today remain provocative and open to further discussion is the experience of being a same sex as one's mother and the project of becoming another one self made a difference in women songs of love, has the persistence of the Demeter Persephone myth is an explanation of women's psychology tied women poets irrevocably to a natural poetics of loss rate rupture. Is woman's experience in the erotic differs substantially from man's that her love poetry will always be different, will always articulate and experience essentially her own. What would be the conditions the costs of change? We would do well to consider these questions at greater length because as Marianne Moore warns in her poem called marriage, everything to do with love as a mystery, it is more than a day's work to investigate the science. Unknown Speaker 07:43 Paper papers do I think, to a certain extent, speak to each other when you said when we started putting this forward and said, but that is another story where women sort of claim control over their own marriage class. I think some of that happens. Unknown Speaker 07:57 Well, a real difference between the weight codes that you're writing about and Jane Austen is that women writers in the 19th century almost never married, particularly the novelist grounding. This was the background scenario, but very, very few women writers in the 19th century, married marriage was a plot but not women involved. That Unknown Speaker 08:17 was the last room that was Unknown Speaker 08:20 the last home. I mean, this marriage. Oh, this is a great chance for me to make a plug. It's by Patricia stories. The new poet you're gonna read at Barnard women poet series next Thursday. Unknown Speaker 08:35 And there any questions from the floor? Patricia stories, SD o r AC. And she's reading there next Thursday night with Sharon Owens. Unknown Speaker 08:52 Jane Austen novel, I kind of like to hear a feminist interpretation, Emma's nourished Unknown Speaker 09:04 that was the part that I had to leave in the papers over to actually make somebody else tell the story. Well, I think I'll begin by telling you an anecdote with the dinner party that I went to in January, right before I was getting ready for second semester and teaching Emma and I had this dinner party, I met a fairly well known novelist and translator, who said, What are you doing? And I said, I'm teaching Latin century novels. And she said, Well, of course you're teaching in Austin with OTG Emma, I said, Yes. She said, Isn't Mr. Knightley the most perfect hero that you can imagine? And I thought, well, I better go for it. And I said, No. I don't really think so. So here's what I mean. Here's Margaret Unknown Speaker 09:47 drabble actually answers that in one of her novels. She said, poor Emma. She got shafted. Frank Churchill was so sexy. She said. Unknown Speaker 09:56 Yeah, okay, well, here's, here's actually I'm this unless he asked me to do it. for that, so let me let me I think I want to answer your question by talking about what happens to the panel flooded because I think that I think that the that the question of feminism and Austin or you know, to to yoke feminism and Austin together is very problematic. Because in ways Austin's very conservative, although she's so smart we all know she's also very radical. I mean, I do think she's the smartest of all women novelists by far, certainly in the 19th century. If it man's if in Mansfield Park the panel applied is subverted in all the ways that I made in Emmet, it's not really subverted, so much is displaced and where it's displaced is into subplots. I mean, how does Emma begin it begins Emma Woodhouse now you'll hear something from my paper, Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich. She's just like Henry Broderick. She's HAMP handsome, clever and rich. lived for most different 21 years a little too distressed. Begins she's never been vexed she's never been bothered and she's ever been well, I mean, I haven't with handsome clever in which is apparently as unlike Pamela is any fairly big and it seems like on the on that score. The Pamela plot has nothing to do. But the panel plot has a lot to do with him and Emma, the panel applies displays into two subplots. There's first of all, the story of Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill. And Jane Fairfax is very much like Pamela she's poor, she has to make her own way in the world. She has to be a governess until last minute, Frank and Mrs. Churchill dies, leaves him a lot of money and he gets to Mary Jane and liberate her from what she describes as being not unlike slavery. The other panel applaud and Emma is one that eminent events but the plot the plot that Emma gets to marry off Harriet to Mr. Elton. Now, Mr. Elton really isn't like Mr. B. I mean, he's not quite as nasty as to be or he's nasty in different ways. Let's just say. So what I mean, but that's a plot that elements of and Austin trashes for that and Emma learns to Trish herself from that she calls herself a president she calls herself and imagines. But that's also a plot that marries a relative that or tries to marry a relatively powerless young woman to a man with much more status in airport power. So there are two Pamela plots one of them is totally discredited, because it never really gets finished the marriage of Harry Smith and Mr. Elton never happens. In fact, Harry marries a member of the Yeomanry, Robert Martin, who's very wise but also patriarch really smart and keeps her in line. But I want to I want I want to say that I think that Austen what you're talking about, about feminist readings of Mr. Knightley and I, for me that they have to do all of that has to do with the way that Pamela Flocker works all over ama is completely uncontrolled. Now, first of all, I think the Pamela plot is is fueled, as I said, by the specter of rape. The real Pamela's real vulnerability is that Mr. B could randomly get away with it. I mean, you could call it seduction, but it could be raped and he could get away with it. I totally shocked my class. We had a discussion that went on forever went on for three weeks, I think, because I came to class one day this semester, and I said, the problem is rape. Unknown Speaker 13:32 It look for those of you who've read me, you will remember that at the end of the first third of the novel at the end of volume one and it goes to a party. The bowl, everybody in her family and at the end is snowing, and they all pile into carriages. And Emma's father and her sister and brother in law and all their children piling to one carriage, leaving no room forever, therefore violating the rules of propriety. She's got to go with Mr. Elton in his carriage. She's been trying to get Mr. Elton to married Harriet Smith. But of course Mr. Elton's interested in her you can't even use the word love. And Austin says that Mr. Elton makes violent love to me. Now what she means by makes violent love to is not unlike what you heard me read Henry Crawford due to Fannie that is taught to, but it seems to me that makes violent load is a euphemism that's really maybe not a euphemism, because what can happen to a young woman along with the young man and the carriage there alone is entirely improper. And also not at all I just thought that she was alone in this character, this young man. So it seems to me that, you know, on the one hand, the specter of the Kamala plot erupts in this scene of a rape of Emma that never happens. And it's interesting that that's the moment in the novel which me really begins to be a sympathetic character. And you know, in case you didn't get the point in line one, you can get the point in buying three, because Harry Smith goes for a walk, and she seems to be beset by gypsies and rescued by Frank Churchill. But what does it mean to Be beset by gypsies again. She's a young girl on a country road all by herself. They were bothering her. What does it mean to be bothered by fellows? Austin really gets away with not saying what she doesn't need to say. And she can't use the word rape given what women couldn't couldn't say in the 19th century. She can just raise the possibility without saying anything. So it seems like different things happen to the panel flogging and on the one hand, the Pamela plot does not happen in the marriage of Harriet industry and they don't get married. But something like it happens in the marriage of Jane Fairfax and Frank and Frank says about James, things not unlike what Mr. B says about Pamela. Even though she's really got all this older. She's very smart. She's very good. And she's really going to take care of me she's going to make me into a better man, because that flight about the woman moralizing the man. But then here's the real problem. There really is now now I can answer the question that you asked me and that's the question about the marriage of Mr. Knightley and Emma, because that's the question that bothers feminist readers abandoned, right. The question is, why does Emma have to marry Mr. Knightley is almost as bad as Colonel Brandon and Sense and Sensibility the man who wears a flannel. Okay, Watson makes it look like Emma doesn't really have to get married. Because she's handsome, clever and rich marriage is not economic proposition. It seems like marriage is a choice. And that enough, that, in fact, is a kind of ideological mystification of the real lives of most women who had to get married. If they could, marriage wasn't a choice. So it seems like Emma chooses to marry Mr. Knightley. And on the one hand that seems to divert the Pamela plot to revoke the Pamela fly. It's a choice. It's kind of anti romantic or it's endless choice. It's not it's not a matter of necessity. Unknown Speaker 17:01 But what what what happens in that marriage, if you remember the scene in the in the novel of where they go to Box Hill, and frankly nasty games and then insult Jane Fairfax's and his base, the argument has been made by millions of literary critics that what's wrong in the Box Hill Chapter is the kind of untrammeled egoism of Emma on the one hand and Frank on the other. And it seems to me that Wolf, Wolf them you see that it's not Christa Wolf is Virginia Woolf. That often makes Emma Mary Mr. Knightley, by way of saying that the only constraint on the kind of untrammeled egoism that Emma represents and Frank represents is whatever it is that Mr. Knightley represented in the novel, and that is, I would argue, again, a morally regenerated patriarchal order. Mr. Knightley is the good patriarch. He's the one with power, but he's not a snub. He's the one who's the proprietor of an estate that's a working farm. You can see that in all the descriptions have done well and be in the novel. But still, I mean, Austin can't let her heroines do what she does, which is not get not get married on the one hand and right on the other hand, and she doesn't want me she doesn't want to marry me to the sexy man. It's as if that marriage would be too dangerous, which is what one of my students said to me yesterday. So she married me to Mr. Knightley by way of suggesting that that's the only thing that can be done to kind of channel organize and constraint all this rather dangerous energy and energy that I think we can recognize is both artistic and sexual. But it's certainly a patriarchal marriage, because what is it that distinguishes Mr. Knightley? He proposes to him when he proposes to me, he says, I've lectured you and blamed you, and you've taken it as no other woman in England good. Unknown Speaker 18:55 Is it a reverse? Unknown Speaker 18:58 Now that she's been reformed, but it seems like it seems like a reverse, but what's the same? Is that he's the one with the power. And then she's transformed into a wife. She says, you know, oh, no, no, you know, I'm really gonna be a good wife. I've changed now. I mean, the sign in the novel that she's grown up, I mean, to talk about not only genre but sub genre, the sign and female buildings, romance of the 19th century that the woman grows up is that she gets married. The sign in male buildings Roman that the young man grows up, is that he gets married and then he gets a job. So I mean, there's really only half of that asymmetry. So I mean, as in Mansfield Park, and we're both displaces and therefore resists the Tamela plot and also, Reaper presented and then you get the same sort of thing. Unknown Speaker 19:53 I see your point. And that is a patriarchal situation. It's not a complete reversal. There I think there are elements, which tends to plague universal social power. She's one when she was wandering around, she has long arms. She does wonderful things. And Mr. Knightley, I mean, she does. And Mr. Knightley is virtuous and connotation. And he wanted me to generate. And when it does come to the marriage, he doesn't assume that she's going to marry him, in fact, you can see is great for that she loves her. And I can. And just as an aside, sort of what I would think is absolutely patriarchal. Unknown Speaker 20:42 I don't think it's absolutely I would agree that it's absolutely patriarchal. And I think the thing that makes Austin for me, the greatest English woman Woman, the greatest British woman, novelist of the 19th century, is that she suffers me in every time she makes me believe in every one of those marriages that ends every one of her novels, in face of all the evidence to the contrary, man, I think that everything that you're saying is what the novel says. But in fact, did you stand back and look, or, you know, this time I stood back and took a look, it seems like there really is nothing for there's nothing for me to do, but get married. And the only man that the binominal lets her marry is the only strong man in the novel in a way that really confirms the strength, power and authority of men. In this case, moral power to I mean, he gets not only his own power, but also families now as over against whatever transgressive energy it is that Emma herself represents. Unknown Speaker 21:45 She's conquered her own veto, but he's gonna be there to keep an eye out. Unknown Speaker 21:48 He's gonna keep straight. He's gonna keep her in line. And you can actually see that in the way that Austin describes the marriage of Harry Smith and Robert Martin belongs to the Yeoman. She She says it's lucky for Harry that she could marry somebody like Robert because he couldn't keep her in line. You know, otherwise, just go for it, you know, isn't she was courting seduction by gypsies rather than, you know, being in danger of being raped. But Unknown Speaker 22:21 it's not like Mr. Knightley is running around, but he wants to keep her in line. I mean, you know, the ideal moral status all the character is uniform. And he's not necessarily restricting, you know, her excluding behavior, but she ends up again. Unknown Speaker 22:38 Yeah, I think that's very true. And I think that that's really a hallmark of being a novel written by a woman. I mean, I do think that women writers tackle this in a very different way from the way male writers do. And and, you know, once again, for me, it's really interesting, because she's precisely so conservative and so radical both at the same time. And then all the same way. One Unknown Speaker 23:05 gas valid question, because I'm, my curiosity is piqued now, as you read this, that initial scene with with Mother, what happens during the course of patterns of childhood, what sort of relationship is negotiated with the mother, Mother them to do with writing? And what does it do for her writing? Unknown Speaker 23:20 Well, there are many places in the text, which she talks about herself, is Nellie, dealing with her mother, there are several levels of misunderstanding that have to do with her mother and not telling her what needs to be said. And so about what they're doing about what's going on about what's in the newspapers about why your father is drafted about why some people go away and never come back. And what you have the sense until the moment when her mother doesn't get doesn't get on the truck, that she could do nothing else. And then the rest of the book is really about once once will sort of explodes that and the reader is shocked to know the rest of the book is really about her making it through to the end and then the ending is really quite it's also a dream sort of narrative but it's much more positive. But you have the sense that that she did not well the only evidence is really in the text and in fact when she when when the manuscript is there a mother is sick the text can speak for itself that's a that's an aspiration that's it's unresolved when all you know is that she wrote it which is a great testimony, but it doesn't really either think. Positively. console when it comes to their income to get Have someone else. Unknown Speaker 25:01 I was wondering if the source of a mystery wouldn't be that the search for their mothers to search for the mother tongue. But it's really a search for the language. And it also could ask you how you relate your topic to the other? Unknown Speaker 25:21 Well, I think women have, number one been excluded from the autobiographical canon because they haven't written what, what are the traditionally called conventional or classic autobiographies? Unknown Speaker 25:34 Sounds to me, so Oh corral around this one. Where do you find your topic? It's what folds into genre, I think more than gender? Well, Unknown Speaker 25:48 I think women do write autobiographies differently than men. Although I will admit I'm not exactly sure where I mean, there are always exceptions. Simone de Beauvoir thought of wherever they think is more like man's. Unknown Speaker 26:01 I mean, she's concerned with memory, memories speak memory. And that means that consuming language? Unknown Speaker 26:08 Well, I think everyone's concerned with language. Yes, of Unknown Speaker 26:11 course. But she particularly Unknown Speaker 26:13 mean walk a walk for sure. Yeah. And I think, yeah, Unknown Speaker 26:17 I was just trying to relate it to the other concerns, which were more judge Ajanta gender? Well, Unknown Speaker 26:29 yeah, I don't think that I she happens to be a feminist writer and she's very political. II. So maybe this particular but in this particular I don't think gender is particularly an issue for black think the issue is, if I can put it in these terms, sort of fatherland and the language that fatherland represents, which is, you know, purity of a certain kind, death, I said, mutation amputation, destroying of the innocent, you know, etc. And then the mother tongue which is not pure blameless, but that is somehow in implicated not by choice seduced by the by those dreams of patrimony and patriarchy, fatherland. And it's more and I think that's where the complication lies. But when you read the whole book, what you're what you're really most affected by is all the levels of language and all the places in which things are hidden and buried and can't be can't be brought out and she goes through newspaper after newspaper trying to find out looking at that particular day to see what it said in you know, the Berlin whatever about a particular transport train? Well, of course, either it says nothing, or it says it in such a coded fashion they only can you what you were looking for, would you know what it says exactly what language well sure, it does it in every level and she knows an accent she's doing same thing because she's protecting something about herself to so that the get she's so aware of the strategies that autobiography, it necessarily involves that I think it hits gender and genre everywhere may not be as directed search, it's really about the self, you know, how do you put yourself on paper and where are you anyway? You're not there? No, where are you? Where are you? So whether she does it? As a woman, you know, is the big question, but I do think that women in autobiography well now see, I'm afraid I am afraid to make an appointment. But if you put someone like if you put Gertrude Stein and system on go, why so we both wrote autobiographies, but look how different your written what are those areas in which some kind of engagement or questioning is taking place? It has to do with the Sal De Beauvoir, you know, so fully internalized philosophical language that the eye is always going out there was, you know, Stein just fractures that to begin with. But in some sense, they're both certain kinds of explorations. And they're both I think defenses against another kind of language that they've had to both internalized and produce. But I might be stretching the you know, the thesis to 40. Questions, Unknown Speaker 29:27 maybe that's not distributed and ask why do you think that the 19th century English novelist, women denied their characters over and over again, any of the small freedoms they had? freedom not to narrate, freedom to write Unknown Speaker 29:44 in metaphors, well, this I mean, the you know, the most famous answer to that question is the answer The Dilbert Mubarak is a woman in the attic that is that that that is that that prohibition really is a reflection of what they hold them in wondrous anxiety. I think that I think that's a very good explanation that yeah, Unknown Speaker 30:08 like movie this morning have movie ended. And Unknown Speaker 30:12 Justin was named that you have to have certain things to get accomplished. Think it's the same thing. Unknown Speaker 30:23 I think that I think that those, those prohibitions really are always kind of mediated in lots of different ways. I find Google Gilberton before the answer compelling, although I'm sure it's not the only answer about why women don't understand what their characters doesn't seem to know. Certainly, I mean, certainly, Austin tends to punish the way female characters mostly insert his crotch Elliot, and she's Unknown Speaker 30:52 women. Tolstoy could be Unknown Speaker 30:55 worse. On the other Unknown Speaker 30:56 hand, she's ill George Eliot is even cruel to men. Because the middle in the middle of like mid woods, I mean, the smart women get trashed and the middle of like new woods, these two men has a chance to go out and ruin themselves. Absolutely. I mean, you know, I get, I guess, you know, I mean, you know, the, the broad answer, and I don't want to sound unduly glib, is that that I mean, that is the way that even writers who see themselves in some senses is challenging patriarchal norms are governed by these norms. So that I mean, then, you know, my group is in conflict. So the patriarchal woman's influential female Unknown Speaker 31:44 will always reflect on what you are saying something about available men under patriarchy, or you are saying something, something that I think could fall under the heading strong protests, Unknown Speaker 31:55 or to take the example of built buildings over to me before we started said, What about the left? We didn't collect. The heroine does not get married. But you know, Charlotte Bronte has it both ways, because it should have could have would as she could have gotten married, only the guy dies. So that's a kind of that's an ending that providentially saves her from a situation where she would really be buried by his extraordinary power of authority, where Lucy would be buried under the talented suit. I Unknown Speaker 32:28 read somewhere that Charlotte Emery just wanted to have Unknown Speaker 32:35 her that her father would have been in the that's why she changed. I don't know. I don't know. Unknown Speaker 32:46 No question. No. It's just an idea that maybe the reason that this champion was the Nautilus that way is because that way, it really happened. Reality. Generally, there were a lot more women who did get married when they were supposed to protest, you know? Yeah, although, Unknown Speaker 33:04 I mean, I think that's both. I think that's both true and not true, because many of these novels are really cases, instances of special pleading and special cases in particular Amma, which is about a woman who doesn't have to get married, or Pride and Prejudice, which makes it look like Elizabeth gets married because she wants to and not because she has to. So I mean, again, there's a kind of there's a constant push and pull between, you know, what, what, what was ordained by to use Austin's metaphor, again, by the norms of patriarchal and bourgeois ideology, and how it is that women undertook to challenge that. And, and really, I mean, rather than to challenge explicitly to subvert it and to subvert it in one way or another, and whatnot, you know, what I become interested in is how that subversion operates on the level of plot. I mean, to take another example in surely, by Charlotte Bronte, there's one Pamela marriage and one unlimited marriage. There's one marriage between the kind of vulnerable and sipping heroin and then there's the marriage of Shirley and Madison. Doesn't seem to be the kind of be powerful figure. But we should all remember that the 19th century surely was amazing. Unknown Speaker 34:22 Seems like marriage is the is the end, go that. That all of Austin's books just funnel, right. You want to prepare the woman or whatever Unknown Speaker 34:35 we have. Female that's female marriage in the convent. Yeah, I Unknown Speaker 34:39 actually think that but I think that they really are anti African Lamia. I mean you know it's been pointed out that in the if you look at the way that Austen's novels end in every in every one of the ending she goes like this. Okay, you know, solve this problem. She doesn't especially says novels by rattling and telling you what happens to all the characters later. Another lesson just dispatches the marriages in a big blur, which is discussed. Especially in a single paragraph, Unknown Speaker 35:13 Marianne is totally coerced by the other three members of this parallelogram to make a fourth, you know, it could happen to sentences, and she's clearly playing something or else she's deadly serious that she doesn't match. Unknown Speaker 35:28 I was just gonna say it's quite a problematic way rape is treated in a lot of 19th century novels or the way it's not true or not true. I remember last semester, one class tomorrow, where she's raped when she's unconscious. And then at the end, she marries the man who raped her and finds out she knows all along, really, that he was the one that raped her. And it's really supposed to be a sort of happy ending, that they are married and everyone accepts it. That's okay. To take. He's marrying her. So it's okay that he raped her. Unknown Speaker 35:56 That I think is a really interesting area for comparison and contrast of novels written by women to novels written by men. I mean, I tested the drug reveals is also a novel about rape. Well, and well, this is the classic novel about reading. But I think that I mean, I think that, first of all, man got to say thing, we got to talk about reading much more explicitly than women do, at least in England, because they weren't governed by quite the same codes of propriety, the government. But also I also think that I think in some sense, Richardson really believed in the Pamela flood, I don't mean, you know, just you have to take belief with a grain of salt here. I think that that clot, which rendered seduction harmless, was a plot that only a man could believe in. I mean, that's really what I'm trying to get at here that women don't believe that that seduction, which is code for rape is harmless in the same way that men do. And it's why Pamela and Tess of the d'Urbervilles in the Marquis of O are more alike than they are like Mansfield Park. We house, Ruth, Leigh, Elizabeth Gasol, etc, etc. Unknown Speaker 37:29 Managers just that angel sub whose work is gigantic. There are very many solutions and issues to protect positions. situation. So what are the she's another 19th century novelist and this one's power and powerlessness and victorious woman is Rachel. And so what is her? What are the solutions? Oh, well, you have the solutions? Well, it's fiction, of course. You have woman who doesn't compromise you're in a woman, somehow visitors through almost dead? Because she has so much mediated and betrayed and don't share. Jesus is a kind of sinking into. There's so much variety Unknown Speaker 38:39 that well, that's that's the deal. I think a good Unknown Speaker 38:45 theme is yeah, this is the whole suicide thing in 19 Unknown Speaker 38:49 century, they should have Unknown Speaker 38:51 never they unveiled a shroud. Unknown Speaker 38:55 More and more Brian Shrout. Today. Unknown Speaker 38:59 There are some questions that is there. I'd love when your paper and that's another story is there? Can you look at 19th century and early 20th century literature and find the correlation between where the next generation of authors pick up the story story like start after the marriage in certain eras in contemporary literature. Right. Is there kind of a pattern that attracted Unknown Speaker 39:31 a divorce? Right? Unknown Speaker 39:36 Well, certainly, certainly, life without marriage is more possible novels written after 1850 than before. And and in fact, you know what the argument runs that women writers structure their plots differently than marriage is ever or always the end. But curiously, marriage is not the end and Pamela either it's in the middle And then something that most readers forget. I mean, it seems like the most important episode in that novel is the marriage of Mr. B. But it's not a bit. I mean, it's only part of the story because the last third of the novel is about the society around Mr. V, because, you know, the members of the gentry approving this marriage, which otherwise look outrageous to them. And you know, Pamela conquers all of them, and also Mr. B's sister, who disapproves of the marriage. Because when sister B's sister disapprove the marriage, because she doesn't want her husband married beneath him, or her brother. For her that she doesn't like the way that that marriage weaken firms male power, me, she's trashed in the novels being a kind of premature feminist very quietly. Unknown Speaker 40:53 I just wanted to say, Brian, which was written by Marian Wallstrom, Wollstonecraft is creating 50 That marriage is, is introduced sort of, even pre beginning in the sense of never really the issue. Only towards the end, when she's involved with I don't sort of quasi involved with I forget his name, like marriage is never the issue is she focuses basically on the wrongs that occurred in the marriage and how he was treated. So there are novels that don't focus on marriage necessarily. I think Austin getting married. Yeah. Yeah, seduction? I think often so marriage is an economic necessity more than anything else. Which is why I mean, I don't know, I didn't know why, when there I saw was because they couldn't support themselves. I mean, there was very little news of support of us. You were either born into money, for whatever reason, or you have some talent, are you able to survive on your own, but it was never encouraged thing for women to subsist on their own. So they saw it as a way of gaining of surviving, eating and feeding children of helping relatives who needed money. Unknown Speaker 42:12 Your. Comments, just question to you Unknown Speaker 42:22 about if it's selenium. Now, if it does mean as I haven't included celebration marriage, again, say your votes do this overnight? It's a naive question. I appreciate everything you said. But we can't Unknown Speaker 42:41 move us don't celebrate marriage a lot, for the same reason that women character sort of resist the Marriage Plot and novels. And I think for good reason. I mean, for the most part, they associate marriage to the loss of something rather than the gaining of something. And that's why for male poets, first of all, Americans assumption on personal history, the ethical landings assumption on personal Republic pumps, public pronouncements, and usually the voters screening after someone's recognition. Politically speaking, or mail quotes tend to disembodied, the love. In other words, Plato, Freud, everybody is a Dante have always told us that the real purpose of what we really want to just transcend sort of human and bodily love and move in the direction of the immortal forms or some kind of meaningful work or whatever they had in mind. And I generally feel that when women poets do write down marriage, and they often don't write an epic form, specifically, because those kinds of rigidly codified forms, were not open to them, we're not really encouraged. And also, as I said, it's trying, it's trying to pick up a right handed object with your left hand, because it's not ordinarily written from the bride's perspective. Anyway, so she's displaced to begin with when she tries to use that. But when women poets do write about marriage, they almost without exception, right, or else they write about often mothers. And I tried to sort of suggest some of the reasons why that I think that charterers suggestion about bisexual positioning, the fact that there is some sense of passing from a female bond to a male body, from transferring love object from others, that they do experience it as a loss Unknown Speaker 44:33 is a loss of autonomy controls on one's own life and often is a violation. Unknown Speaker 44:42 I think you can see that a different way in your paper about because she talks about herself as Nelly and as you but never resign. I mean, I think that that's really part of the same thing, but obviously a very postmodern kind of splitting Unknown Speaker 45:01 He's sort of a depressing thought, you know, sort of leaves us kind of in a in a sad place, which is why I tried to end this paper with a new songs in which women poets actually do act as subjects and do negotiate their own contracts and do have a notion of love. It's vibrant and alive and share and stuff like that. But I think, really the history of women's fiction in the history of women's poetry on the issue of marriage has been apparently fairly depressing. And the other comments or thoughts? Thank you very much for coming.