working papers
Silence as (Anti-)Patriarchal Technique
This paper reads Miriam Toews’s 2018 novel, Women Talking, alongside Anna Burns’s 2018 novel, Milkman, to consider the roles of speech, silence, and isolation in facilitating patriarchal social structures that blame women for their own assaults, question their testimony, and justify men’s violence directed at women. Testing the old truism that no (wo)man is an island, Toews’ novel depicts a group of Mennonite women living in rural Bolivia who discover that male members of their group have drugged and sexually assaulted them over a period of two years. Burns’s novel portrays the travails of a young Northern Irish woman stalked by a paramilitary, rendering her an outcast from her larger community during the Troubles. Though the two novels grapple with distinct forms of isolation – one geographical and the other emotional – they share an interest in the ways silence and strategic speech are adopted as weapons of the weak in response to the dystopian scenarios in which women find themselves. Both texts struggle with how to counter the effects of isolation that render women speechless and without recourse in the face of considerable violence.
Wollstonecraft’s Class Politics
One of the most notable shifts in Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings is her attitude toward women of the lower classes. As is well known, the admonitions contained in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman are addressed toward women of the emerging middle class, whom Wollstonecraft positions as the moral superiors of both poor women and the elite. Yet by the time she authors Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman a few short years later, the novel’s most interesting character is just such a poor woman, Jemima, who challenges the novel’s ostensible protagonist for her claim on that role. This paper traces a cluster of concerns - domesticity, excess, and exclusion - that render Jemima sympathetic in Wollstonecraft’s eyes. It argues that by the time she writes Maria, Wollstonecraft comes to recognize an informal market in women’s labor, one that possesses liberatory potential but more often than not serves to isolate and abuse women, particularly those without the legal protection of a father or husband. The paper contributes to a nascent literature on Wollstonecraft’s political economy and develops arguments made in Gallagher (2022).