Refashioning the Mind: The Revolutionary Rhetoric of Voltairine de Cleyre
2003; Society for the Study of American Women Writers; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/leg.2003.0047
ISSN1534-0643
Autores Tópico(s)Political Theory and Influence
ResumoVoltairine de Cleyre belongs to a group of writers in the United States—late nineteenth-century freethinkers, anarchists, and sex-radicals—who continue to be excluded not only from the canon in general but even from the most progressive textbook anthologies. This exclusion renders their achievements invisible; it also obscures the broader social, cultural, and political context of many canonical authors, including such figures as Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. De Cleyre has been the subject of excellent historical work, beginning with Paul Avrich's biography and followed by Margaret S. Marsh's chapter in Anarchist Women, but with the exception of Catherine Helen Palczewski's important considerations of de Cleyre's rhetoric and her views of sexuality and Wendy McElroy's positioning of her work in the context of nineteenth-century anarchist feminism, the project of exploring de Cleyre's place in American literary history has only just begun. In this light, the present essay is a plea for more serious consideration of Voltairine de Cleyre's [End Page 153] turn-of-the-century anarchist feminist writings, both fiction and non-fiction. It argues that de Cleyre, in her double focus on social and psychological transformation—on getting rid of what she called "institutions in the mind"—produced a rhetoric aimed at addressing what Angela Davis has called "the intensely social character" of the interior life (200).
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