“Unbroken Health and a Spirit Almost Criminally Elastic”: Women’s Work and Women’s Bodies in the Autobiographies of Harriet Martineau and Margaret Oliphant
2020; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09699082.2020.1775785
ISSN1747-5848
Autores Tópico(s)Modernist Literature and Criticism
ResumoThis article examines how the autobiographies of Harriet Martineau and Margaret Oliphant represent the work of writing in relation to the domestic labour and familial duties that are gendered as “women’s work”. It argues that these texts register tension between two kinds of work that are in some sense understood as discontinuous and incompatible and that this tension is expressed through the writers’ depictions of their bodies. Harriet Martineau uses the representation of her sensory disabilities and poor health to justify turning away from women’s work towards intellectual labour, but she also relies on depictions of bodily weakness to reaffirm her threatened femininity at key moments in the text. For Margaret Oliphant, not physical weakness but strength becomes the vehicle for expressing her conflict about managing her double identity as woman and writer. In Oliphant’s Autobiography, her exceptional capacity for work becomes a source of guilt rather than pride, guilt that I argue stems from fear that her work as a writer has marred her work as a mother.
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