Regulating Female Consumption in Burney`s Camilla

( Kyung Eun Lo ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2014 근대 영미소설 Vol.21 No.2

This paper argues that Camilla exemplifies Burney’s persistent investigation into how a female protagonist is forced to negotiate the complex and often coercive demands of a gentry society defined by rapidly expanding consumption practices. Camilla’s journey towards virtue requires her to enter the world of commerce in which she must learn to curb her fashionable consumption when confronted with the tragic consequences of her financial irresponsibility and debt. Although women can use consumption to conceptualize a notion of the self that accommodate their own desire and agency, Burney also draws attention to the pervasive ways in which patriarchal culture attempts to regulate female consumption through the male gaze. By dramatizing the destructive effect of female consumer appetites on private domestic life, Burney’s Camilla at first glance can be read as a cautionary tale that warns that female consumption needs to be managed properly. The novel, simultaneously, reveals Burney’s implicit critique of how women and their powerful consumer desires are rigorously disciplined by male surveillance in later eighteenth-century Britain.

Coquetry and Consumer Culture in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless

( Kyung Eun Lo ) 한국18세기영문학회 2012 18세기영문학 Vol.9 No.1

This essay interrogates the various ways in which Eliza Haywood`s novel The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) redefines coquetry to formulate a form of female agency in eighteenth-century Britain. By contextualizing coquetry within the economic order, particularly its engagement with emergent consumer culture, this essay demonstrates how Betsy`s coquetry allows her to play an active role as a paradigmatic consumer of goods who masterfully exploits the marketplace for her own pleasure and profit. The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, far from being a part of conservative conduct literature that focuses on a plot of a reformed coquette, highlights the ways women can appropriate coquetry to promote their interests and renegotiate their position within the visual order through fashionable consumption such as everyday acts of shopping or choosing fashions in an increasingly commercialized culture, in order to exercise power both within and beyond the constraints of their role as objects of display and exchange in a marketplace culture.

Challenging the "Scrutinous Gaze": Eliza Haywood`s Female Spectator

( Kyung Eun Lo ) 한국18세기영문학회 2014 18세기영문학 Vol.11 No.1

The primary aim of this paper is to take issue with the common approach that Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator is part of the conservative conduct literature that advocates the ideal of domestic women within the private sphere. This paper focuses on the complex ways in which her periodical challenges the visual authority of Mr. Spectator and profoundly revises the assumptions towards women and consumption found in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator papers. In doing so, I argue that Haywood’s periodical does not function as a passive conduit for patriarchal norms and domestic ideology but should be seen as a radical intervention in reformulating spectatorship in ways that empower women. By establishing her authority as a discerning female spectator who is able to challenge men’s “scrutinizing gaze,” Haywood not only becomes a powerful model for her readers but insists that women can become active seeing subjects who can exercise proper judgments and participate in both private and public realms.

The Female Masquerade in Eliza Haywood´s Fantomina and Daniel Defoe´s Roxana

( Kyung Eun Lo ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2013 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.21 No.1

This paper seeks to examine the fictional representations of masquerade in Eliza Haywood`s Fantomina and Daniel Defoe`s Roxana in an attempt to demonstrate how these texts reflect and inscribe the conflicting responses to the cultural institution of the masquerade in eighteenth-century England. While the anonymity of disguise allowed the very principles of normal sexual, social, and metaphysical hierarchies to be challenged, many viewed the license offered by masquerades with great concern and fear. By exploring how the theme of masquerade is linked to female representation and spectatorship in feminist film theories, this paper contends that Haywood presents the masquerade as positive and liberating for the female protagonist and ends with a vision of feminocracy. Defoe, on the other hand, problematizes the female masquerade and its association with female liberation and gender transgression. Paradoxically, his complicated portrayal of Roxana`s masquerade draws attention to the cultural economy of the patriarchal society where women are forced to assume the status object and symbol of masculine desire for security and autonomy. As such, Hayrwood and Defoe both dramatize how the theme of the female masquerade is inextricable from complex questions such as sexual desire, independence and freedom, and the female body bound to biological or familial ties in the patriarchal society.

The Female Traveler`s Gaze in Montagu`s Turkish Embassy Letters

( Kyung Eun Lo ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2013 근대 영미소설 Vol.20 No.2

Written during her journey to the Ottoman Empire between 1716 to 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu`s The Turkish Embassy Letters holds significance for being the first travel account by a European woman about the exclusively female spaces of Turkish women and their everyday culture. Whereas critics have largely focused on feminist and orientalist aspects of The Turkish Embassy Letters, this paper examines the specific ways Montagu deploys visual authority as a female traveler in her negotiation of these overlapping discourses of gender and orientalism in her travel letters. Montagu self-consciously constructs herself as a powerful viewing subject through her appropriation of the traveler`s gaze, depicting Turkish women`s beauty and freedom in ways that contest existing orientalist stereotypes by male travel writers. Montagu`s cross-cultural encounter, however, remains limited and temporary, as she ends up reproducing orientalist discourse and reaffirming her English identity against the other non-Europeans. The Turkish Embassy Letters illustrates how Montagu`s female traveler`s gaze is inseparable from the larger aims of orientalism, which privileges the Western seeing “I” in representing and knowing the East.

The Pleasures and Perils of Female Consumption in Daniel Defoe`s Roxana

( Kyung Eun Lo ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2012 근대 영미소설 Vol.19 No.3

By highlighting Roxana`s paradoxical construction as both a consumer and a commodity in the broader framework of material culture in the eighteenth century, this paper considers how Roxana exercises agency as the female consumer in the new economic order through her manipulation of her status as both a subject and an object of exchange. By underscoring the interconnections between economic and gender discourses, I argue that Roxana becomes an active, even transgressive, agent in the marketplace, one who uses the delights of commodities and consumption to fashion and empower herself, while she also carefully exploits her status of an object of exchange for her own ends. Just as she fashions new selves through her use of commodities, her masquerades recapitulate the uncertainty and fluidity of the eighteenth-century British market and its discourses, making it possible for her to manufacture and circulate different selves for her own profit. While the early part of Roxana celebrates the heroine`s ability to forge new selves through consumption, its later sequences dramatize Defoe`s reservations about the unruly power of the female consumer and its threat on English domestic virtues through Susan, who would ultimately limit Roxana to a private, domestic role. As such, Roxana dramatizes radical new possibilities for female agency within the developing consumer culture, yet it also attempts to contain and regulate these transgressive female desires within the prescribed ideal of domesticity.

Cultivation and Nation in Frances Brooke`s The History of Emily Montague

( Kyung Eun Lo ) 한국18세기영문학회 2015 18세기영문학 Vol.12 No.1

This essay is primarily concerned with exploring how Frances Brooke``s The History of Emily Montague (1769) deploys the trope of cultivation in relation to colonial and national discourses. The novel illustrates how English selfhood and nationhood are largely defined and maintained through various Others by setting up systematic contrasts between the landscape and its people in Canada and England in terms of cultivation. The novel, however, simultaneously suggests the failure of imperial ideals by revealing how the landscape or colonial Others resist such British efforts to cultivate them, to the extent the central characters abandon their colonizing project and retreat from Canada. The novel concludes by valorizing the ideals of English country gentlemen as true citizens and reaffirming the values of cultivation. Yet the failure of the colonial project in Canada at the end of the novel implies that such English national identity is tenuous at best, thus underscoring the tensions and contradictions at the heart of national and colonial project.

Urban Vision and Gender in Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England and Gaskell’s North and South

노경은 ( Kyung Eun Lo ) 대한영어영문학회 2014 영어영문학연구 Vol.40 No.2

Both Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South wrote specifically about Manchester in the 1840s in their treatment of industrial capitalism. Despite their common roles as observers and investigators of social problems in Manchester, critics have not yet fully examined the issue of urban spectatorship in relation to gender in both texts. By comparing how both Engels and Gaskell observed and expressed their experiences of Manchester in the 1840s, this paper seeks to explore how his or her urban vision is deeply influenced and complicated by his or her status in the conventional cultural binary of male as spectator and female as spectacle. This paper demonstrates that Engels’ urban spectatorship ends up reproducing its particular unequal power relationship between the observer and the observed so that the working-class remains as the Other in the eye of the onlooker. Gaskell’s urban vision, on the other hand, is inevitably shaped by a sense of anxiety and contradictions inherent in being the Other in the mid-Victorian era, yet it simultaneously illustrates how successfully a female writer is able to negotiate these contradictions in a complex manner to offer a powerful critique of social inequities. (Konkuk University)

The Female Gaze in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

노경은 ( Kyung Eun Lo ) 대한영어영문학회 2013 영어영문학연구 Vol.39 No.1

To possess the gaze has traditionally meant in Western culture to occupy a male subject position in relation to one’s objects of vision. While critics have often identified the omniscient narrator of George Eliot’s Middlemarch with the all-powerful male gaze, this paper aims to challenge and undermine the dominance of the male gaze in the novel by examining narrative points of view as well as the various masculine discourses of vision―such as artistic, scientific, and medical gazes―which subject women under the scopic dominance of the male. By applying the concept of the gaze to narrative stance as well as examining how women are represented through the male gaze, I claim that the male gaze associated with its omniscient narrative is not dominant or monolithic, but that it is possible to locate a version of the female gaze, as exemplified by Dorothea’s sympathetic gaze, that can be a powerful resistance and alternative to the masculine gaze and its scopic regime. By focusing on the interrelated issues of the gaze, gender, aesthetics, and narrative, this reading of Middlemarch clearly demonstrates the radical nature of the feminist project Eliot was engaged in her critique of oppressive masculine system of viewing and its power relations. (Konkuk University)

Transforming the Traditional: Margaret Fuller`s Treatment of the “Woman Question” in Woman in the Nineteenth Century

노경은 ( Kyung Eun Lo ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2014 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.22 No.1

This paper explores Margaret Fuller`s treatment of the ‘Woman Question’ through an analysis of her feminist manifesto, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), in conjunction with other writings such as Autobiographical Romance and her 1844 poetry. The period in which Fuller lived was largely characterized by two competing positions on the “Woman Question” - woman as separate, distinct nature as opposed to that as woman as a free human being on an equal level with man. I examine how Fuller incorporates and reshapes these two opposing arguments about the nature of women to revise and transform existing gender relations. Fuller wants women both to claim equal opportunities with men and at the same time to discover their special powers as women. First, I discuss how Fuller`s concept of androgynous soul asserts for fundamental equality of men and women, thereby dismantling rigid gender stereotypes. Second, I analyze how Fuller appropriates conventional notions of the feminine as essentially different from men to reconstruct a powerful female selfhood, as evident in her feminist mythmaking of various classical pagan goddesses. Overall, Iconclude that Fuller`s skillful appropriation of sexual discourses allows her to subvert and redefine patriarchal values and ideologies to some extent.