Review: Helene Moglen. The Trauma of Gender. A Feminist Theory of the English Novel.

Abstract

Helene Moglen intends to challenge the traditional view, most famously expressed by Ian Watt in "The Rise of the Nopvel" from 1959, that the English novel as a genre developed in the eighteenth century in response to the "rise" of capitalism and the ascent of the middle class. As a starting point for her study, she takes Nancy Armstrong, who argues in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press 1987) that the economical and political concerns central to the eighteenth century novel were often masked as problems of gender relations. Moglen claims that gender relations in the novel were not, in fact, a mask for other concerns but themselves the central problem which caused the development of the novel as a means of articulating and negotiating it. Her "feminist theory of the novel" is based on the assumption that the rigid definition of "masculinity" and "femininity" as complementary and mutually exclusive categories, and of gender as a natural and immutable part of every person's identity, which gradually became the dominant view from about 1650 onwards as a result of economical development, philosophical discourse, and anatomical research, caused "the trauma of gender." Individuals, Moglen argues, originally in possession of all possible traits, felt the need to conform to the prescribed gender roles and to suppress all those aspects of their personality that did not fit in. This resulted in strain, fear, and a feeling of loss. Moglen's theory of the novel is feminist in the sense that she intends to contribute to the uncovering and understanding of the psychic costs of this sex-gender system and its influence on the Western world until today, thus aiming at social and psychological change.