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Women and Knowledge in 19th century Britain (Grenoble)

Women and Knowledge in 19th century Britain (Grenoble)

Publié le par Marc Escola (Source : Virginie Thomas)

Le Lycée Champollion organise le mercredi 24 mai à 14h une après-midi d'étude transdisciplinaire publique en anglais autour de la question du savoir féminin au XIXe siècle en Grande-Bretagne. Nous aurons le plaisir de croiser trois approches complémentaires en civilisation, littérature et art grâce aux interventions suivantes:

 1) Civilisation: “Captives of ignorance”1? Women, education and knowledge in the Victorian period”, Véronique Molinari, Professeur de civilisation britannique, Laboratoire ILCEA4, Université Grenoble Alpes

In England, as in most European countries, access to knowledge was the first “feminist”2 demand. As it is, education was a central concern for those struggling against female oppression well before the formation of an organised women’s movement in the second half of the 19th century. As early as 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft discussed the views put forward by Rousseau in his treatise on education, Emile, and demanded a quality education for women. In the second half of the 19th century, when an organised British feminist movement emerged, activists such as Elizabeth Wolstenholme (1833–1918) and Josephine Butler (1828–1906) also directly equated freedom with the acquisition of knowledge.

Up until WWI, a significant proportion of upper middle-class girls never went to school at all, being educated at home under the aegis of (often ill-trained) governesses and those who did go to school mostly attended private schools over which the state had no control and the choice of which was entirely, again, in the hands of their parents. In working-class families, in spite of moves towards compulsory elementary education in the 1880s, girls’ schooling remained even more of a short-term experience, curtailed as it was by the needs of the family.3 This means that most of the education of girls, whatever their social background, took place at home, that is to say a place where a strict division of gender roles existed. Despite these limitations, education for girls steadily developed in the Victorian period, and a variety of schools and colleges emerged.

A standard assumption in this respect is that feminist campaigns were largely responsible for the provision of these new kinds of schooling. The fact is that the history of women’s education can only be understood in relation to wider economic, social, cultural and ideological factors outside the education field, and must in particular be linked with the social changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Access to education in the 19th thus not only widened for girls, but also for boys. Therefore, improved standards in secondary schools, and the foundation of women’s colleges, must not only be seen as a part of feminist policies, but as part of broader education reform. Still education was a central issue for feminists, who were often involved in the creation of schools and colleges (Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon were among Girton's founders), and the growth of these institutions played a crucial role in the history of the feminist movement and education, bound as it was with broader feminist concerns.

Finally, to fully understand what was at stake in these campaigns, and the resistance these triggered, a distinction must be made between access to education and a broader access to knowledge, as the latter encompassed issues that would not be obtained through schooling (such as sexuality). Feminist did not only want to give women access to new (and better paid) job opportunities, and therefore economic freedom (which was in itself revolutionary enough); they also aimed at putting an end to the ignorance in which women were kept until marriage and often even beyond, under the pretext of preserving their "innocence."

After an overview of female education in the Victorian period (its specificities, its variety, its limitations and its progress), this talk offers to examine the motivations behind its progress and, in so doing, to set the campaign for girls’ education as part of a broader feminist campaign for reform.

2) Littérature: “A voice, a place and a genre of one’s own: Women, knowledge and empowerment in Jane Eyre, Christine Vandamme, Maître de conférence en littératures anglophones XIXe-XXIe siècle, Laboratoire ILCEA4, Université Grenoble Alpes

The presentation aims to analyse to what extent Jane Eyre’s emancipation is rendered possible through personally acquired knowledge: her extensive reading at Gateshead provides her with the necessary critical distance to more fully comprehend vaster and implicit power relations between men and women, rich and poor, but also masters and servants, Roman emperors and slaves.

Her development as a character is also to be replaced and recontextualised in a century of major feminist struggles from the right to one’s body and one’s finances to the right to vote– in other words an ongoing fight for one’s voice and interests to be given free rein and be fully taken into account. Another interesting aspect to take into account is the autobiographical dimension of the novel–it blends the personal and the universal and gives a unique lyrical tone to what can be considered as a major feminist plea for the right to “speak out”. And this will be the major focus of the presentation: speaking out, finding one’s voice and imposing it, whether in fiery and passionate tones with her employer Rochester or vindictive and accusatory ones with her cousin John or aunt Mrs Reed or even searching and blunt ones with Saint John Rivers. The main plea in the novel is for the right to get to know oneself and then have such self respected, even at the cost of solitude: “The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I ill respect myself”.

One of the most modern discoveries of the novel has to do with new conceptions of the accepted social order: Jane relentlessly claims it should be based on more justice and equality instead of a quite cynical and oppressive patriarchal system. And the novel is all the more convincing in supporting her case as the very knowledge of one’s identity, but even of one’s genre–in the more modern sense of the term, is made to vacillate and crumble. Jane as a character or as a narrator just as Charlotte Brontë as an author are “alien” figures, grotesques: “mad cat[s]”, “bad animal[s]”, “spirit[s]”, “fair[ies]”, “things”. As time goes by, Jane becomes an expert in performing the genre that will give her more power in a patriarchal society, that of the “master”. In many scenes with Rochester, Jane’s performance and oratory brilliance illustrate very convincingly what Judith Butler has only quite recently identified and analysed as “the performativity of the genre”.

The object of the presentation will be to question the use Jane makes of education, knowledge but also self-knowledge and caring for oneself as well as a fine mastery of the art of debating as a means of empowerment and recognition of her singularity not just as a woman but as a distinct individual who cannot be categorised or controlled as anything else but herself: the “resolute, wild, free thing” who “care[s] for [her]self”. To that extent the novel was very modern and it is no coincidence if one of the most respected critics of the period, Mrs Rigby should have declared she would be ready to acknowledge the genius of the work, should it have been written by a man but that she could not possibly grant the same praise to the novel should it have been written by a woman as “no woman […] makes mistakes in her own métier”. She even goes on to say quite peremptorily: “if we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex.”

3) Art: “Images of Erudite Femininity. Capturing the learned/knowledgeable woman in the 19th-century visual arts”, Virginie Thomas, professeur en khâgne au lycée Champollion, docteur en littérature et art britanniques du XIXe siècle, et Agathe Viffray, étudiante en M1 Histoire de l'art à Paris 1

Representations of women were frequent in the Victorian society. The visual arts were filled with the picturing of several types of women: from the Angel in the House, to the Stunner or the Femme Fatale... The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - which developed in the 19th century under the influence of D.G. Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais or Edward Burne Jones - is especially known for its half-length portraits of woman beauty, be it meekly attractive or fatally bewitching. The artists decided to capture female beauty and its dual identity. Therefore, they created specific types of beauty which pervade our Victorian imaginary world and also inexorably bring to our mind the Pre-Raphaelite Sisters who served as models and muses but also as artists who tried to create a visual space of their own.

Through this imagery, we can feel the ambiguity hidden behind the figure of the woman and more importantly the woman of knowledge. Indeed, very few representations of female knowledge can be found without being imbued with a threatening dimension. Female domestic knowledge is necessarily associated with the representation of a domesticated woman, echoing the recommendations of the time as defined by John Ruskin in Sesame and Lilies or in the works by Sarah Stickney Ellis, for example. On the opposite, the aim of the pictures of learned women was to send a warning against the deadly potential of woman's unwonted curiosity through the use of mythological figures, such as Pandora, Psyche or Cassandra, ultimately leading to the lurking image of the castrating sorceress.
Yet, a difference emerges when we confront the gaze of male and female Pre-Raphaelite artists. Women artists took hold of the type of the erudite woman forged by their male counterparts but played with the viewers' horizon of expectation: they entered the canon, yet slightly shifted it by softening the usual rejection and emphasizing the idea of freedom linked to the possession of knowledge.

The study of women’s creations dealing with figures of knowledgeable women will show the several biases chosen by the artists and what social reality these choices reveal. The comparison of women’s and men’s works on the same themes enable to understand the appropriation of the woman’s image and the originality of the representations they created. From the figure of the governess and the one of the Angel in the House (the two forms of possession of knowledge deemed acceptable for women in the Victorian society) to the image of the sorceress (the evil embodiment), by way of the representation or lack of representation of the professional scholar woman, we will try to embrace the different types of knowledgeable women created in the 19th-century British art and the subtle variations between male and female visions. The analyses of chosen works will exemplify our thinking by concrete examples taken from the visual arts of the time. Most of them will be taken from the field of painting, yet tapestry and photography will also be examined. Our corpus will include key names of the male Prerapahelite Brotherhood, such as D.G. Rossetti or Edward Burne-Jones, but also male painters who were only associated with the movement, such as Frederick Sandys. At the same time, we will also shed light on the Preraphaelite Sisters who worked in the shadows of their male counterparts, such as Rebecca Solomon, Evelyn De Morgan or Marie Spartali Stillman, to quote but a few...


1- Wolstenholme, Elizabeth Wolstenholme, The Education of Girls, its Present and its Future, p. 328
2- The term ‘feminism’ did not come into use in the English language until the 1890s, and even then its meaning was contested.
3- DYHOUSE Carol, Girls growing up in late Victorian and Edwardian England, 1981, p. 3.