The Foreign Woman in British Literature

Exotics, Aliens, and Outsiders

Marilyn D. Button, Toni Reed

• Publisher: Praeger
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN:
  9780313309281
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780313388729
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

While England has been strengthened by a proud isolationism, she has simultaneously been enriched by the economic, social, and political complexities that have emerged as people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds have moved within her borders, or when her own citizens have emigrated among those foreigners to live or rule. This book explores the foreign element in English culture and the attempt by English writers from the early 19th to the mid 20th century to portray their complex and often ambiguous responses to that doubly foreign element among them: the foreign woman. While being foreign may begin with national or ethnic difference, the contributors to this book expand it to include other forms of alienation from a dominant culture, resulting from gender, race, class, ideology, or temperament.

The many factors shaping English national identity—including British imperialism, immigration patterns, English family and social structures, and English common law—have been shaped by gender-related issues. Though not a prominent literary figure, the foreign woman in England has received increasingly critical attention in recent years as a psychological and sociological phenomenon. By beginning with Byron in the early 19th century and concluding with Lawrence Durrell in the 20th century, this study contributes to a more comprehensive vision of the foreign woman as she is portrayed by a number of British authors, including Shelley, Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronté, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Anita Brookner.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Dismantling Traditionalist Gender Roles: An Exotic Counter-World in Byron’s Don Juan
• 2. Transforming the Stereotype: Exotic Women in Shelley’s Alastor and The Witch of Atlas
• 3. “Asia Loves Prometheus”: Asian Women and Shelley’s Macropolitics
• 4. A Genealogy of Ruths: From Alien Harvester to Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century England
• 5. Imagining a Self between a Husband or a Wall: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
• 6. Challenging Traditionalist Gender Roles: The Exotic Woman as Critical Observer in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh
• 7. “In Short, She Is an Angel; and I Am—”: Odd Women and Same-Sex Desire in Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White
• 8. Tigresses, Tinsel Madonnas, and Citizens of the World: The “Other” Woman in George Eliot’s Fiction
• 9. Phantoms Mistaken for a Human Face: Race and the Construction of the African Woman’s Identity in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
• 10. The Foreign Woman Is a Man: Gender Reversal in D. H. Lawrence’s Fiction
• 11. Gypsy Women in English Life and Literature
• 12. “Our Many Larval Selves”: Durrell’s Livia and the Cross-Cultural Signal
• 13. A Losing Tradition: The Exotic Female of Anita Brookner’s Early Fiction
• Afterword
• Index
• About the Contributors