Helene Moglen
The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the English Novel
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. x+217. $45.00
Reviewed by Eleanor Ty
The Trauma of Gender is a sophisticated and fascinating reading of four well-known novels by four male authors of the eighteenth century. Instead of subscribing to the traditional line of thinking that attributes the rise of the English novel to the "burgeoning of capitalism and the ascension of the middle classes," as proposed many years ago by Ian Watt, Helene Moglen argues that the novel "came into being as a response to the sex-gender system that emerged in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries" (1). In addition, she does not agree with Watt that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition. Rather, it has been structured by two "mutually defining traditions: the fantastic and the realistic" (1).
Moglen complements her discussion of genre with a provocative psychoanalytic-based approach to the texts and authors. She not only applies the theories of Freud, Lacan, and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok to Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, and Walpole; she uses the fiction to critique and expose the limitations of these late nineteenth- and twentieth-century theorists. According to Moglen, between 1600 and 1750, the situation of women in England altered radically. "Infantilized by her legal, social and economic dependence on her husband, a woman was likely to be an object of ambivalence for her children, whose psychic lives she dominated. Her sons defined themselves in opposition to her maternal qualities, while her daughters read their futures in the functional limitations of her life" (2). Masculinity and femininity came to be defined not just as different from one another but as mutually exclusive. Other differences, of class, race, and nationality, were filtered through the lens of sexual alterity, and Moglen contends that "the psychological reverberations of differentiated social practices were profound" (4).
The novel "imposed and resisted" (4) this sex-gender system; it established norms by demonstrating how ideals of masculinity and femininity were translated into social roles at the same time as it revealed the psychic costs that this system of differentiation incurred. For example, in her discussion of Defoe's Roxana, Moglen notes, "the story that began by placing instrumentalized sexuality in opposition to maternity ends by demonizing the sexual mother, who cannot be saved from moral failure and psychic dissolution. The gendered division of labor, which celebrates women's capacity for feeling, encourages men to articulate culturally devalued aspects of their own psychic lives through cross-gender representations. Misogyny is clearly woven into Defoe's representation of Roxana, but the female struggle for self-awareness that he describes offers an implicitly radical, even protofeminist critique of the individualism that he celebrated in Robinson Crusoe and tried, in his own life, to embody" (51-52).
Moglen's most insightful and original comments are those that integrate observations about psychoanalytic theory with the novel. She says of Sterne, "for him--as, indeed, for Freud and later for Lacan--the central problem of this self-eluding and self-deluded subjectivity is concerned with the mystery of its engendering: the mystery of the origins of self, sexuality, and sexual difference. The primal scene with which Tristram begins his inquiries, and to which he compulsively returns throughout the novel, is precisely the scene of origination--the scene in which he is conceived by a man and a woman as a male" (89). Sterne and Lacan are both "trapped in the oppositional terms of the cultural symbolic" (104). They "describe the ungendered/gendered subjectivity of their fantasies both as fundamentally male and as shaped by structures of knowledge and feeling that they identify with, but paradoxically deny to, women" (104).
The book is filled with many such tantalizing and dazzling statements that it is a "must read" for scholars studying the origins of the novel. Even her exceedingly long notes at the back of the book contain intricate arguments that would have served as an additional chapter in other works.