The Culture and Literature of Girlhood: Liberation or Limitation?

Karl Marx wrote that "men make their own history, but do not make it just as they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past" (395). The relationship between agency and structure that he focuses on here is crucial to any criticism, like feminist criticism, originating in and ultimately concerned with political and social change: To what extent are the possibilities for transformation both enabled and limited by the historical and institutional setting? To invoke Marx is thus appropriate in the context of these three provocative works of feminist literary criticism.

Two of these works also situate themselves in terms of cultural studies, an approach to literature and culture that, in its early formulation by Marxist cultural critics like Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, stressed the agency of subordinate groups as a corrective to its occlusion (in different ways) in both traditional and orthodox Marxist studies. Paradoxically, although Foster and Simons do not describe their work as cultural studies, their close readings offer perhaps the most sustained and balanced attention to both agency and structure; Their approach is at the same time also the most traditionally literary.

Lynne Vallone's Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries stresses structure. Vallone focuses on Foucauldian disciplinary practices in the culture of girlhood: "The successful girl internalizes the implicit or explicit ideological messages communicated by her reading, her family, her community, her social class, her sexuality, and finds, ultimately, that happiness and virtue lie within her self-control. . . . Each girl must decide how to conquer and then change her girlish nature—characterized by desire, hunger, anger, ignorance and aggression—into beautiful womanly conduct. The means by which this aestheticized conquest can occur . . . is communicated by girls' culture" (5). Vallone examines the ways in which the values and practices of historical institutions—including England's Magdalen Hospital for penitent prostitutes, dower practices, the Evangelical Movement, and the domestic science movement—were communicated in literature for girls, in canonical texts as well as in less well-known novels, conduct manuals and novels, and tracts.

Vallone's method, bringing historical, nonliterary material and scholarship to bear on literary texts, leads to some brilliant analyses. For example, she discusses the bluntly economic character of marriage—epitomized by the inclusion of dowry amounts in marriage announcements in the Gentleman's Magazine—and goes on to note the economic factors behind the reluctance of the blushing female characters in Evelina, Pamela, and Sir Charles Grandison to sign a marriage settlement or even to agree upon a marriage date: "Harriet Byron's inability to sign proceeds not from fear, but marks her modesty; she is ashamed to be thought 'too' aware of the legal arrangements of marriage, Grandison's wealth and generosity to her, and their impending sexual union, lest she be considered 'forward,' 'knowing,' or 'grasping.' She must literally sign herself into Grandison's hands, and what embarrasses her is the knowledge and awareness of the voluntary act of relinquishment and public avowal of sexual maturity" (61). In this way, Vallone illustrates the effects on the apparently personal experience of the body of the economic relations structuring the social institution of marriage.

Vallone's Foucauldian approach is well suited to her study of the sermons and the conduct literature, which demanded from the penitent prostitute and the charitable girl a similar sacrifice: the relinquishment of desire, and of time and money, respectively. The narration of this relinquishment results in "the pleasure of the act" (the title of the chapter), which is in effect the discipline of female sexuality. Vallone quotes a conduct book by...