Creative Negativity. Four Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest by Carol Hanbery MacKay (review)

lian ethics as the basis for her exploration of modes of speech in Austen's Pride andPrejudice and Persuasion. The onlydifficulty that this work presents might arise from the reader's predisposition . Academics who have been trained to expect close textual analysis when they read the names of prominent writers in chapter headings may need to be patient with Michaelson's approach. Frequently, she provides such extensive discussion ofthe important theorists whose ideas form the context for her discussion that the "true" subject appears forgotten. In her chapter on Opie, for example, Michaelson provides a two-paragraph biographical introduction, then offers a twenry-five-page examination of the Quaker tradition before returning to Opie for the final eight pages ofthe chapter. However, in this as in every chapter, Michaelson includes a clear rationale for her subject choices, providing a very deliberately organized and specific plan of development before embarking on more specific discussion. Throughout the book, she frequently refers to the introduction or previous chapters to establish obvious connections and a sense of coherence. Once one becomes accustomed to her organization ofideas, the true strength ofMichaelson's accomplishment can be appreciated . % Carol Hanbery MacKay. Creative Negativity. Four Victorian Exemplars ofthe Female Quest. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. 275p. Christine Anton Berry College With this study MacKay presents her research ofwomen artist figures during midand late ^^-century England, a time regarded as highly reactionary, prejudiced, repressive, and rigid. As widely documented, the life ofwomen was not exactly an enviable one during theVictorian era, as theywere generally boxed up into clearly defined roles befitted their "inferior" gender. Nonetheless, the author found "in the midst of a sexist, racist, imperialistic culture ... covert revolutionaries" (xi), MacKay states, four women who challenged and advanced the social roles put upon them. MacKay's analysis ofthese "radicals" draws upon the lives and works ofphotographer and poetJulia Margaret Cameron (1815-1 879); thewriterAnne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919); the political activist and spiritual leader Anne Wood Besant (1847-1933); and actress-writer Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952). While all four women were prominent, popular figures in their own time, today they are virtually forgotten and absent from academic research. Yet, they attained remarkable achievements, and MacKay's book intends to resurrect their lifeworks 70 + ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * FALL 2003 Reviews by demonstrating how these four early feminists operated with and within the system during a key period ofhistory. It becomes quickly apparent that MacKay is well familiar with her subject matter. Over the last fifteen years, she has extensively published on all fourwomen, yet her book is far from a mere summary ofher earlier research. Here, for the first time, MacKay tries to bring together the creative endeavors of these four artists through a theoretical framework that the author coins "creative negativity," the fundamental nature of the female quest. In the first chapter MacKay introduces the reader to her theory about the term "creative negativity" and her understanding ofthe "female quest." Creative negativity constitutes "a complex ofrhetorical and performative techniques by which certain women of the period construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct themselves" in order to step outside the structure of a defined existence. Creative negativity is essentially divided into six interacting elements, MacKay notes: "(1) it grows out of negativity, either philosophical or emotional; (2) it evokes afocalpoint, often a place; (3) it combines reality and illusion ; (4) it suggests a shift in magnitude, a sense ofmultifariousness or zooming out; (5) it includes an altered sense oftime; and (6) it evokes self-referentiality, an aesthetic of formal invocation in a work of art, a sense of self-consciousness in social contexts" (3). Born out of suppressed or repressed negative emotions, the main objective of creative negativity is a crossing of societal and/or emotional boundaries. MacKay clarifies the "female quest" by comparingand contrasting it to the male quest. The prototype ofthe male quest in the Western tradition, MacKay writes, can be characterized as such: typically portrayed is a single individual who seeks a distant, often inaccessible goal. His search proceeds logically and chronologically in tandem with the linearity of time and space. The male questor is ultimately concerned only with his own persona and separates and distances himselffrom a clearly...