Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism by David Sigler (review)

In Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism, David Sigler postulates the existence of a set of British Romantic women writers who envisioned the future in the present. Taking pains to differentiate these writers from those who prophesied or predicted the future, Sigler considers how they positioned themselves as if they already inhabited a future that enabled them to critique or comment upon the present. That complicated temporal or atemporal plane provided them with an opening—a fracture—that gave them the opportunity to move outside of the conventional expectations of what was perceived as culturally appropriate for women and women writers. He calls these writers "fracture feminists," a term I initially resisted because common usage makes us think of a fracture as something broken. Yet that is Sigler's point: not that they are broken but that they locate ruptures in their contemporary moments to present the future, writing about what Sigler calls "the contemporary future" and later terms "contretempopia," which he acknowledges as a "deliberately silly term" that plays with Jacques Derrida's notion of "contretemporality" (pp. 4, 11). While he notes that the rich group of novelists, poets, essayists, and historians he examines—Mary Wollstonecraft, the anonymous author of "Ithuriel," Mary Robinson, Anna Barbauld, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, Hannah Cowley, Charlotte Smith, Charlotte Caroline Richardson, Felicia Hemans, the anonymous author of Gulzara, Princess of Persia (1816), and Mary Shelley—would, at most, identify themselves as female philosophers, his steady recognition of them as "feminists" rather than the hedging term "proto-feminists" is a local instance of his provocative and compelling argument in action. They are fracture feminists, living through intense contemporary political events such as the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, plantation slavery, the push for women's rights, and parliamentary reform, but, Sigler posits,"instead of commenting on these matters directly, these feminist writers were responding as historians to the contemporary moment, as if they themselves were not fully subject to the demands of chronology" (pp. 16-17). The two theorists who consistently inform Sigler's readings are Jacques Lacan and Derrida. Though he recognizes that their psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches sometimes distrust one another, he invokes Hélène Cixous's conception of combining the two into a kind of philanalysis. He uses Lacan and Derrida to powerful effect, but it is somewhat surprising that twentieth-century philosophers such as Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and Simone De Beauvoir make only occasional appearances in this otherwise enlightening discussion of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century feminists.

One of the greatest strengths of Fracture Feminism, beyond its innovative thesis, lies in the brilliant juxtaposition of texts Sigler selects to demonstrate how fracture feminists not only engage in "contretempopia" but also establish intellectual connections with one another. He begins with Wollstonecraft and observes that though she is usually seen as writing for the future, she voices the thesis that shapes his work when she memorializes the recently deceased fracture feminist Catherine Macauley in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In Sigler's words, Wollstonecraft describes Macauley as "a woman from the future who must, in the future, be remembered" (p. 29) when she urges her readers to "remember that Catharine Macauley was an example of intellectual acquirements supposed to be incompatible with the weakness of her sex. In her style of writing, indeed, no sex appears, for it is like the sense it conveys, strong and clear" (qtd. p. 29). Here (and elsewhere) Sigler pays wonderful attention to the way verbs instantiate temporal shifts by pointing out how Wollstonecraft tells her readers to remember Macauley in the present through the eternal present of her writings as an example of the future in the past. When he then turns to Wollstonecraft's legacy, he quickly dispenses with William Godwin's problematic Memoir of the Author of the "Vindication of the...