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Family Fortunes: History and Literature in Materialist-Feminist Work
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Family Fortunes: History and Literature in Materialist-Feminist Work That literary critics meditate publicly upon landmark works of history such as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 may be seen as emblematic of the current shift in relations between historical and literary studies, a shift in which Family Fortunes itself may be located. In literary critical circles this shift is evidenced in talk of a "turn to history" or a "renewed interest in history" and in the rise to prominence of "new historicism" as a literary critical mode (Howard 1986, 14; Montrose 1986, 8, 11).1 In history circles the shift is evidenced by talk of a "linguistic turn" or a "new interest in linguistic theories" and by the rise of a "new history of meaning" (Toews 1987, 879, 881).2 The new historicism and the new history, moreover, are variously rooted in a common set of "postmodern" assumptions about knowledge , human identity, and the reaP Both tendencies are associated with the view that the real is apprehended only in "language," language being understood for the most part as systems of meaning rather than as words or words alone (Scott 1987, 6).4 Languages, or systems of meaning, are seen as constructed, historically specific, and political and are expressed, according to the same set of assumptions , not only in words but also in social institutions and practices. Human beings (often referred to in literary criticism as "the subjects ") are also immersed in symbolic systems through which they are identified and in which they apprehend the world. More precisely, human beings are immersed in multiple sublanguages, or discourses ,s which operate as parts of symbolic systems as a whole. According to the same set of assumptions, historical documents, like literary texts, are immersed in discourse too. Both may make reference to the real (though the referential nature of historical documents is mainly asserted by historians), but both have a "worklike" func59 60 Starting Over tion, heavily conditioned by the various sublanguages by which they are informed. Both literary text and historical document construct the real to which they also respond.6 Thus, practitioners of new historicism and new history both, while they may disagree over the extent to which discourse constitutes the real or is constructed by it and over the degree to which discourse may be altered by individuals bent on remaking their world, place systems of meaning at the heart of their investigations. The critical assumptions and practices that inform new historicism and the new history are often read both as a product of poststructuralist, and other postmodern, theories, with their emphasis upon language, or systems of meaning, and as a reaction against the formalist bent of much poststructuralist practice, with its focus upon contextually isolated texts. For it is the project of new historicism and the new history to read written and social texts, constructions of "experience" and the material world, in relation to each other. Similar assumptions and practices, however, have had a long and relatively autonomous history in feminist work. Indeed, despite the fact that discussion of new historicism and new history is often carried on as if their assumptions and practices had been produced by men (feminist theorists, if they are mentioned at all, are often assumed to be the dependent heirs of male intellectual capital), feminist labor has had much to do with the development of this literaryhistorical enterprise.7 As I have argued in "History as Usual" in more detail, the postmodernist assumptions that inform new history and new historicism were partly generated by the theoretical breaks of the civil rights movement and of the early second wave of the women's movement, by antiracist and feminist critiques of "objectivity ," by antiracist and feminist assertions of the political and historically specific nature of knowledge itself, by antiracist and feminist analyses of the cultural construction of identities, and by critiques of white, heterosexual, feminist theorizing for essentialism and for racial and sexual biases. Since the late 1960s, moreover, feminist work has implicitly emphasized the role of "ideas," or symbolic systems, in the construction not only of identities but also of social institutions and social relations as a whole. It has done so not only in response to poststructuralism but also because the subordination of women, who have always been at least half of humankind, has seemed ideological to a large degree. [3.87.11.93] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:07...