Fatal Women

31:4 Book Reviews searching for an encompassing legitimation that will admit "diversified intellectual commitments, social requirements, and multiple ideologies." Fiction was important to Pater's aesthetics precisely because it permitted him to resolve or skirt any aporia created either by conflicting dialectics of history and myth or by other examples of referential discourse, all of which limited exploration. Iser is suggesting that Pater's decentered aesthetics, a point he claims to have underplayed in the 1960 study, though "deconfirming" in its critical posture, nevertheless, provides a legitimated, reconstructed mobilization of the past filtered through a receptivity that provides the "aesthetic moment" with the ability to mediate if not to reconcile conflicting dichotomies. For Pater the historical Plato sketched in his Plato and Platonism (1893) is the great mediator; the Platonic dialectic is "co-extensive with life itself." Some reviewers of the original edition, Iser recalls, faulted him for not following the chronology of Pater's works in his analysis. The Victorian Studies reviewer, in fact, also accused him of forcing constructions on Pater's work and of "overreading" passages. The objections read now like perfunctorily withered remnants of an age of critical innocence. What the time-binding Victorian Studies reviewer was unable to comprehend was that the book was indeed less about Pater as a person than about the salient characteristics of Pater's aesthetic vision. At this point in time, Iser's Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment also should be recognized for its place in the systematic progression from the 1950s onward of intellectually liberating theories of reception aesthetics. Given that perspective on Pater's work, one might be inclined to conclude that "overreading" him could be a virtue. Franklin E. Court Northern Illinois University FATAL WOMEN Bram Dijkstra. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-deSi ècle Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. $37.95 Though we have long been accustomed to the clichés of women as either angels or demons, Dijkstra would have us believe that the former depictions in the nineteenth century are no different from the latter, for they are all manifestations of "vicious antifeminine imagery." Coventry Patmore's Angel in the House is, after all, the Victorian male's demeaning depiction of woman's submissiveness and uselessness (angels are not even supposed to fornicate), their principal function being to comfort husbands when they return from the corrupt world of commerce. In short, as Dijkstra informs us, the "cult of the household nun" is associated with the view of woman as man's "second conscience" (as a female writer in 1839 pronounced), placed on a pedestal and simultaneously deprived of a functional place in the wider world. By the end of the century, she was 477 31:4 Book Reviews depicted in art and literature as self-involved and narcissistic, a masturbator , a femme fatale, a lesbian—all symbolic expressions of the autoerotic female who refused to accept her previous social role, expressions that served the pleasurable fantasies and growing fears of late nineteenth-century males who felt that they were being "marginalized." Dijkstra has provided his study with a strong, single-minded thesis, often convincing as well as amusing, but it is precisely his single-minded thesis that simultaneously accounts for some of his book's unfortunate weaknesses. Too often, generalizations are presented as though universal facts, as in the statement that "modem madonnas" could prove their worthiness to their husbands by "playing the role of cringing household pets," leading to "an entirely new set of psychopathological responses in the women. . . ." Obviously, evidence for the extent of such responses is wanting; also, part of the problem is trying to define what "psychopathological" means in this context. And remarks such as "women everywhere tried hard to become the household nun they were supposed to be" merely undermine a reader's confidence in the presentation. Dijkstra limits his view of the period by not mentioning that there were a goodly number of activist women, female physicians and lawyers, and successful women writers (often, however, adopting male or ambiguous pseudonyms, which were soon transparent, but many who published under their own names) who rejected the clinging vine image. There were...