Women’s Responses

Abstract

Anne Mellor has written in Romanticism and Gender that history (of which literary history is a subset) reveals the presence in English culture of two varieties of ‘Romanticism’, which seem to divide roughly (though not entirely) along the lines of gender. One is the familiar ‘masculine Romanticism’ whose outlines have been delineated for nearly two centuries by the works of six canonical male poets, and by the impressions of a Romantic ethos those works suggest. The other, a ‘feminine Romanticism’, is being made visible again by late twentieth-century efforts to recover the marginalized works of the many, often prolific, women writers of the period. This latter feminine Romanticism, Mellor argues, is a strongly subjective one that frequently defines itself in relation to other unstable subjectivities, so that it presents not the image of the heroically assertive individual selfhood historically associated with traditional (masculinist) Romanticism, but rather ‘a self that is fluid, absorptive, responsive, with permeable ego boundaries’. Unlike masculine Romanticism’s hierarchical, authoritarian and ego-centred ideology, feminine Romanticism’s offered ‘an ethic of care (as opposed to an ethic of individual justice)’.