Author: Barnita Bagchi
Publisher: Tulika
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 196
ISBN/UPC (if available): 818522983X
Description
In Pliable Pupils and Sufficient Self-Directors, Barnita Bagchi examines writings that focus on female education and development by five representative British women writers who flourished between 1778 and 1814-Lady Mary Hamilton, Clara Reeve, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton and the early Jane Austen.
In a climate in which female education was a subject of anxiety in print culture and fiction as site of contestation, and in which women were emerging as major producers both of educational writing and heroine-centred, ostensibly didactic fiction, these writers produced fictions of female education that were pioneering Bildungsromans. Highly gendered, these fictions explore key tensions generated by the theme of education, including the dialectics between formal and experiential education, between the pliable pupil obedient to pedagogical authority-figures and the more self-sufficient auto-didact, and between a desire for greater institutionalization of education and a recognition of the flexibility given by distancing from established structures.
Such fictions, Bagchi argues, are compendious and miscellaneous, encompassing diverse domains of knowledge, such as philosophy, politics and history. There is a congruence between the ambulatory, tension-ridden patterns of female education found in these fictions and the distinctive, miscellaneous fictional knowledge they represent-their creators grappled with the epistemological and ethical status of fiction, which they connected with female experience.
The writers of these fictions held conservative views on national politics, and categories such as gender, race and class are disturbingly aligned in many of their works. However, the author argues, as far as writings on female education are concerned, the terms radical and conservative have limited use. Intrinsic to post-Enlightenment notions of education, divisible into ex and ducere: on the one hand, an outward pull towards freedom, suggested by ex. When, in an age of cultural and political revolution, gentlewomen wrote in the still upstart form of fiction about their won education, disjunctions and dialectics were stark. This freedom-control tug-of-war, according to Bagchi, should not be treated in a reductive way, and these women writers should not be straitjacketed as incipient subjects of an emergent hegemonic bourgeois order. Also, significantly, the journeys towards emancipation as well as the starkly disturbing closing off of many such possibilities in the written analysed here, remain with us today as burningly alive issues.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
The difficult study of others and herself: Lady Mary Hamilton
CHAPTER TWO
Women of small fortunes, with cultivated minds: Clara Reeve
CHAPTER THREE
A sister adept in this art of free-masonry: Elizabeth Hamilton
CHAPTER FOUR
The courage to rise superior to the silly customs of the world: Mary Brunton
CHAPTER FIVE
To torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words:
Jane Austen’s Early Writing
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index