Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual WomenWomen Intellectuals, Private Intellectuals?

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women: Women Intellectuals, Private Intellectuals? [This chapter reads Possession: A Romance and The Matisse Stories (1993) in terms of how their representations of women writer-intellectuals test the limits of the myth of the man of letters by representing the private intellectual as a legitimate possibility in reality as well as within fiction. I examine these texts’ treatment of the relationship between intellectuals, literary writing and concepts of the public and private spheres with reference to key thinking on these ideas in the work of Edward W. Said (1994) and Jürgen Habermas (1962), work that has contributed powerfully to the myth of public cultural and intellectual workers, while at the same time indicating that myth’s limitations. Theories of the intellectual claim almost unanimously that a private intellectual cannot exist or at least cannot claim legitimacy, but Byatt’s fiction considers seriously the possibility that since women have related very differently to the institutions of public life, many women intellectuals have figured themselves as other than ‘public’. Moreover, the public intellectual is one specific image of the intellectual among many that do not necessarily arrange themselves into a clear, gendered hierarchy. I argue that the public and private spheres (as the above theorists describe them) are not entirely separable. Byatt’s ‘thinking’ women defy the dominant cultural images of public, professional and occasionally amateur intellectuals and modify those same images. They therefore represent a discourse of intellectuals that is non-traditional and non-hierarchical, allowing it to accommodate valid, ‘other’ intellectuals who make vital contributions to public life. This is the narrative solution available to intellectual women facing social and cultural limitations in Byatt’s fiction; for example, in the compromised ‘silence’ of Christabel LaMotte as analysed by twentieth-century scholars in Possession, and also in the cases of a female translator’s difficulty in seeing herself as important in public life in the short story ‘Medusa’s Ankles’, a guilty writer and mother whose cleaning lady is a secret artist in ‘Art Work’, and a female academic taking up the cause of an abused female student in ‘The Chinese Lobster’.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual WomenWomen Intellectuals, Private Intellectuals?

Download PDF
30 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/a-s-byatt-and-intellectual-women-women-intellectuals-private-DsLylMBbvV
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
ISBN
978-3-031-08670-0
Pages
151 –181
DOI
10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_5
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[This chapter reads Possession: A Romance and The Matisse Stories (1993) in terms of how their representations of women writer-intellectuals test the limits of the myth of the man of letters by representing the private intellectual as a legitimate possibility in reality as well as within fiction. I examine these texts’ treatment of the relationship between intellectuals, literary writing and concepts of the public and private spheres with reference to key thinking on these ideas in the work of Edward W. Said (1994) and Jürgen Habermas (1962), work that has contributed powerfully to the myth of public cultural and intellectual workers, while at the same time indicating that myth’s limitations. Theories of the intellectual claim almost unanimously that a private intellectual cannot exist or at least cannot claim legitimacy, but Byatt’s fiction considers seriously the possibility that since women have related very differently to the institutions of public life, many women intellectuals have figured themselves as other than ‘public’. Moreover, the public intellectual is one specific image of the intellectual among many that do not necessarily arrange themselves into a clear, gendered hierarchy. I argue that the public and private spheres (as the above theorists describe them) are not entirely separable. Byatt’s ‘thinking’ women defy the dominant cultural images of public, professional and occasionally amateur intellectuals and modify those same images. They therefore represent a discourse of intellectuals that is non-traditional and non-hierarchical, allowing it to accommodate valid, ‘other’ intellectuals who make vital contributions to public life. This is the narrative solution available to intellectual women facing social and cultural limitations in Byatt’s fiction; for example, in the compromised ‘silence’ of Christabel LaMotte as analysed by twentieth-century scholars in Possession, and also in the cases of a female translator’s difficulty in seeing herself as important in public life in the short story ‘Medusa’s Ankles’, a guilty writer and mother whose cleaning lady is a secret artist in ‘Art Work’, and a female academic taking up the cause of an abused female student in ‘The Chinese Lobster’.]

Published: Aug 31, 2022

Keywords: Public intellectuals; The private and the public; Historiographic metafiction

There are no references for this article.