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Marriage, property, and women's narratives

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Marriage, property, and women's narratives/ Sally A. Livingston.
Author:	Livingston, Sally A.
Published:	New York :Palgrave Macmillan, : c2012.,
Description:	1 online resource (xiv, 226 p.)
Subject:	Right of property - History. -
Online resource:	An electronic book accessible through the World Wide Web; click for information
ISBN:	9781137010865 (electronic bk.)

Marriage, property, and women's narratives
Livingston, Sally A.

Marriage, property, and women's narratives[electronic resource] /Sally A. Livingston. - 1st ed. - New York :Palgrave Macmillan,c2012. - 1 online resource (xiv, 226 p.) - New Middle Ages. - New Middle Ages..

Includes bibliographical references (p. [195]-214) and index.

Property's history, property's literature -- Silence, language, sexuality -- Medieval women reject marriage: Heloise and Marie de France -- Sexual purity as property: Vie Seinte Audree and The Book of Margery Kempe -- Property and propriety in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England: Burney, Austen, Eliot -- Virginia Woolf's women, trapped and freed -- Mid-nineteenth-century Russia: women writers reject the marriage plot -- Conclusion: why are women poor?

The initial impulse of the book came from my reflection as a medievalist on Virginia Woolf's modern question, 'Why are women poor?' I contend that only a medievalist can answer this query accurately since it was in the Middle Ages that women's right to own property diminished sharply. Because marriage was often the moment in which this right was lost, when in becoming the property of their husbands, women no longer had property of their own, I examine the writings of female medieval authors such as Heloise, Marie de France, and Margery Kempe. Their narratives, among others, show a distinct use of financial metaphors and interventions to regain control over their property b7 stheir physical selves as well material possessions. As legal restrictions deepen in the succeeding centuries, however, women writers rely more on the marriage plot as a literary device. Instead of finding ways to manipulate words to regain economic power, they find their only salvation in finding a husband, who controls both their money and themselves. I argue that even with legal changes, such as the Married Women's Property Act, women writers from Frances Burney to George Eliot continue to portray their female protagonists as dependent upon men for financial support. Returning to the modern era and to Woolf herself, I show how this is true in her fiction, which betrays the feminism of her nonfiction. In a final chapter I ask the question, 'What would have happened had women not lost the right to own property in their own name?' Looking at the case of nineteenth-century Russian women authors such as Nadezdha Khvoshchinskaia, Sofia Soboleva, and Karolina Pavlova, I determine that in their narratives, female protagonists have the ability to choose marriage on their own terms or reject it outright. This is due, I argue, to the fact that Russian women had the right to own property in the Middle Ages and never lost that right.

ISBN: 9781137010865 (electronic bk.)

Standard No.: 9786613658463

Source: 579328Palgrave Macmillanhttp://www.palgraveconnect.comSubjects--Topical Terms:

250986
Right of property
--History.Index Terms--Genre/Form:

96803
Electronic books.

LC Class. No.: HQ1143 / .L58 2012eb

Dewey Class. No.: 330.082

Marriage, property, and women's narratives
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520 $a The initial impulse of the book came from my reflection as a medievalist on Virginia Woolf's modern question, 'Why are women poor?' I contend that only a medievalist can answer this query accurately since it was in the Middle Ages that women's right to own property diminished sharply. Because marriage was often the moment in which this right was lost, when in becoming the property of their husbands, women no longer had property of their own, I examine the writings of female medieval authors such as Heloise, Marie de France, and Margery Kempe. Their narratives, among others, show a distinct use of financial metaphors and interventions to regain control over their property b7 stheir physical selves as well material possessions. As legal restrictions deepen in the succeeding centuries, however, women writers rely more on the marriage plot as a literary device. Instead of finding ways to manipulate words to regain economic power, they find their only salvation in finding a husband, who controls both their money and themselves. I argue that even with legal changes, such as the Married Women's Property Act, women writers from Frances Burney to George Eliot continue to portray their female protagonists as dependent upon men for financial support. Returning to the modern era and to Woolf herself, I show how this is true in her fiction, which betrays the feminism of her nonfiction. In a final chapter I ask the question, 'What would have happened had women not lost the right to own property in their own name?' Looking at the case of nineteenth-century Russian women authors such as Nadezdha Khvoshchinskaia, Sofia Soboleva, and Karolina Pavlova, I determine that in their narratives, female protagonists have the ability to choose marriage on their own terms or reject it outright. This is due, I argue, to the fact that Russian women had the right to own property in the Middle Ages and never lost that right.
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