Middle-and upper-class women for the first time in the eighteenth century were identified by men and male-created ideologies almost exclusively with the home and the realm of feeling passion, and emotion; while the male appropriated to his natural sphere reason and the powers of the analytical mind.
-Diane Long Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny
The notion of the world being divided up into "public" and "private" spheres has become pretty natural to me, a late twentieth century college student struggling to understand the life and literature of the Romantic Era. It's not hard for me to distinguish between the public realm of politics, commerce, rational thought, and logic and the private realm of community, domestic duty, emotion and sensibility. I envision them as bubbles, solid yet not impermeable, constraining yet not insurmountable, housing public and private life as I've come to see it. I can look down on those spheres, like two of those little snow-globes that contain water so that when you shake them, it looks like the figures inside are under the attack of a monstrous blizzard. In one globe, I see several men walking a busy road, talking, conducting business, reading the daily paper, and driving around in horse-drawn carriages (remember, I have the Romantic Era on the brain). In the other globe, after the snow has settled, I see a few women sitting inside a well-decorated house, caring for children, sewing, drinking tea and writing out invitations to next week's dinner party.
But you may ask: Wait a minute-men and women? Why not just "people"? I mean, anyone can participate in politics and business, domestic life and emotion, regardless of sex, right? This is the twentieth century, after all. We're in the wake of feminism's second wave and women don't have to stay in the private bubble if they don't want to. And men, they can even stay at home and raise children now. Why the sex division?
Yes, it's true that both men and women have made great strides in the direction of freedom to roam both spheres, but after being immersed in literary history for so long I can't put the notion that men and women are confined to one sphere or another out of my head--no matter how many women executives I meet or how many changing tables there are in men's public rest rooms. The fact is, things were not always like the way they are today. Not too long ago an invisible wall that divided public from private, rationality from emotion, and, eventually, masculine from feminine, was so strong that to have the means and desire to cross over from one realm into another was not the norm, but the exception. Consequently, the literature of male writers remained within the realm of rationality, structure, logic, and politics. Likewise, the literature of women writers came to be associated with emotion, family, fanciful passion and social life. While these patterns are very prominent in literature, we do have to remember that they are trends, cultivated by societal constructions and, consequently, not absolute.
While I could begin to write about how Romantic literature was affected by the rise of the public and private spheres, how male and female writers conformed to the rigid societal constructs of their time-which was, in fact, my original intent-I will instead write about "the exceptions." That is, I have had more fun finding the works of English 441b that go outside their respective spheres, taking on characteristics not normally associated with the "place" that they occupy based on the sex of their writers. I want to explore how some of the poetry and fiction that we have discussed defies traditional notions of what is "masculine" and "feminine," and makes some revolutionary strides in the way we perceive what, and more importantly, who constitutes the public and private spheres.
Welcome to my website, created for ENG 441b , an Early Romanticism class at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. At this site, I wish to analyze those writers of ENG 441b who have ventured outside of their "proper" spheres, beginning with the men of sensibility , then moving on to the women of rationality , and then to some concluding thoughts about what I have called the double bubble .
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This page was created by Jacqueline George at Miami University, Oxford, OH.