Master Class to be taught by Jill Campbell, Professor of English, Yale University
Enrollment limited to 15. Application required.
Using literary examples of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century representations of women as well as graphic images from the exhibit, this workshop will explore the interactions between two meanings of the word “body”: the physical structure or substance of a person, and an organized group of individuals. Jane Austen plays across these two senses in Northanger Abbey when she complains that women novelists, so routinely derided and abused by reviewers and readers, are “an injured body.” Her phrase evokes the vulnerability of an individual physical body while the passage it appears in implies that the fervor of attacks on women novelists may arise partly from their corporate prominence and force. Austen stirringly calls on her sister novelists to take pride in their collective achievements, and not to “desert one another.”
The prospect of such solidarity among aspiring women provokes distrust and anxiety in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and satirists often link images of women’s transgressive corporeal bodies with evocations of the monstrosity of women’s incorporation as a group. Rowlandson’s “Breaking Up of the Blue-Stocking Club” (1815) provides a prime example of how the threat of unruliness in individual female bodies escalates when they assemble on their own. The word “bawdy” itself encapsulates this threat: the bawd dares to constitute and manage a group of working women herself. From the Augustan age through the nineteenth century, women writers and artists are particularly discouraged from conceptualizing or organizing themselves as a collective tradition or united group.
We will examine a range of visual and verbal treatments of women’s corporate and corporeal “bawdiness” and the implications of links between the two. Workshop participants will select individual works for discussion.
Master Class offered in conjunction with the Lewis Walpole Library’s current exhibition: Bawdy Bodies: Satires of Unruly Women.