Category: Essays

Traumatic Hauntings

Ghost stories in the 19th and early 20th century reflect the change in socio-political attitudes to mental health, and specifically in the work of Everett and Sinclair, the attitudes of society to trauma or PTSD as it was reassessed once it became not just the problem of abused and oppressed women and children, but one that plagued men following the trauma of war.

Dialectics between Critical Theory and New Media: The Problem of Gender Representation in Video-Games

This essay poses the question of whether the critical theory and approaches to reading that come out of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment are useful to a feminist investigation of the problem of representation in 'new media', specifically, the medium of video-games.

Femininity as Performance: The Death-spectacle in Selected Works of Charlotte Mew

Charlotte Mew became famous in the early 20th century for her contributions to the war-poetry genre following the first great war, but faded into obscurity once the literary canon began erasing the works of women. When her name resurfaces in the present age it is primarily as a war poet. Yet Charlotte Mew's portfolio is diverse. Her short stories and poetry explore the gendered identity politics of the fin-de-siecle, decadent and sometimes chillingly gothic in tone, they express the anxieties of lesbian identity in the nineteenth century. This essay posits that Mew's fascination with death in the works mentioned are inextricably tied up with her concerns with the performance of femininity which forbids the expression of lesbian sexuality.

Mansfield Park and The Domestic Prison

Who is Fanny Price, and what, exactly, is her game? A question critics and readers of Austen have been asking for quite some time. This essay seeks to understand Fanny's motives in the context of 18th century conduct books, contemporary women writers, and the proto-feminist movement of figures such as Wollstonecraft. In so doing this essay posits that Fanny is consciously engaged in a constant performance of femininity and conduct book femininity which she attempts to navigate to her own advantage, becoming complicit in the cementing of the domestic imprisonment of women, even as her performance takes its emotional and psychological toll.