Women and Otherhood

Chair: Sarah Daw

“The Pilgrimage of Life. British Women Travelling on the Continent 1780-1830” by Heather Walker

This paper will examine whether some female travellers could develop a different attitude to the religious practice which they encountered on the Continent, to that of their male contemporaries. Most tourists adopted an anti-Catholic stance, but there may have been a gendered element to this attitude.  As Roy Porter pronounced, ‘it was a strain to be a gentleman without being an Anglican’.  Unlike male Grand Tourists, women were not returning home to inherit lands, titles or positions which required religious conformity. Whilst some men never travelled abroad again after they had achieved their Grand Tour, women who were not awarded this educational journey might travel extensively across Europe over many years. This may have given them the time and experience to modify their views from the blunt antipathy to Catholic services so often expressed by novice travellers of both sexes. 

“Censored by Forgetfulness: Two Female Writers Responding to the Social and Economic Transformations of Late Nineteenth Century Germany” by Sabrina Stolfa

The novels Licht und Schatten (1895) by Charlotte Niese and Ein moderner Märtyrer (1896) by Luise Westkirch address a broad middle class demographic and offer far-reaching observations and questions about what they saw as the pressing issues of their day. These authors, of bourgeois origin, were not prepared to present themselves in a radical light, yet remained socially engaged. The publication environment effectively censored what expression or ‘voice’ was available to them; thus they opt to avoid overt advocacy of contemporaneous womens’ rights movements. Charlotte Niese formed part of a recognisable contingent of authors who saw potential for an effective response in a “necessary strengthening of idealistic urges in all people regardless of gender”; Luise Westkirch concealed her more progressive gender revisionism by involving it in the narrative’s social thesis on the one hand, while treating it as an adjunct on the other. An evaluation of how successfully their social agenda may be said to have been realised requires a kind of distanced and even paradoxical referentiality in aesthetic parameters implicitly at work when considering concepts like ‘triviality’ and ‘significance’.

"Existing in the margins: Challenging ‘Self’, ‘Other’ and the boundaries of identity through the platform of fiction” by Lauren Hayhurst

My Creative Writing PhD thesis, The Nameless, explores how recent national and global conflicts have affected Muslim women living in Britain, and how attitudes towards this group have changed, both inside and outside the community. But who is ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, and what ‘community’? Feminist anthropologist, Lila Abu-Lughod (1991), reminds us of the ambiguities, as ‘the outsider never simply stands outside. What we call outside is a position within a larger political-historical complex.’ And not only does this complex exist within the external, national context, where tradition, class, mobility and stereotypes operate, but also within the internal, local context of our own self-awareness. If author Margaret Atwood (2002) is correct and ‘the mere act of writing splits the self in two,’ is fiction really a useful platform to contest the self/other binary? Or perhaps a useful platform is exactly one that claims no answers, but instead raises questions through the unresolved plurality of its meanings.

In this presentation I examine this dilemma by discussing the practical, personal and ethical intricacies of translating unfamiliar sensitivities into fiction.