Passions of the Voice

Book excerpt: "In The Passions of the Voice Claire Kahane argues that the subversion of gender definitions promoted especially by feminism in the late nineteenth century had an unsettling effect on narrative discourse. The emergent figure of the speaking woman, both as narrative trope and as historical agent - personified by the feminist orator - created an anxiety of imagination in Victorian writers. The result is fiction in which the narrative voice loses control of the story it is telling, especially when it evokes the figure of the woman as speaking subject." "Kahane begins with a reading of Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria," a text in which Freud develops the concepts of hysterical narrative and of transference by acting out and then analyzing his own hysteria as he unfolds the meanings of the Dora case. Subsequent chapters explore the hysterical voice in Florence Nightingale's Cassandra, Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, Alice James's Diary, Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm, Henry James's The Bostonians, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, T. S. Eliot's "Hysteria," Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. Kahane argues that each of these texts exhibits features of a discourse in crisis, and that against these textual instabilities the narrative voice struggles to find a form that will contain the confusions of its utterance. She concludes that, for modernist writers such as Conrad and Ford, hysteria was not a psychopathology subject to cure but a sign of the time."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved