{ She-who-must-be-obeyed! H. Rider Haggard, She, 1887

“CUSTOM” OLD “Authority” Desire / Animality “LIBERTY” MODERN “Freedom” Control / Rationality JS Mill’s Progressive Ideology Culture aims for “the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality.” --Matthew Arnold, C&A, 62.

 “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians” (13)  “Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior [previous] to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.” (14) The Politics of Time: JS Mill

 “Culture indefatigably tries… to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that.” (Arnold, C&A, 64).  “[The bourgeoisie] compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves” (Marx, CM 16) Creating a world in the “modern” image…

Gender, Power, & Desire

 “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female form which is styled accordingly”  An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen.” Laura Mulvey

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Venus Verticordia,

DG Rossetti, Lady Lilith, , Revised “… subtly of herself contemplative, Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave.”

She: feminist or anti-feminist?