Past forms, present concerns: reading transhistorically for feminised labour

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article makes the claim that experiences of feminised work are represented through literary forms that recur across disparate genres, periods, and media. Drawing on Caroline Levine’s concept of form and taking a transhistorical approach to the study of literary representations, the article compares the 1952 novel Excellent Women by Barbara Pym and the Instagram comics of Liana Finck. While these texts do not invite immediate comparison, the article demonstrates that Pym and Finck use similar formal strategies in their depictions of feminised labour. Comparing these case studies reveals recurring forms of circularity, incompletion, and ironic comedy, which are used to represent the working lives of women. In both cases, the female protagonists are caught up in feminised experiences of work resulting in resignation to seemingly endless repetition. The article argues that the affordances of these forms capture transhistorically occurring traits of feminised work, thus giving shape to experiences that are not limited to a particular historical moment. Since contemporary working conditions are becoming increasingly feminised, the article concludes that looking to representations of feminised work across time can illuminate experiences of feminisation today, in waged as well as unwaged contexts.KEYWORDS: Affectfeminisationformlabourtranshistorical readingwork AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to thank Ida Aaskov Dolmer, Ella Fegitz, and Bryan Yazell for their feedback during the writing of this article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Jane Jenson, Elisabeth Hagen, and Ceallaigh Reddy (eds.), Feminization of the Labor Force: Paradoxes and Promises (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016); Cristina Morini, ‘The Feminization of Labour in Cognitive Capitalism’, Feminist Review, no. 87 (2007), pp. 40–59; Kathi Weeks, ‘Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 45.3–4 (2017), pp. 37–58.2 Jasper Bernes, Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).3 See Emily J. Hogg and Peter Simonsen (eds.), Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021); Barbara Korte and Frédéric Regard (eds.), Narrating Poverty and Precarity in Britain (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014); Michiel Rys and Bart Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work: 1840 to the Present (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) for recent discussion of precarity in relation to literature and popular culture.4 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 16.5 Weeks, ‘Down with Love’, p. 38.6 Ibid., p. 38, see also McRobbie Be Creative pp. 88–9.7 Susan J. Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction (London: Pluto Press, 2020), pp. 58–9, see also Silvia Federici, Wages against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975), p. 5.8 Tithi Bhattacharya (ed.), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. (London: Pluto Press, 2017); Ferguson, Women and Work.9 Implicit in this shift is the assumption that, on the social level, white middle-class men’s responsibility for household work will often remain minimal. The notion of the housewife as a feminine norm relies on universalising a white middle-class experience.10 Nancy Fraser, ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’, New Left Review, no. 100 (2016), pp. 99–117: 100.11 Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, transl. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2018).12 Arlie Hochschild, with Anne Machung, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, revised ed. (New York: Penguin, 2012).13 Morini, ‘Feminization’, p. 42.14 Lisa Adkins and Eeva Jokinen, ‘Introduction: Gender, Living and Labour in the Fourth Shift’, NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 16.3 (2008), pp. 138–49.15 Rita Felski, “‘Context Stinks!’”, New Literary History, 42.4 (2011), pp. 573–91; Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Michaela Bronstein, Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).16 Levine, Forms, p. 16.17 Caroline Levine, ‘Model Thinking: Generalization, Political Form, and the Common Good’, New Literary History, 48.4 (2017), pp. 633–53: 639.18 Ibid.19 Bronstein, Out of Context, p. 8.20 Ibid.21 Ibid., p. 9.22 Levine, ‘Model Thinking’, p. 643.23 Ibid., p. 645–9.24 Alexis B. Moraitis and Jack Copley, ‘Productive and Unproductive Labour and Social Form: Putting Class Struggle in Its Place’, Capital & Class, 41.1 (2017), pp. 91–114.25 Levine, Forms, p. 3.26 Ibid., p. 16.27 David Sweeney Coombs and Danielle Coriale, ‘V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism’, Victorian Studies, 59.1 (2016), pp. 87–9.28 Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978 [1952]), p. 5. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.29 On the spinster in modern fiction, see Hope Howell Hodgkins, Stylish Spinsters: Spark, Pym, and the Postwar Comedy of the Object’, Modern Fiction Studies, 54.3 (2008), pp.523–43.30 Karl Miller, ‘Barbara Pym’s Hymn’, London Review of Books, 2.4 (1980), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n04/karl-miller/barbara-pym-s-hymn [Date accessed 18 April 2023], n.p.31 Estella Tincknell, ‘Jane or Prudence? Barbara Pym’s Single Women, Female Fulfilment and Career Choices in the “Age of Marriages”’, Critical Survey, 18.2 (2006), pp. 31–44: 31.32 Ibid.33 Claire Barwise, ‘“You make Everything into a Joke”: The Forward-Looking Feminism of Elaine Dundy and Barbara Pym’, Feminist Modernist Studies, 5.1 (2022), pp. 54–71: 54.34 See e.g. Jeffrey Peer, ‘Hot Spinsters: Revisiting Barbara Pym’s Virtuous Style’, Journal of Modern Literature, 44.3 (2021), pp. 93–111; as well as Tincknell.35 Mildred and Everard’s marriage is referred to in Pym’s Jane and Prudence (1953), Less Than Angels (1955) and An Unsuitable Attachment (1982).36 Having ’comics-like’ properties, inviting a reading of something as a comic; see Colin Beineke, ‘On Comicity’, Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, 1–2 (2017), pp. 226–53.37 Liana Finck, ‘Work in Order to Relax in Order To’, Instagram, 14 June 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/Cew8ENXFfoH/ [Date accessed 14 April 2023].38 Liana Finck, ‘The Only One Who can Do It’, Instagram, 21 April 2022), https://www.instagram.com/p/CcoGpHalRQV/ [Date accessed 14 April 2023].39 Liana Finck, ‘Write to distract yourself from life, make cartoons to distract yourself from writing, take on freelance to distract yourself from cartoons, teach to distract yourself from freelance, and focus on life a bit to distract yourself from anxiety over not having enough work’, Instagram, 14 December 2021, https://www.instagram.com/p/CXecYRZF1yx/ [Date accessed 14 April 2023].40 Liana Finck ‘From My Free Newsletter. Link in STORIES’, Instagram, 12 October 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CjnyBqlLTS4/ [Date accessed 14 April 2023].41 Liana Finck, ‘Leaving the House in the Morning’, Instagram, 23 June 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CfJZU27L5I_/ [Date accessed 14 April 2023].42 Liana Finck, ‘I Think I Posted this Before’, Instagram, 25 December 2021, https://www.instagram.com/p/CX6MARMlcKL/ [Date accessed 14 April 2023].43 Jennifer L. Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 9.44 Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, 2nd ed., (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1988), p. 327.45 Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity, pp. 9–10.46 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkely, CA: Crossing Press, 2007); see also Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (London: Ignota Press, 2019 [1986]).47 While Finck is not unique in this approach, she is uniquely successful in it. Artists such as Julia Wertz and Pia Bramley employ similar visuals and affective styles but have significantly smaller followings and public recognition. Cartoonists with high follower counts and similar thematic interests, such as Cassandra Calin, Lucy Knisley, and Mary Catherine Starr, employ art styles that do not challenge conventional aesthetic norms.48 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).49 Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, ‘Comedy has Issues’, Critical Inquiry, 43.2 (2017), pp. 233-249: 235.50 In this, the novel is representative of Pym’s oeuvre more generally, in which a critical and ironic perspective on marriage is a recurrent preoccupation. On this, see Tincknell, ‘Jane or Prudence?’ and Jean E. Kennard, ‘Barbara Pym and Romantic Love’, Contemporary Literature, 34.1 (1993), pp. 44–60.51 Barwise, ‘You make Everything into a Joke’, p. 60.52 Ben Highmore, ‘Homework: Routine, Social Aesthetics and the Ambiguity of Everyday Life’, Cultural Studies, 18, no. 2–3, 306–27.53 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).54 Levine, Forms, p. 3.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Carlsberg Foundation (grant number CF20-0554).