The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency: Feminist Histories and the Horizon of Modernity

�� n the 1980s, feminist cultural history of the Victorian period manifested a decisive shift toward asserting the centrality of gender to the ideological advent of modernity. In her influential essay, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (1986), Joan Scott gave prominence to the notion that feminist history ideally aspires not only to uncover women in history, but to argue for the primacy of gender in the symbolic formations of culture and the political arrangements shaping social life. Such an agenda has been dramatically evident in theoretically minded feminist scholarship on the modern period, which has positioned women and cultural forms of femininity as vital structuring agents within history. A prime example of this approach would be Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987), which provocatively asserts that “the modern individual is first and foremost a female” (66). A Foucauldian understanding of the advent of modern power and its development throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries underwrites Armstrong’s bold claim, even as her work also aligns itself with the tradition of cultural materialism. 1 Armstrong’s book, as well as Mary Poovey’s roughly contemporaneous Uneven Developments: The Ideological Construction of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1988), locates gender, and more specifically the construction of ideal middle-class femininity, at the heart of the ideological formation of the modern bourgeois subject and its articulation in literary and social narratives. Similarly, Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (1995) assigns to women the primary task of consolidating and regulating cultural capital, a key form of bourgeois hegemonic power. In laying claim to forms of feminine power, and to the primacy of gender within modern ideologies, these critics nonetheless display a certain discomfort with the question of just how critically reflective modern women subjects might be. On the one hand, as I will show, I