"In
The Bostonians, the analysis of women and publicity describes a broader dilemma: the more rationalized the analysis of human lives, the more uncertain the question of human agency--but also the more compelling the figure of woman as a representative of modern subjectivity. Among its other critical insights, the distinctly cerebral brand of literary analysis undertaken in realism discovers the power of a corporeal figure--the public woman--that is no longer explicable as merely an unreal spectacle."
Nancy Bentley, Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920 (Philadelphia, 2009).
Sarah Bernhardt as Theodora in Victorien Sardou's Theodora (1882).
see Jennifer Fleissner on woman as the 'emblematic' subject of naturalism. representations of modern political subjectivity?
