The Flesh Made Word Female Figures and Women's Bodies

Helena Michie's provocative new work looks at how women's bodies are portrayed in a variety of Victorian literary and non-literary genres--from painting, poems, and novels, to etiquette, books, sex manuals, and pornography. After identifying a series of codes and taboos that govern the
depiction of women in such activities as eating and working, she then turns to the physical descriptions of Victorian heroines, focusing on those parts of their bodies that are erased, and on those that become fetishized in conventional description. Her vivid analysis moves forward in time with a
consideration of 20th-century "second wave" feminism and a discussion of the poetics of the body as articulated by feminist writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Making use of feminist, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic accounts of the figure of woman, and the relation of the body to the text,
The Flesh Made Word offers fresh readings of works by writers as diverse as the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Trollope, Hardy, Adrienne Rich, Olga Broumas, Audre Lorde, and Louise Gluck.

Examining the works of such Victorian writers as the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy, Michie discusses the codes and taboos which distance the reader from the female body, allowing `safe' bodily parts - like hands - and `safe' physical activities - like eating - to stand for other, unspeakable aspects of female physicality. She reveals how these codes function as safe textual spaces for the entrance of the seemingly excluded female body, and shows that in the stylized discourses of synecdoche, euphemism, physiognomy, and metaphor lie the possibilities of their own subversion.