ABSTRACT

In the opening pages of ‘Femininity’, the fifth of his New Introductory Lectures (1933), Sigmund Freud poses the ‘riddle of the nature of femininity’ as an unresolved question that ‘people have knocked their heads against’ throughout human history. Commiserating with one sex and winding up the other, Freud goes on, tongue-in-cheek, to separate and gender the subjects and objects of the interrogation: ‘men’ it seems have not ‘escaped worrying over this problem’ but ‘to those of you who are women this will not apply – you yourselves are the problem’ (Freud 1973: 146). Yet as Freud knew very well, women had been ‘worrying’ over the problem of ‘femininity’ at least as long as men. For although femininity may be defined as a set of attributes ascribed to biologically sexed females, what exactly those attributes are, and the extent to which any given version of femininity is natural or cultural, have been debated long and hard by women themselves. When, for example, Charlotte Brontë’s heroine, Jane Eyre, speaks passionately to the reader of the gendered division of emotions: ‘Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel’, she is challenging the

commonsense understanding of femininity in the 1840s, and, by implication, its scientific as well as its social basis (Brontë 1987: 96). In life as well as in fiction, one can both ‘live’ a gendered identity in all its complexity, and hold its received definition at arm’s length. In fact, the analysis of femininity by women has a long pedigree in its own right. Later in the chapter we will turn to some key moments when femininity was under particular pressure and scrutiny, exploring them through both women’s fiction and feminist theory and criticism.