ABSTRACT
The author describes the particular writers imbued their author characters with the signifiers of motherhood in a way that modified the dialectical dilemma between literary celebrity and gender/sex. As a consequence, the writer and her work were often vilified through a public smear campaign that denigrated them through a series of metaphors that equated women and their literary production as pestilence, trash, narcotics, and diseases. Women literary professionals responded in multiple ways to this coercion through representation. The gendered and sexed implications for writing and celebrity are profound. Given the prevailing Victorian stance that both public identity and artistry are male and masculine, we see a cultural imperative for the male writer to appropriate procreative powers, while the woman who writes must appropriate intellectual ability. When sex identity exists in such simultaneous overlap and contradistinction to gender roles in this case, when behavior is taken to be identical with biology the stability of both concepts is potentially at risk.
