ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, a central project of Victorian literary studies in the United States has been the re-examination and revaluation of Victorian liberalism. The history of the Liberal party; liberal attitudes towards the state; liberal selfcultivation; the enlightenment ideals of reason, discussion, and self-reflexivity-all have received extensive scholarly attention.1 Yet the new liberalism studies have been remarkably silent on the Woman Question. How the liberal self might be gendered, or what feminism and liberalism might have to do with one another, seem to be questions best left to feminists interested in that sort of thing, or questions that already led to an exhausted impasse in the 1980s, or even questions that a revived enthusiasm for liberal universalism would put to rest.2 Recent studies of Victorian literature and liberal theory, and of literature’s relation to the historical development of the Victorian liberal state have tended to skirt what is surely one of the largest and
most wide-ranging changes effected by liberal ideas: the change whereby gender ceases to seem a logical or valid criterion for determining eligibility to participate in the political process. This lacuna makes sense historically-part of the aim of the new liberalism studies is to get beyond the legacy of the 1980s and produce something new. But it also makes sense theoretically, since feminist theory is where some of the most powerful critiques of liberal universalism have emerged.
