Nora Gilbert | University of North Texas (original) (raw)

Papers by Nora Gilbert

2021 MLA Annual Convention, Jan 7, 2021

Practically from its origins, and especially once it had been consolidated as a spectacle for mas... more Practically from its origins, and especially once it had been consolidated as a spectacle for mass consumption, American cinema had to deal with censorship by different authorities at local, state and federal levels. The industry responded to the problems arising from such censorship by introducing self-regulation, expressed in the Motion Picture Production Code, popularly known as the Hays Code. In addition to their influence on the subjects chosen and how these were treated, these mechanisms of censorship and self-regulation had a highly significant influence on the filmic form. What role did censorship play in the transition from the cinema of attractions to a more narrative model? Was it a determining factor in the establishment of the Institutional Mode of Representation? How did the Production Code interact with other systems and formulas associated with classical cinema, such as the star system or the different film genres? How did the progressive relaxation and subsequent ab...

Studies in the Novel, 2019

Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2015

Nora Gilbert, “A Servitude of One’s Own: Isolation, Authorship, and the Nineteenth-Century Britis... more Nora Gilbert, “A Servitude of One’s Own: Isolation, Authorship, and the Nineteenth-Century British Governess” (pp. 455–480) Much has been written, both during the Victorian era and in recent literary and cultural-historical criticism, about the plight of the nineteenth-century British governess, a plight that is largely attributed to her uncomfortable position of “status incongruence,” as M. Jeanne Peterson has usefully labeled it. Because the governess was deemed inferior to the family she worked for but superior to the family’s domestic servants, her free time was not uncommonly spent on her own—even, more specifically, in a room of her own. And, just as Virginia Woolf would envision in her landmark feminist treatise, the activity that this isolated, educated woman habitually and productively turned to was the activity of writing. Almost all resident governesses relied on letter writing as their primary source of connection to the outside world, but many also expressed their thoug...

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2012

In the wake of Foucault's influential retelling of the history of sexuality, a new school of ... more In the wake of Foucault's influential retelling of the history of sexuality, a new school of censorship theory emerged that was devoted to exposing and unpacking the paradoxically productive effects of censorious practices. This essay traces a particular strand of that paradox, labeled here the logic of scandal: the logic wherein discourse is authorized and amplified by feelings like shock and moral condemnation rather than stymied by them. To explore the ramifications of this logic for and within narrative art, I take as my subjects a novel written during the famously prudish Victorian era and a film produced under the famously stringent Production Code—W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve. In each the “scandalous” discursive acrobatics performed by the text's morally ambiguous heroine reflect the strategies of censorship evasion employed by the morally ambiguous artist who created her.

Eighteenth-Century Life, 2018

Abstract: This essay seeks to explore the pivotal role that female rebellion, refusal, and flight... more Abstract: This essay seeks to explore the pivotal role that female rebellion, refusal, and flight played in both the rise of the novel and the rise of modern feminism. To make my case for the ideological and narratological importance of what I am referring to as the “runaway-woman plot,” I concentrate on the early (indeed, to my mind, originary) novelistic writings of Aphra Behn. For even if Behn did not voice her interest in the Rights of Woman as overtly or polemically as did Mary Wollstonecraft in her landmark feminist Vindication, so many of Behn’s narratives hinge upon the question of what their female protagonists are and are not morally, socially, or legally permitted to do—and, more specifically, where their female protagonists are and are not morally, socially, or legally permitted to go—that it is hard not to detect in them a tacit expression of precisely such an interest. In performing close readings of two of Behn’s most complex and perverse runaway-woman narratives, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684–87) and The History of the Nun (1688), this essay recalibrates our sense of Behn’s connection with and contribution to what would come to be called the women’s rights movement.

Journal of Narrative Theory, 2018

From the moment Fred Astaire arrived in Los Angeles in 1933, studio executives and Hollywood colu... more From the moment Fred Astaire arrived in Los Angeles in 1933, studio executives and Hollywood columnists wondered, both privately and publicly, whether a ‘homely,’ ‘skinny,’ ‘sophisticated’ dancer would be able to function as a leading man. The fact that the answer proved to be a resounding yes has been largely credited to the woman who danced by Astaire’s side in nine of his first eleven film outings.1 According to John Mueller, for instance, “the reason so many women have fantasized about dancing with Fred Astaire is that Ginger Rogers conveyed the impression that dancing with him is the most thrilling experience imaginable” (8-9), while according to Katharine Hepburn, more famously and more cuttingly, the basis of Astaire and Rogers’ unprecedented collaborative success is that “He gives her class; she gives him sex” (qtd. in Levinson 75). Egalitarian as Hepburn’s quid pro quo parsing of the partnership may be, the Astaire-Rogers films do much to undermine the neatness of such a dichotomy. As Margaret T. McFadden has noted, the characters played by Astaire are often required to shake off their “effete, highbrow” ways and embrace Rogers’ earthier, more working-class aesthetic by the films’ endings (693); if anything, according to this reading and others like it, Rogers “gives” Astaire the right kind of “class” to please Depression-era viewers.2 What interests me in this article, though, is the giving of sex rather than of class. While I agree with Katharine Hepburn that it was Astaire who stood as the primary

<1> As a scholar who specializes in the seemingly disconnected fields of Victorian literature and... more <1> As a scholar who specializes in the seemingly disconnected fields of Victorian literature and classical Hollywood film, I am always looking for new and different ways to solder together my two research interests in the classroom. While I do teach more traditional, adaptation-based literature and film courses on occasion, my preference is to move outside the arena of adaptation studies—to teach novels and films that speak to each other without speaking over each other, as I like to put it to my students. One course that has been particularly successful in this regard is a Literature and Gender course that I call " Women Behaving Badly: Victorian Sensation Fiction and Hollywood Film Noir. " For although they are linked by neither time nor place nor medium, sensation fiction and film noir do have a striking number of formal, thematic, and production-history attributes in common: both erupted on the popular culture scene and were produced, for the most part, over a contained period of one or two decades; both are " genre fictions " that play into audience expectations even as they work to subvert and rewrite them; both feature plots that revolve around scandalous and/or criminal acts, which must be discovered by some form of detective work; both of their narrative structures emphasize the importance of—or, rather, the inescapability of—the dark and shadowy past. <2> But what interests me most, from a pedagogical standpoint, about the cousinly genres of sensation fiction and film noir is the way they persistently, obsessively, and viscerally dramatize the (perceived) social threat of defiant and deviant female behaviors and desires. They do this, most obviously, by providing us with some of the most infamous examples of the " femme fatale " figure in all of British literature and Hollywood film: Lucy Audley from Lady Audley's Secret(1862), Lydia Gwilt from Armadale (1866), Phyllis Dietrichson from Double Indemnity (1944), Kathie Moffat from Out of the Past (1947), and so on. Yet the role of female transgression in both sensation fiction and film noir is, as literary and film scholars have respectively observed, a complex one; film noir's famed cinematographic stylings notwithstanding, these are not stories that are told in black and white. Indeed, the critical ©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue

Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Nov 2011

PMLA, May 2012

In the wake of Foucault’s influential retelling of the history of sexuality, a new school of cens... more In the wake of Foucault’s influential retelling of the history of sexuality, a new school of censorship theory emerged that was devoted to exposing and unpacking the paradoxically productive effects of censorious practices. This essay traces a particular strand of that paradox, labeled here the logic of scandal: the logic wherein discourse is authorized and amplified by feelings like shock and moral condemnation rather than stymied by them. To explore the ramifications of this logic for and within narrative art, I take as my subjects a novel written during the famously prudish Victorian era and a film produced under the famously stringent Production Code—W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve. In each the “scandalous” discursive acrobatics performed by the text’s morally ambiguous heroine reflect the strategies of censorship evasion employed by the morally ambiguous artist who created her. (NG)

Books by Nora Gilbert

"Better Left Unsaid" is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from the central allegat... more "Better Left Unsaid" is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from the central allegations that are traditionally leveled against it. Taking two genres generally presumed to have been stymied by the censor's knife—the Victorian novel and classical Hollywood film—this book reveals the varied ways in which censorship, for all its blustery self-righteousness, can actually be "good" for sex, politics, feminism, and art.

Book Reviews by Nora Gilbert

Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Mar 2008

Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Oct 2009

In Mary Ann Mason and Eve Mason Ekman&#x27;s engaging new study, Mothers on the Fast Trac... more In Mary Ann Mason and Eve Mason Ekman&#x27;s engaging new study, Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can Balance Family and Careers, the mothering issues that have fueled the flames of discussion on Oprah and her kin for decades are given a much-...