Misanthropy by Andrew Gibson

Author:Andrew Gibson
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

WOMEN, MODERNITY AND MISANTHROPY

It is difficult to see, then, how the case for misanthropy on the basis of the experience of those who have suffered extreme historical damage should make absolutely no appeal to us. How exactly would one dismiss an Irishman or woman who asserted in 1900 that the Irish people had for many centuries suffered gross historical injustice and maltreatment at the hands of a nation that took itself and was taken by others to be one of the world’s great civilized powers, had neither been able to save themselves nor been rescued by anyone else, and therefore had good reason not to think highly of humanity? But I want to pause for a moment and underline the fact that, in the work of O’Brien, Kavanagh and other modern Irish writers, Irish misanthropy persists after liberation from British rule. In O’Brien and Kavanagh, the misanthropy that springs from a history of victimization resists the narrative of ready emancipation from it, refuses to grant it any weight for thought. There is a misanthropy that carries on through the modern drive to emancipation, lingers within, survives, may even be born of and nourished by it. This chapter is about such a misanthropy, and my examples will be modern women.

Any woman reader of this book may well have been bubbling with increasing irritation at its masculine focus. The texts I have been quoting stubbornly keep on equating humanity at large with man. My book has seemed from time to time to mimic them in this. But it has also repeatedly asked questions about the defensibility of the misanthropic attitude, in effect sounding sceptical about what has been, historically, a predominantly masculine orientation. Surely, then, misanthropy was in fact a function of backwardness. If, as must self-evidently be the case, until the modern age, more or less all the misanthropists, or those we know about, were men, didn’t women just know better (and wouldn’t they have said so, given half a chance)? The rise of the modern feminisms calls time on misanthropy, or so the argument might seem to go; misanthropy swiftly becomes irrelevant, obsolete. With the integration of women into the modern, democratic constituencies, humankind redefines itself, and for the better. But has the continuing emancipation of women remade the world effectively enough to keep the misanthropists at bay? Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst proclaimed that ‘men were responsible for the present [dire] state of affairs’, but that women would successfully ‘undo’ their ‘terrible mistakes’.1 Have her hopes been borne out? Not all our contemporaries have confidently thought so. This chapter, however, is about some great modern women who never shared her optimism in the first place.

The women’s movement, or what is sometimes known as ‘first wave’ feminism, particularly in Britain and the United States, began in the 1860s and 1870s. In Britain, the National Society for Women’s Suffrage was founded in 1872. But the constitutionalist suffragists that emerged from this made comparatively little headway until, with the emergence of the suffragette movement

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.