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Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and Literature

Online ISBN:
9780199868902
Print ISBN:
9780195335910
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and Literature

Ned Schantz
Ned Schantz

Professor

Department of English, McGill University
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Published online:
1 September 2008
Published in print:
1 November 2008
Online ISBN:
9780199868902
Print ISBN:
9780195335910
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

For over two hundred years of narrative culture, when female characters try to get together, crazy things happen. Indeed, the greater the means at women’s disposal, the more severe and twisted is the anxious reaction. But behind this broad anxiety lurks a powerful ideal of sympathetic and strategic female networks, an ideal that takes its intimate shape from the expectations of communications media, and that underwrites the very culture that would deny it. The book examines novelistic culture from the British novel to Hollywood film as a series of responses to the threat and promise of female networks. In texts from Clarissa, Emma, and The Portrait of a Lady to Sorry, Wrong Number, Vertigo, and You’ve Got Mail, it argues that a recurring gothic nightmare haunts plots of courtship and marriage, and that the concept of female networks illuminates the exits, for culture and criticism alike. And while this study must of necessity visit an uncanny realm of lost messages and false suitors, telepathy and artificial intelligence, locked rooms and time-traveling stalkers, these occult concerns only confirm the power at stake in the most basic modes of female communication, in gossip, letters, and phones.

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