The Reality of Representation: (Un)Defining the meaning of Female Authorship

So I've been thinking a lot about representation as of late. What representation really means, and whether it is in fact through representation that we can--and do--find the real.

How fortuitous, then, that Dobson and Zagarell's chapter on women writers in the early republic talks of--among other things--this very issue. Or at least the idea of representation. They don't further philosophize about it, which is fine. Leaves it open for me. According to Dobson and Zagarell, "by example and implication, the conventional writing that women produced expanded the representations of women in American culture itself" (369). My initial connotation of "representation" is not a particularly positive one, in that it makes me think of something artificial. And didn't women want to produce something real? But, in early America in particular, was there "a real thing" when it came to national identities, of men or women? It seems to me that was what was still being figured out, what people were looking for, and how were they to find it without any kind of model? In this sense, then, I do think that representations came before the real thing.

Of course, there was not any sort of clear cut representation of womanhood. Gender confusion and performativity are not issues new to us--they existed then, too. What did it mean to be a woman? And did writing genuinely answer this question? Dobson and Zagarell talk about the decision women (and surely we can extend this conversation to men, too)  faced in regards to whether to use a pseudonym or their real name: what's in a name? As we've talked about in class before, money was so often a driving factor. Sigourney knew there was money in her real name (albeit not as much money as KeSha has in hers...), so she used it.

But did she, or other women, who were writing for money, write what they really wanted to write, or what would sell? Dobson and Zagarell tell us that "The construction of female authorship that emerged during the 1830s was increasingly restrictive" (377). Representations of women as domestic dominated (though they were not the only representations), and these representations served as a catalyst in the construction of female national identity.

Yet, perhaps because so much of women's writing dominated on local, not national levels, and because there were so very many marginal voices fighting to be heard, voices that did not adhere to the domestic trope, there was not a "uniform definition of female authorship by midcentury" (381). Is this a bad thing? And was there really a uniform definition of female authorship thereafter?

I think it shows how dynamic women were, that female authorship could not be defined in a boxed-up form, especially considering there seemed to be a correlation between the definition of female authorship and the definition of female-in-general.

The debate over the power of intellect in regards to gender has not disappeared in full today, and I think it is just as hard now to define what it means to be a "female author" and what it means to be a "male author." Quite frankly, I'd be more concerned and disheartened if such things were easy.