UC Irvine

“An Unoccupied Woman: American Women’s Writing, the Literary Spinster, and Feminist Care” takes seriously the question of what it means to care for and about a text—to like or even love a piece of writing and its author, in spite or because of its difficulties and its contradictions, its frustrations and its irrelevances. It considers what it means when to care for such a thing is embarrassing or unfashionable, or when that care is overlooked or underappreciated. It does so by tracking two connected yet disparate figures: that of the literary spinster and of the feminist critic. The spinster, in popular thought, hovers just outside the boundaries of legitimate care—neither maternal nor marital, any care performed by (or for) the spinster is inherently unproductive. The spinster herself, in fact, is inherently unproductive: she spins in place, never progressing toward marriage or reproductive coupledom and instead breaking or otherwise frustrating those plots for others. Despite these frustrating contradictions which so often render her illegible, the spinster is a figure to whom feminist criticism returns time and again, in a cycle of reclamation and disavowal that too often smooths over her messy incongruities. Across three chapters, “An Unoccupied Woman” reads the spinster as a particularly resonant figure for women’s writing at the end of the nineteenth century and a metonymic representation of the feminist literary critic as caretaker in the late twentieth century. Operating both as a thorough analysis of women’s writing in the late nineteenth century and as a theoretical revision of feminist critical practice, “An Unoccupied Woman” opens important lines of inquiry into gender and sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century, the history of feminist literary criticism, and the larger project of American women’s writing.