My article discusses Travels in West Africa (1897), a travel narrative by the British woman writer Mary Henrietta Kingsley. In her depiction of her adventure in the West African land, Kingsley offers vivid portrayals of how Africans use their hands. Her observation of the hand reflects Victorians' growing interest in reading human hands. Noticeable about Victorian discourses of the hand is that they differentiate white hands from non-white ones, reducing the latter into an empty sign that does not project any evidence of human-specific potential for achieving high civilization of the kind that Europeans have. This perception is present in Kingsley's text as well, but a distinguishing feature of her writing is that she interprets the non-white hand as a symbol of its non-white subject's humanness. Evident in the text is that she persistently highlights how empathetically she embraces a wide variety of racial and cultural differences visualized through the hand. However, the focus of this article does not lie on how smoothly she adopts cultural relativism in her account of the non-white hand. Instead, the article looks at how her empathetic reading of the African hand in effect unfolds in ways that silence its non-white subject and allow her to bring to light her own adaptability to other cultures, which she perceives as an essentially feminine trait―something male imperial agents cannot have. The article therefore problematizes several moments of Kingsley's discovery of the African-specific bodily agency and revisits the process whereby she establishes her authorial position at the expense of Africans as a womanly woman imperialist to claim her place within the British Empire.

Mary Wroth casts Urania, who unmistakably speaks for the author as the title protagonist of Urania, in the role of a pragmatic counselor with the power of reason. Urania's advice brings to mind Lipsius's precepts of constancy. In early Stuart England, Lipsian constancy was sought in the place of English Parliament in order for MPs to preserve their right and duty as a counselor to the King. In this regard, Wroth's use of the term constancy extends to the public discussion of civic virtue. Urania is initially regarded as an insignificant woman whose advice is not worth listening to. However, Urania proves that she is worthy as a reasonable and great counselor. By demonstrating that women are also eligible as an effective counselor, Wroth herself participates in the public discourse of Lipsian constancy and Tacitism. Wroth, who could not officially present petitions to the King, deployed her political advice within her Urania. In the midst of James's prohibition on freedom of speech, Wroth implicitly criticizes the King's misrule as she materializes the political fantasy on the stage of Urania through the representation of the idealized king. Wroth strategically veils her warnings against the royal misrule as she averts the attention of readers from her treatment of political matters by publicizing her private story, the scandal with William Herbert. By casting Herbert in the role of an idealized Emperor, Wroth brings to the fore the contrast between the pseudo-pacifist King James and the warlike Herbert. Furthermore, Wroth offers her own advice on the best form of government by representing a limited monarchy in Urania. Disguising herself as an ignorant woman to veil her serious political counsel, Wroth present Urania as her own version Petition of Rights to James.

The aim of this study is to examine the theme of the failure of hegemonic masculinity in Romantic Gothic dramas: Remorse (1813), Manfred (1816-1817), and The Cenci (1819). I will work from Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley's major Gothic dramas written after the French Revolution as a way of investigating how the flaws of hegemonic masculinity are delineated and developed in order to redefine a new type of romantic masculinity. Male characters embodying traditional masculinity are represented as violent, vile, and even corrupt figures in Romantic Gothic dramas. These antagonists commit anti-ethical behavior without any sense of compunction, which shows the corruption of male power. These three Romantic Gothic dramas reflect the moral flaws of the male characters which lead to their demise. These moral flaws arise from their corrupt and aristocratic power, which they attempt to use to dominate the world. Against this backdrop of idealized femininity, oppressive masculinity is revealed as corrupt. For the Romantic poets, it was necessary to redefine idealized masculinity as a way to overcome their sense of destroyed illusions in reality. Idealized masculinity is related to the image of androgyny, which contains both masculine and feminine qualities in unity. This concept of androgyny comes from Plato's Symposium. It is a “communitarian symbol of human interconnection” (Andrews 442). This study of these dramas in terms of the failure of hegemonic masculinity not only exposes the poets' radical visions for an ideal society, but also reveals their sense of despair and frustration resulting from the gap between the ideal and reality.

This essay employs a risky strategy of de-historicization in reading Christina Rossetti's much-discussed poem, “Goblin Market,” in order to identify the pattern of utopian desire embedded in the text. Drawing from Jose Esteban Muñoz's emphasis on futurity in his consideration of queerness as a point in the utopian horizon, I argue that queer eroticism in “Goblin Market” evades historical underpinnings exactly because its state of jouissance is representable only as a dreamy, gestural, and ephemeral process, and poetry becomes the most appropriate form for preserving such a ghost-like gesture that can avoid the suffocating prison house of the present and project a potentially subversive shadow onto the futurity. For Rossetti, the reality is always already dominated by Victorian patriarchal and religious ideologies, but there is no clear deliberation on her side to destabilize and subvert that status quo. Instead, by way of representing queer performativity, she lets the text imagine what Muñoz calls “the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality,” something Rossetti herself is quite unconscious of, yet summoning inspirations for a radical alterity. However, despite my reliance on Muñoz's theorization of queer utopianism, this essay is not interested in Rossetti's actual political stance concerning gender insofar as I abandon any sort of historicization, which may be necessary in Muñoz's search for historical concreteness in tracing the queer traces. Rossetti's utopian future is not only indefinite (though Muñoz seems to deem it indefinite as well), but also non-existent in her cognitive realm, which makes her eroticism all the more autonomous and potential in emancipating itself from the grips of history.

In I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1983), Menchu does not recount her traumatic past to retraumatize herself or emphasize her status as a helpless, powerless victim of indiscriminate violence, economic exploitation, torture, and aggression committed by her ruthless oppressors and the Guatemalan military. Instead, Menchu vividly shows her postcolonial power to politically reappropriate her “imperfect Spanish,” “silence,” and “lies” in order to achieve the urgent aims she has in mind in her testimony. Speaking in a public, collective voice of marginalized groups such as Indians and women in her testimony, Menchu, with a clear political awareness, politicizes her personal trauma so as to salvage Mayan culture and end the massacre of her indigenous community. Menchu believes that telling traumatic stories of the poor, disenfranchised, and dispossessed people of Guatemala to the world will bring about social justice and change across the globe. Thus, standing as a representative of these disempowered people, she situates her trauma in a political-social context, rather than putting it in a personal memory. By politicizing her trauma and transcending the position of just being a witness to events in her testimony, she reforms herself as a brave, dauntless fighter, who lays bare and disseminates the truth about the infringements upon the human rights of silenced indigenous peoples of not only Latin America, but of the whole world. In this way, Menchu's testimonial narrative can have an enormous international impact on the national, ethnic, and gender liberation of people who are discriminated against, marginalized, and silenced all around the world.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's narrator, luncheoning with university fellows, spies a Manx cat and registers a lack in the conversation around her, a difference in the sound of voices, and speculates on the different kinds of poetry men and women might have hummed at parties prior to World War I. Finding the thought “ludicrous,” she explains her laughter by pointing to the tailless cat, thinking: “It is a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is strange what a difference a tail makes.” The “strangeness” of this “difference,” I argue, reflects the deep, intricate entanglement of human and nonhuman in Woolf's feminist thinking, which decenters patriarchal, humanist epistemologies and de-essentializes gender and other identity categories. Woolf's complex notion of androgyny, then, may be productively revisited from a posthumanist perspective, for her modernist anthropomorphisms subvert the will to dominate, universalize and hierarchize, inherent in anthropocentric thinking. Ultimately, her staging of new, less anthropocentric relations between human and nonhuman, “thinking of things in themselves,” generates a form of critique that denaturalizes hierarchy, affirms difference, and invites collaboration to create a world where the woman writer “shall find it possible to live and write her poetry.”