Should Little Women be in International Relations? A Dialogue between the Opposing Traditions of the Novel and International Relations1 

Vanessa PupavacSchool of Politics and International RelationsUniversity of NottinghamNG7 2RDvanessa.pupavac@nottingham.ac.uk     Abstract 

The article discusses the opposing traditions of the novel and the discipline of International Relations and the need for dialogue between IR and the key literary genre of modern society. The article highlights the gendered public and private spheres, and the tensions between the individual and history, which underpin their opposition, drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s reading of Kant’s political philosophy. The novel’s consciously domestic and sentimental character, associated with women’s historically restricted lives, opposed its inclusion in International Relations. Nevertheless a shared sense of the tragic human condition unites the traditions of the novel and International Relations. The novel tradition found the individual to be a site of conflict and questioned cultural representations of women as ‘angels in house’. The novel offers insights for critically analysing women’s entry into International Relations as idealised subjects and global governance: its understanding of the individual, human feelings and relationships; and its erosion of the divisions between the international and the national, and the public and the private domains. 

Novel approaches to International Relations 

I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy, and it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight with papa, and I can only stay at home and knit like a poky old woman’, and Jo shook the blue army-sock till the needles rattled like castanets, and her ball bounded across the room2

So Louisa Alcott’s classic Little Women introduces her impatient heroine Jo March. Little Women has been stereotyped as sentimental drivel (unread its advocates suspect), but inspired feminists including Simone de Beauvoir and Elaine Showalter.3

The power of Alcott’s Little Women for generations of women has been how it asserts women’s independence through lively, strong-willed sisters, acting in a supportive community of women, striving to integrate their creative ambitions and their personal relations. The novel as a proto-feminist text legitimises claims for women’s independence and paid work from the heart of the home decades before women’s suffrage began to be recognised internationally.4

1 I would like to thank colleagues and anonymous reviewers who gave very useful comments on earlier versions of this paper. 2 Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (London: Penguin, 1989): 3. 3 Simone De Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963): 89-91, 104-105; Elaine Showalter, ‘Introduction’, in Alcott, 1989: vii-xxviii.4 Alcott, 1989: 118.

The history of the novel and the history of women’s emancipation in the West are closely linked. Women developed consciousness of their condition through the novel, while any history of the novel cannot ignore women’s role in the genre’s development. Feminist writing has strongly identified with the novel and its special affinity with women’s experience. The rise of feminist approaches in International Relations may encourage its use as a familiar source in feminist writing. However the novel does not have an established presence in International Relations, although it is commonly studied in cognate disciplines like history, area studies and post-colonial studies.  Could Little Women contribute to our understanding of global governance and its gender politics?

The article discusses the opposing traditions of the novel and International Relations. My analysis deliberately emphasises the differences between the two traditions and selects examples of the classic English novel to draw out their distinct characteristics before identifying underlying commonalities. I begin by highlighting the novel’s significance for women’s writing and philosophical thinking. Little Women’s heroine is tempted by Kantian philosophy until warned away by her future husband. To Jo’s frustration, women were not supposed to write philosophical books or be actors in war. I discuss the novel’s relative absence from International Relations and how the novel’s consciously domestic and sentimental character, associated with women’s historically restricted lives, opposed its inclusion in International Relations. I then consider the historical novel, alongside Kant’s explicit endorsement of historical transformation, and his contrary equal condemnation of its horrors.5 I discuss the longing to retreat into the private world of feeling and the contrary longing to escape into the public world of action. I observe how the novel discovers the individual to be a site of conflict and how a shared sense of the tragic human condition unites the traditions of the novel and International Relations. The novel questions cultural representations of women as ‘angels in house’. Alcott, author of Little Women, Good Wives and other wholesome family fiction, also wrote melodramatic fiction portraying satanic figures behind angelic domestic masks. Finally I conclude how the novel offers insights for critically analysing women’s entry into International Relations as idealised subjects. The novel may help us explore the limitations of global governance’s understanding of individuals, their feelings and relationships; and the implications of its erosion of the divisions between the international and the national, and the public and the private domains, which have informed the traditions of both the novel and International Relations. 

Women’s consciousness and the novel  

Virginia Woolf’s influential A Room of One’s Own describes the shelves of women’s writing as being almost exclusively novels until the twentieth century.6 The novel genre, evolving from women’s letter writing, became pivotal for women to explore artistic expression, personal experiences, social problems and philosophical ideas.7

The genre’s strong association with women encouraged both female and male writers

5 Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ in Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970c): 41-53; Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’ in Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970e): 93-124. 6 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Granada, 1977): 63.  7 Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel (London: Pandora, 1986); Woolf, 1977.  

like Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft and others to address the women’s question through novels. Many feminist autobiographical writings like Simone de Beauvoir allude to the defining influences of Alcott’s Little Women and other novels.8 Plays including Henrik Ibsen’s The Doll House and August Strindberg’s Miss Julie have also been important. Indeed Aristophanes’ Lysistrata has been considered the first international feminist text. But the novel was the genre above all, which women not only used, but shaped and made their own.9 Symbolically the female identity of the novel is captured in the many novels, which bear individual women’s names: Emma, Evelina, Indiana, Jane Eyre, Lelia, Ruth, and Shirley. This close identification includes novels by male writers: Pamela, Clarissa, Madame Bovary, Tess of D’Urbervilles, Anna Karenina and Effi Briest to name just a few classic works.10 Women, whether as writers or readers, propelled the novel’s establishment and development as the dominant modern literary form.

Women’s philosophical and social engagement through the novel helped advance women’s voices and claims in the public sphere. Historically female writers like Alcott, Frances Burney or George Eliot used fictional genres rather than direct philosophical writing, even if they were embedded in intellectual circles and were ‘not by nature novelists’.11 Alcott’s intellectual ambitions are reflected in her attempts to resist pressure from publishers to write safe light fiction. Jo in Little Women is almost seduced by Hegelian and Kantian metaphysics.12 But ‘intellectual freedom depends on material things’, Woolf bluntly stated in her essay A Room of One’s Own.13 Or as Jo is advised by her sister, ‘when you’ve got a name, you can afford to digress, and have philosophical and metaphysical people in your novels’.14 Alcott wrote popular fiction to support her family, allowing her father, Branson Alcott, to pursue his philosophical writing, while constraining her own.15

Yet exclusion from the public sphere alone cannot explain why the novel became so important to women writers to address philosophical ideas and social problems. Crucially women writers found the novel could recognise women’s struggles and the importance of the private sphere in its own right. As Jean Elshtain’s seminal Public Man, Private Woman (1981) argues:

To affirm a vision of the private-familial experiences as having its own dignity and purpose is to insist that particular experiences and spheres of social relations exude their own values and purposes, and have ends not attainable by, or within, other spheres. To assert the continued necessity of such relations

8 de Beauvoir, 1963; Showalter, 1989.9 Aristophanes The Acharnians; The Clouds; Lysistrata (London: Penguin, 1973).10 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Hogarth, 1987). 11 Woolf, 1977: 64.12 Alcott, 1989: 351-353.13 Woolf, 1977: 103.14 Alcott, 1989: 270.15 Sarah Elbert, A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott's Place in American Culture  (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

and a particular notion of their reconstructed vitality is to recognise that we are all impoverished if all of life falls under a single set of terms.16

Novel as lived philosophy 

The Platonic philosophical tradition sees the body and its senses of pain and pleasure as distractions from the mind, while the Aristotelian tradition acknowledges the senses as important for stimulating thinking. The novel has particularly lent itself to philosophical thinking, seeking to reconcile mind and body, and the individual and society. Kant’s philosophy, drawing upon the Aristotelian tradition, suggests cognition arises through the senses and intellect.17 Alcott’s Little Women alludes to Kantian philosophy and I will draw attention to Kant’s relevance to relation between the novel and International Relations. Here I apply Arendt’s reading of Kant, because Arendt engages with the tensions in Kant’s moral philosophy and philosophy of history, while her own writing extensively engaged with the characteristics of the public and the private, and the individual and history, which are significant to the opposing traditions of the novel and International Relations.18 Kant’s philosophy, founded on human ‘unsociable sociability’, is interested in how frictions between individuals and different spheres develop human understanding and sociability.19

Reason and sentiment are often represented as belonging to different gendered spheres, including by Kant,20 and are extensively addressed in feminist writing from Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women21 to Jean Elshtain’s Public Man, Private Woman. Kant sees philosophy as fundamentally about evaluating life, and since life concerns everybody, philosophy is something that anybody may potentially do, not just philosophers.22 And to evaluate life, the philosopher needs to live among fellow citizens, not just fellow philosophers, for Kant believes that sociability, communication and the capacity to imagine other’s standpoints are vital for thinking and allowing us to appeal to community sense and achieve relative impartiality.23

Impartial judgement does not stand above society, but is achieved through engagement with society, while examples synthesising the general and the particular help develop judgement.24 Kant believes philosophical thinking should be popularised

16 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981): 334-335.17 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): 27; Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1929): 300; Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Hague: Martinus Njihoff, 1974): 21-29.18 Arendt, 1992; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Kimberly Hutchings, Kant, Critique and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996); Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970a). 19 Arendt, 1992: 10-12; Hutchings, 1996: 48-50; Kant, 1970c: 44-45.20 Kant, 1974: 166-173.21 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (London: Penguin, 1992).22 Arendt, 1992: 28-29; Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 13; Immanuel Kant, ‘Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”’ in Basic Writings of Kant, ed. Allan Wood (New York: Modern Library, 2001b): 133-142; Immanuel Kant, The Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (London and New York, 2005): 76-77).23 Arendt, 1992: 10-12; 72-74; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952): Section 40: 150-154.24 Arendt, 1992: 38-39, 76; Kant, 1952, Section 40: 150-154.

through society and contribute to the rights of man,25 while Wollstonecraft’s Vindication shows how philosophy has degraded women and denied them rights. Kant’s own philosophy denies women the possibility of full citizenship rights.26 And yet his philosophy, not withstanding his prejudices against women, logically implies women’s involvement in making philosophical judgements.

Here we come to the novel’s relevance to philosophy for all and the struggle for women’s emancipation. Kant is sceptical of the genre’s philosophical potential.27 And he is no champion of women’s emancipation and believes women threaten masculine virtue, although they have a role in cultivating and refining society.28 Yet Kant’s philosophy gives importance to the imagination, which liberates us from private experiences and helps us enlarge our minds towards developing relative impartiality and good judgement.29 The novel represents ‘ethics in action’ or at least imaginative action. Novels allow us to visit other places and other standpoints and develop our general understanding, beyond our particular experience, yet appealing to us through the novel’s portrait of particular lives. Philosophers like Rousseau used the novel to outline how a philosophy could be applied in individuals’ lives.30 Novels’ merits over traditional historical or philosophical writing were explicitly debated at the end of the eighteenth century. The writers Joanna Baillie, Maria Edgeworth and William Godwin among others argued for the moral superiority of romances against the dry or bellicose character of historical accounts.31 Individual stories striking the imagination enlarge understanding of human nature and foster better judgement and justice.32

Understanding individuals’ strengths and weaknesses, their motives and personal experiences helps us learn historical lessons for the benefit of humanity. Historical romances, following historical figures into the closet or showing ordinary private individuals, touch our sympathies and leave lasting (moral) impressions. 33

Kant’s philosophy seeks to give dignity to individuals and is concerned the idea of infinite historical progress denies their importance.34 Kant believes an individual’s life should be treated as a meaningful story, whereas infinite historical progress contradicts individual stories with a beginning and an end. The novel as a genre gives importance to individual stories and has consciously sought to portray ordinary women and men, neglected or caricatured by traditional philosophy. Historically the novel has offered women a voice and an audience in which to assert women’s dignity

25 Arendt, 1992: 29, 38-39; Kant, 1929: 312; Kant, 2009: 13.26 Immanuel Kant, ‘On the Common Saying: “This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice’ in Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970d): 61-87; Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Hague: Martinus Njihoff, 1974): 79-80, 166-173; Susan Mendus, ‘Kant’, in Women in Western Political Philosophy, eds. Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1987): 21-43.27 Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ in Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970c): 50; Kant, 1974: 5 & 79.28 Kant, 1970d; Kant, 1974: 79-80; 169; 166-173; Mendus, 1987.29 Arendt, 1992: 38-39, 73-76; Kant, 1952, Section 40: 153-154.30 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or, On Education (New York: Basic Books, 1979).31 Joanna Baillie, ‘Introductory Discourse’, in The Dramatic and Poetical Works (London: Longman, 1853);  Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); William Godwin, ‘Of History and Romance’, in Things as they are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988): 359-373.32 Baillie, 1853: 4-5.33 Baillie, 1858: 5-9; Edgeworth, 2000: 1-3; Godwin, 1988.34 Kant, 1970c: 44.

and contest the degraded role assigned to them by society and male philosophers like Kant and Rousseau. The novel has been used to explore the course of a woman’s life, her relations, and how society fosters her degradation or self-realisation. Wollstonecraft observed women could not develop general thinking or interest in wider public affairs because their restricted lives, restricted forms of polite conversation and lack of solitude discouraged thinking from other standpoints.35 The novel engaged women with particular characters whose preoccupations they could recognise and take them beyond their narrow perspectives. The novel could thereby help women to bridge the gap between their limited personal outlook and abstract writing, and enlarge their minds and potentially develop their philosophical thinking.36

Significant feminist thinking continues to be conducted in novels as lived ethics, whether Maya Angelou’s explorations of race and gender or Margaret Atwood’s explorations of gender and environmentalism. Consequently the novel remains important in gender studies. Nevertheless the novel, as the dominant modern literary form and its centrality in feminist writing, has not translated into International Relations.  The novel’s neglect in International Relations 

International Relations as a discipline has historically been influenced by approaches from diverse disciplines, notably history, political philosophy, political science, psychology and sociology. The discipline in the last two decades has opened up to alternative approaches, but has been slow to embrace the novel as the dominant modern literary form. The novel is still not quite respectable in International Relations as a substantial source to analyse international politics. The sub-genre of science fiction has gained interest,37 but the discipline tends to regard these contributions as light-hearted exercises from the main business of International Relations – such as its reception of Harry Potter and International Relations.38 Literary sources tend to be used in International Relations as incidental decorative colour. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is an enduring metaphor in International Relations writing on Africa.

[Reference to the novel by International Relations scholars is more common in monographs or edited books than International Relations journals. The International Relations journal Millennium seems the most receptive to the novel with its 2001 special issue on Images and Narratives in World Politics. Jutta Weldes’ edited volume on science fiction and world politics indicates how much more could be mined from the sub-genre.39 Generally though, we have to search hard for the novel’s substantial rather than incidental use in International Relations journals.40 Articles on

35 Wollstonecroft, 1992: 132, 150, 314-315.36 ibid.37 Chris Brown, ‘Special Circumstances: Intervention by a Liberal Utopia’, Millennium, Vol. 30, No. 3, (2001): 625-633; Jutta Weldes, ‘Globalisation is Science Fiction’, Millennium, Vol. 30, No. 3, (2001): 647-667; Jutta Weldes, (ed) To Seek Out New Worlds: Science Fiction and World Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).38 Daniel Nexon and Iver Neumann (eds) Harry Potter and International Relations (Langham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).   39 Weldes, 2003.40 Anthony Lang and James Lang, ‘Between Theory and History: The Remains of the Day in the International Relations Classroom’, Political Science and Politics, Vol. 31, No. 2, (1998): 209-215. 

themes such as the relationship between the American spy novel and the Cold War are more likely to appear in history journals.41] 

The novel’s lack of attention in International Relations is striking when compared with cognate disciplines, particularly its prominence in post-colonial studies for understanding trans-national relations and the post-colonial experience. The genre appears to have allowed post-colonial subjects an international voice that has carried better than other forms of writing, echoing the experience of women writers up to the twentieth century. Postcolonial and feminist studies have extensively explored how the novel intertwines concerns about race and gender.42 Indeed the novel’s dominance in the field has made post-colonial studies synonymous with post-colonial literary studies.

Herbert Butterfield, an influential figure in British International Relations, wrote The Historical Novel, supporting the genre’s value for historical understanding.43 His interest demonstrates that International Relations did not have to wait for the rise of postmodernism to endorse the novel,44 and that the novel’s application is not necessarily tied to postmodern theories, although they have dominated aesthetics in International Relations.45 Postmodern theories on textuality blurring the distinction between fiction and non-fiction obviously lend themselves to the novel’s use,46 but other genres such as film have been more readily included in International Relations than the novel.  Why has the novel not translated as readily as film into International Relations, despite the advancement of feminist approaches in International Relations over the last two decades? The feminist International Relations scholars Ann Tickner and Cynthia Weber have highlighted the marginal status in International Relations of narrative and other methods favoured in feminist research and how feminist approaches have been more readily absorbed where they have kept to traditional methodologies.47

Could the genre’s association with the ‘feelings of women in the drawing room’ make International Relations overlook the novel?48 Wollstonecraft warned against the novel’s sentimental illusions as she strove to overcome the dichotomy between reason and feeling.49 George Eliot attacked the triviality of much women’s fiction in her

41 Katy Fletcher, ‘Evolution of the Modern American Spy Novel’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 22, (1987): 319-331. 42 Feminist Review ‘Political Histories’, Vol. 85, Issue 1 (2007).43 Herbert Butterfield, The Historical Novel: An Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924). 44 Fred Halliday, ‘“High and Just Proceedings”: Notes Towards an Anthology of the Cold War’, Millennium, Vol. 30, No. 3, (2001): 691-707. 45 Roland Bleiker, ‘The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory’, Millennium, Vol. 30, No. 3, (2001): 509-534. 46 John Horton, ‘Life, literature and ethic theory: Martha Nussbaum on the role of the literary imagination in ethical thought’, in Literature and the Political Imagination, eds. John Horton and Andrea Baumeister (London: Routledge, 1996): 79-80. 47 Ann Tickner, ‘What is your research program? Some feminist answers to international relations methodological questions’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 1, (2005): 1-22; Cynthia Weber, ‘Good Girls, Little Girls and Bad Girls: Male Paranoia in Robert Keohane’s Critique of Feminist International Relations’, Millennium, Vol. 23, No. 2, (1994): 337-349.48 Woolf, 1977: 70.49 Wollstonecraft, 1992.

essay ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’.50 Are there lingering Platonic or puritanical anxieties in International Relations over the novel as fiction? Aristostlean philosophy challenged Platonic antipathy to fiction and suggested the special capacity of poetry or drama to express the human condition and embody historical truths. Indeed Plato’s desire to exclude fiction arguably related less to questions over its veracity than his fears over its corrupting influence and implications for political authority.51

The novel’s neglect, as a genre, suggests continuing gendered methodological norms in International Relations. Without the novel, swathes of women’s philosophical or historical writing are effectively excluded from International Relations. Reference to women writers like George Eliot remains an anathema in International Relations, while reference to her contemporaries Mill or Feuerbach would not raise an eyebrow. Could fictional classics like Little Women seriously contribute to International Relations? Is there more to International Relations’ spurning of Little Women than prejudice? If classical drama is where ‘the political sphere of human life [is] transposed into art’, 52 what is the novel? Are there reasons integral to the novel as opposed to drama or film, that make the genre less relevant to International Relations? The sub-genre of science fiction, with its inter-galactic worlds, speaks most obviously to international politics and is gaining attention in International Relations,53 while the core tradition of the novel remains absent. If we leave aside ‘Silly novels by Lady Novelists’, are the concerns of the novel tradition simply incompatible with the concerns of International Relations? Are the concerns of the novel ‘too small an affair’ for International Relations?54

Little Women against International Relations  

The novel’s history has been influenced by women’s restricted social roles, exclusion from the public sphere, and the social position of women who could take up writing. As Eliot observes:  

A loving woman’s world lies within the four walls of her own home; and it’s only through her husband that she is in any electric communication with the world beyond.55 

The novel’s ‘perennial interests of domesticity’ have been shaped by the domestic circumstances of women novelists who have overwhelmingly come from the middle classes.56 In the words of Woolf, ‘all the literary training a woman had […] was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had

50 George Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, Westminster Review, Vol. 66, October, (1856): 442-61.51 Susan Mendus, ‘“What of soul was left, I wonder?” The narrative self in political philosophy’, in Literature and the Political Imagination, eds. John Horton and Andrea Baumeister (London: Routledge, 1996): 53.  52 Arendt, 1998: 188.53 Weldes, 2003.54 Henry James on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, quoted in George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967): 54.55 George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1858): 119, discussed in Jenny Uglow, George Eliot (London: Virago, 1997): 90.  56 Woolf, 1977: 79.

been educated (…) by the influences of the common sitting room’.57 Consider the symbolic geography of the Little Women cooped up sewing sheets, imagined by them into a map of world:  

They adopted Jo’s plan of dividing the long seams into four parts, and calling the quarters Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and in that way got on capitally, especially when they talked about the different countries as they stitched their way through them.58 

Kant, like the Little Women, only travelled in the imagination,59 but even women’s imagination was constrained by their narrow domestic realm. Indicatively the frustrated Madame Bovary, nurtured on a diet of silly novels, merely imagines herself shopping in the capital when she buys a map of Paris and walks its streets in her imagination.60

The dominant feminine domestic character of the novel defines the genre’s tradition as the antithesis of International Relations. The genre’s domestic inclination evolved from the eighteenth century novel of manners, concerned with cultivating polite society and civilised conversation, and distancing itself from violent political conflict. Its mode ‘deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent clashes’.61

The common domestic themes of the novel compliment how the genre is fundamentally ‘the art of the housed and private man’ or woman: a privately-enjoyed art form, read by individual readers to themselves in their own rooms.62 The novel’s private character contrasts to the public character and collective experience of other genres: the oral recitation of epic poetry in pre-literate or semi-literate communities, theatrical performance of drama, or cinematic screening of films. Michael Shapiro (2001) discusses the physical space of the novel, but not its gendered aspect.63 The gendered space is mapped out by the rebellious Maggie in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, with whom de Beauvoir strongly identified64: 

So it has been since the days of Hecuba, and of Hector, Tamer of horses: inside the gates, the women with streaming hair and uplifted hands offering prayers, watching the world’s combat from afar, filling their long, empty days with memories and fears; outside, the men in fierce struggle with things divine and human, quenching memory in the stronger light of purpose, losing the sense of dread and even of wounds in the hurrying ardour of action.65 

An unhistorical domestic private world of reproduction is separated from an international world of historical destruction and creation. And a feminine world of sentiment and enforced passivity is contrasted to a masculine world of agency and 57 Woolf, 1977: 64.58 Alcott, 1989: 10.59 Arendt, 1992: 44.60 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: Provincial Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981): 53-54 .61 George Meredith, The Egoist (London: Penguin, 2007): ‘The Prelude’: 1.62 Steiner, 1967: 25.63 Michael Shapiro, ‘Sounds of Nationhood’, Millennium, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2001): 583-601. 64 de Beauvoir, 1963: 140.65 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (London: Penguin, 1996): 405.  

action. Sometimes the domestic realm is represented as the civilised sphere against masculine wildness as in Laura Wilder’s Little House series, sometimes as the natural, maternal refuge against alienating modern industrial society, as in Charles Dickens’ writing, 66but however traditionally represented, divisions are gendered. Meanwhile the tomboy Jo hates being a girl and wants to escape domesticity for war, but symbolically the nearest she gets to fighting is knitting army socks.67  

The novel’s development was closely entwined with women’s fate and its typical narrative framework reflected their expected social paths. The novel plot became framed by the quest to marry successfully because marriage remained the primary way that women could secure or better their social position in Western societies until the twentieth century. Eliot’s essay ‘Silly Novels’ parodies the novel’s stereotypical plot: 

The men play a very subordinate part by her side. You are consoled now and then by a hint that they have affairs, which keeps you in mind that the working-day business of the world is somehow being carried on, but ostensibly the final cause of their existence is that they may accompany the heroine on her ‘starring’ expedition through life.68  

The novel, enjoyed primarily as a private literary form, explored the inner world of individuals against the great social and political changes. The very name of the genre is linked to its exploration of novel feelings.69 The novel’s elevation of sentiment sought to expand beyond the early Enlightenment’s foregrounding of reason and defend humanity’s soul against the alienating mechanisation of people into hands. The novel has often been deliberately anti-heroic, narrating ordinary unhistorical lives. The social novel developed by Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dickens and others suggested the polite society of refined feeling enjoyed by the minority-privileged sections of society depended upon the oppression of the many.70  However they did not abandon the genre’s domestic interest and considered the feminine private sphere as crucial to social improvement, intertwining the causes of women and their domestic roles in social reform. Synthesis between reason and feeling, action and sentiment also implied greater synthesis between the sexes. Thus the novel historically both reflected women’s exclusion from the world of action and asserted a feminine world of feeling against an unfeeling alienating world. 

The novel has classically preferred a domestic feminised interior world, even when protagonists’ lives have been touched by wider political conflicts or wars. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is defined by the cultivated space of the country estate and her heroine’s moral development.71 The Napoleonic Wars, the international slave trade, the British navy’s expansion and imperial mission are absent presences in her fiction.72 Similarly Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, set during the Napoleonic Wars and Luddite unrest, avoids the spaces of political conflict and is dominated by confined

66 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 2003).67 Alcott, 1989: 30.68 Eliot, 1856.69 Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2000).  70 Eliot, 1985: 385, discussed in Uglow, 1987: 138.71 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). 

domestic spaces and the inner world against the outer world.73 War is pointedly kept off-stage in the ‘Great Tradition’ of the novel, especially the English novel.74

Returning to Little Women, its action is deliberately domestic and symbolically begins when the father enlists in the American Civil War. Both the father and the war are excluded from the novel, although Alcott had brief wartime experience nursing wounded soldiers, she could have drawn upon. Little Women’s absence from International Relations is therefore unsurprising.

This pattern is not just observable among women writers, but male novelists not domestically constrained as their female counterparts, even where the novel’s protagonists are involved in war.75 Walter Scott’s acclaimed historical novels proved to be an exception to the dominant English novel tradition.76 His novels lost critical literary favour and were excluded from the Great Tradition, along with works like Fennimore Cooper’s popular The Last of the Mohicans, which exposes a nation’s violent history. International conflict was typically addressed by English novelists such as Dickens or Thackerey at a safer, temporal distance in the historical novel.

The historical novel, although developed by Scott to European acclaim, arguably flourished more in Russia and America than Europe, the former with its dread of social catastrophe, the latter with its sense of being a frontier society and civil war.77

The external world violently forced itself into national literatures where the social position of the middle classes and their enjoyment of ‘the art of the housed and private man’ were more precarious.78 [War dominates novel themes in postwar Yugoslav literature]. The novel’s range was contained where the stabilised post-revolutionary conditions of mid-nineteenth Europe allowed for the domestication of themes.79 International and colonial affairs were commonly ‘absent presences’ in the English novel whose relation to the domestic sphere are mystified, whether the colonial relations which underpin the tranquillity of Austen’s Mansfield Park or haunt Bronte’s Jane Eyre80.81  

Temptations of history and the novel

Despite the ‘Great Tradition’ of the novel marginalizing war, the genre pioneered analysis of modern warfare, notably in Scott’s historical novels and Wells’ science fiction.82 Georg Lukacs’ seminal study of The Historical Novel links the rise of 72 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994); Igor Webb, From Custom to Capital: The English Novel and the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963). 73 Charlotte Bronte, Shirley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). 74 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962). 75 Steiner, 1967: 99.76 Walter Scott, Waverley; or, 'Tis sixty years since (London: Penguin, 1980); Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).77 Steiner, 1967: 43-49.78 Ibid. : 25.79 Ibid.: 43-49.80 Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 81 Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); Said, 1994; Webb, 1981. 82 H.G. Wells, The War in the Air. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1941); H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (London: Penguin, 2005).

historical consciousness and the historical novel to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which made history ‘a mass experience’ and posed ‘problems of social transformation’, connecting ‘national and world history’.83 Hegelian dialectics, Clausewitz’s science of war84 and Scott’s historical novel appeared in a period of heightened historical consciousness, but Scott’s Waverley, published in 1814, preceded both publication of Clausewitz’s On War and even some of Hegel’s major works. Scott’s pioneering historical novels address how a nation and society are developed through conflict and may be counted among the first historical sociology texts, before even the term ‘sociology’ had been coined. According to Lukacs, the historical novel’s significance is to depict the evolving historical consciousness and broad historical change, rather than a comprehensive account of specific historical events.85 The best historical novels are those which juxtapose the ‘heroic and the domestic’.86 They explore how ordinary individuals at a specific historical juncture are torn between conflicting historical forces; they narrate war’s victors and casualties and how conflict transforms popular life.87 The artistic need to intensify action and clarify character may lead to a cavalier approach to historical records, but the effort to capture historical consciousness remains.88

The historical novelist epitomises Kant’s world citizen or Hegel’s philosopher as world-spectator who does not make history, but narrates its significance after the events are over.89 Here we see tensions between Kant’s moral philosophy and philosophy of history.90 Kant believes in historical progress and endorses historical revolution, but sees history working behind individuals - analogous to Adam Smith’s hidden economic hand.91 Kant gives no guide to historical action and condemns its protagonists for engendering horrific violence.92 Kant’s world citizen is conscious of the opposing positions of the individual and history, and war and peace. Kant asserts a duty to promote peace and defend individuals’ dignity against universal history’s demands.93 Yet Kant’s philosophy of history believes that war may be sublime and better than ‘soulless despotism’ of a universal autocracy.94 Antagonism, pain, war and disaster, according to Kant’s historical philosophy, are necessary to propel human cultural advancement and prevent humanity sinking back into an animal existence.95

Perpetual peace, were it realised, would resemble the eternal peace of the grave.96

83 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin, 1989). 84 Carl Von Clausewitz, On War (London: Penguin, 1982). 85 Lukacs, 1989: 42.86 E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990): 26. 87 Lukacs, 1989: 198-204.88 Butterfield, 1924; Lukacs, 1989. 89 Arendt, 1992: 44-46; Immanuel Kant, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ in Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970b): 182-183; Kant, 1970c: 51-53. Immanuel Kant, ‘On the Common Saying: “This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice’, in Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970d): 61-87. 90 Hutchings, 1996: 41-56.91 Kant, 2001a: 119-120; Kant, 1970b: 182-183; Kant, 1970c: 41-53.92 Arendt, 1992: 44-46; Kant, 1970c: 93-130, Kant, 1970e.93 Kant, 1970c: 41-53.94 Kant, 1952, Section 28: 112-113 and 83: 96; 1970e: 113; 2001c: 384; discussed in Arendt, 1992: 53.95 Arendt, 1992: 26, 53; Kant, 1952, Section 28: 112-113 and 83: 96; Kant, 1970c: 44-45.96 Arendt, 1992: 52; Kant, 1970e: 114; Immanuel Kant, ‘Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone’ in Basic Writings of Kant, ed. Allan Wood (New York: Modern Library, 2001a): 384.

Kantian philosophy does not resolve the tensions between ethics and history, or between the public and private worlds. But the frictions between them may be viewed as creative. Arendt’s The Human Condition and Elshtain’s Public Man, Private Woman assert the distinct characters of the public and private spheres enrich human lives and encourage imagination of different ways of living. Kantian opposing ideals point to both sublime and tragic potential, following Hegel’s definition of tragedy as conflict between opposing rights.97 The tragic novel addresses irreconcilable clashes between personal desires, social morality and historical social conditions and reminds us of the limits of (women’s) emancipation in given historical material conditions.98

Kantian political philosophy did not affirm actual political movements. The novel, including the historical novel, too has struggled to portray collective action positively and create ‘positive’ characters ‘who takes an active part in public life’.99 Many historical novels impose the perspectives of the privatised individual of late modernity onto very different social conditions, making history incidental to the conflict and resolution of the novel.100 If novels seek to convey the feelings of war as individual protagonists,101 and Kant is correct that the protagonists do not understand the historical significance of events,102 novels will emphasise war’s incomprehensible horrors for individuals. The war novel has taken from the novel tradition its interest in ordinary, unhistoric people, their inner feelings and personal relations within the historical action. Many twentieth century classic war novels suggest war’s absurdity and historical actions as purposeless at the micro level. Meanwhile just as characters in the historical novel have sought to escape the pressures of history, so the historical novel has come under pressure to offer readers escapism and yielded to the historical romance. The historical romance continues the novel of sentiment and is organised around the archetypal courtship plot, which makes history a colourful romantic backdrop.

Returning to Little Women, the heroine Jo is tempted by Kantian historical progress through war against the domesticated religious Pilgrim’s Progress, around which the story of the four March girls is consciously organised. Alcott protects her heroine from the metaphysical glorification of history, even as her heroine rebels against women’s traditional domestic role and is attracted to war:  

The conversation was miles beyond Jo's comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms; and the only thing “evolved from her inner consciousness,” was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually, that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new, and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before; that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful,

97 Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (London: Penguin, 2004).98 Woolf, 1977: 46-49.99 Lukacs, 1989: 34.100 Lukacs, 1989: 198-204, 244.101 Richard Lee, ‘History is but a fable agreed upon: the problem of truth in history and fiction’, Annual Conference, Romantic Novelists' Association (2000) http://www.historicalnovelsociety.org/historyis.htm102 Kant, 1970c: 41.

came over her, as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday.103  

Jo is explicitly warned away from the seductive appeal of metaphysics by her Professor Bhaer, who fears an ‘inflammable young soul would be led astray by the rockets, to find, when the display was over, that they had only an empty stick, or a scorched hand’.104 Alcott’s defence of her heroine against metaphysical temptations anticipates a major theme of the twentieth century historical novel such as Boris Pasternak’s popular Dr Zhivago: the enticements of history, repentance in the face of its horrors of world war and totalitarianism, and the wish to return to the domestic.105

Yet despite her condemnation of the temptations of history and war, Alcott cannot easily accept domestic passivity. The vivid picture remains of the rebellious Jo, frustrated with domestic feminine roles, and eager to act the witch or the murderer Macbeth. ‘I always wanted to do the killing part’, she declares in the first chapter.106

Jo’s very idea of ‘fighting Apollyon’ involves her identification with the death angel’s destructive powers as against the ideal of women as peacemakers. 

Romance of war 

International peace policies commonly links women’s voices to antiwar politics. Women’s writing on world politics has historically been associated with peace studies rather than war studies (or International Relations) in works such as Betty Reardon’s Sexism and the War System.107 Consider the confident statement in the 1915 Militarism versus Feminism essays, ‘The antithesis between Militarism and Feminism is not only emphasised throughout history in every age and country but it is inherent in the very nature of things’.108 Woolf’s Three Guineas identifies women as better able to transcend national boundaries and become potential world citizens compared to men because they are excluded from full membership of their national public spheres.109 The careers of women like Eglantyne Jebb, a pacifist, a nurse in the Balkan Wars and later founder of Save the Children in 1919, confirms this gendered opposition. Jebb entered international politics and claimed an international voice opposed to a Westphalian system of international relations. Jebb lobbied the League of Nations to make human rights rather sovereignty the founding principle of the international system.  

And yet idealising women as peacemakers and their natural opposition to war does not always accord with women’s historical experience or writing which may question gendered dichotomies of male bellicosity and female pacifism and domesticity.110

While women are too often victims in war, a war’s overall outcome may improve women’s social position in the peace that follows. War, notwithstanding its terrible sufferings, may overturn traditional social norms, even if only temporarily, and forge 103 Alcott, 1989: 352.104 Ibid.105 Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago (London: Collins, 1961). 106 Alcott, 1989: 7.107 Betty Reardon, Sexism and the War System (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996).108 Mary Sargant Florence, Catherine Marshall and C.K. Ogden, Militarism versus Feminism (London: Virago, 1987): 143. 109 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, 1966).  110 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995).

new social norms that give women greater freedom for action and thought. War’s role in women’s emancipation was apparent to older champions of the women’s cause. Woolf, among others, thanks wars for helping emancipate women: ‘the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later’.111 Alcott’s brief experience as a nurse in the American civil war helped her develop her thinking on women’s emancipation, although she does not allow her heroine Jo to become a nurse.  Women may take up public action in war, only to return to their narrower domestic roles in peacetime, as Alcott and Nightingale and so many women in postwar Europe. Nevertheless women’s return to the domestic was not complete and their wartime experiences of acting outside the home influenced women’s greater political participation, including antiwar politics.112  

Furthermore the novel does not necessarily uphold the gendered dichotomies around men’s attraction to heroic war and women’s preference for domestic peace. Not least the flourishing of popular women’s historical romances after the Second World War in the UK suggested a sublimated desire for action among a generation returned from wartime action to the domestic, even if the historical romances commonly shared the fault of transposing contemporary consciousness onto past figures. Popular historical romances such as Georgette Heyer’s Spanish Bride or An Infamous Army,113 drawing upon extensive historical research, document women following the drum in the Napoleonic Wars, may be read as pro-feminist research into women’s presence in international war and politics, which introduce themes such as diplomatic wives and base women critically explored by a later generation of international feminist scholarship such as Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches and Bases.114 Moreover women’s antiwar politics historically may shock polite society, disturbing civil order and cultural norms of womanhood – as the Greenham Common women’s peace camp and direct action against cruise missiles.115 Indicatively a militarist anticolonial feminism justifying revolutionary violence and questioning whether peace and demilitarisation are necessarily associated with gender equality is an important strand of postcolonial studies,116 a field strongly influenced by the novel genre. I return to women’s historical exclusion from the world of action.

Behind a Mask and longing for action

The novel has explored how the tensions between the individual and society are refracted in the world of feeling. Indeed the novel, in marginalizing war and international conflict from their narratives, heightens the sense of domestic conflict. The novel thereby suggests elemental conflicting internal forces are part of the human condition. Freud’s theories of the unconscious, of opposing drives of eros and death, 111 Woolf, 1977: 103.112 Andrew Munton, English Fiction of the Second World War (London: Faber, 1989): 94-96; Angela Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).113 Georgette Heyer, Spanish Bride (London: Arrow Books, 2005); Georgette Heyer, An Infamous Army (London: Arrow Books, 2004).114 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).  115 Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female? (London: Virago, 1987): 162-203.116 Jacklyn Cock, ‘Women and the military: implications for demilitarisation in the 1990s in South Africa’, Gender and Society, Vol. 8(2), (1994): 152-169.

were influenced by his wide literary reading from the Greek classics to Shakespeare’s dramas to modern novels and plays. His Civilization and its Discontents sees conflict as inevitable given the conflictual character of human nature, the opposing human desires, and the inherent tensions between the individual and society.117 For Freud, civilization involves collective pacification of opposing human drives.

Suppressed tensions are apparent in the novel’s domestic world of sentiment, even where characters are socially secure, and suggest correspondences with the conflictual character of international politics, notwithstanding their differences. The novel discovered a tumultuous world when it turned inwards and that the individual herself was a site of conflict between opposing conscious and unconscious feelings: ‘one shadowy army fighting another, and the slain shadows for ever rising again’.118 The novel highlights how individuals can be imprisoned by a world of feeling, in particular the anguish of women imprisoned by feelings in ways that men are not because they are unable to escape into action.119 The novel cries out against women trapped in the world of feeling and speaks to their longing to participate in a world of action. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre speaks to women’s frustration at their domestic confinement and their longing to participate in a world of action, in a widely cited passage: 

It is vain to say human being ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.120 

The novel suggests domestic confinement and the want of action makes women the frail sickly creatures they are deemed by custom to be (Bronte, 1974: 200). Here the novel embodies Kant’s fears of a despotic domestic peace and its resemblance to the eternal peace of the grave.121 Or Elshtain’s warning against life being impoverished ‘if all of life falls under a single set of terms’.122 Where infantilised women are able to hold sway, they reinforce domestic or cultural tyranny.123 Excluded from the world of action, the novel suggests women become malign influences, echoing Kant’s concerns that peace may corrupt men.124 Gwendolen in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda argues women are corrupted and turn poisonous through their pastoral domestic confinement: 117 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989). 118 Eliot, 1985: 405.119 Jane Austen, Persuasion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965): 236; Bronte, 1974: 128-130, 188-190; Bronte, 1980: 110.120 Bronte, 1980: 110-111; discussed in Woolf, 1977: 66.121 Arendt, 1992: 52; Kant, 1970e: 114; Kant, 2001a: 384.122 Elshtain, 1981: 335.123 Eliot, 1985: 636-637; Steiner, 1967: 103-104.124 Kant, 1970c: 44-45.

We women can’t go in search of adventures – to find out the North-West Passage or the source of the Mile, or to hunt tigers in the East. We must stay where we grow, or where the gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers, to look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining. That is my notion about the plants: they are often bored, and that is the reason why some of them have got poisonous.125 

Women’s exclusion from the harsh world of action paradoxically makes unfeeling economic calculations intrude into the world of feeling. When women’s future is secured through a suitable marriage, the unworldly world of feeling necessarily clashes with external worldly interests. The conflict between sentiment and interest runs through the novel tradition which both reflects and rages against the sentimental education of girls, their smattering of superficial accomplishments to charm an eligible husband and their diet of silly novels conspiring to foster infantile creatures ill-prepared either for the responsibilities of married life or independent living.126

When Little Women novelists rebelled against domesticity and women as selfless ‘angels in the house’, they might escape into the unreality of Gothic melodrama or the sensationalist novel.127 Alcott, author of Little Women and Good Wives, had another subversive authorial identity, whose heroines are ruthless Machiavellian figures exploiting cultural ideals of feminine sentiment to realise their ambitions.  If Little Women as wholesome family reading reconciles personal desires, morality and social experience, sensationalist novels by Alcott, Wilkie Collins and others explore antagonisms in the private housed world, especially for women. Alcott’s scheming spiteful heroine Jean Muir with false teeth in Behind a Mask outwits respectable society and wins the wealthy husband.128 The active female characters of sensationalist writing rebel against cultural dependence, illustrating its perils in an unequal, unjust world. They also warn polite society from within domestic sphere of the potential for social revolt, as one alarmed critic wrote: ‘a little fierce incendiary’ and ‘inimical to the peace of society’.129

Feminist critiques have argued Little Women retreats from a vital female order to a modified patriarchal order in marrying Jo to the professor.130 Indicatively Jo is returned from the temptations of sensationalist writing and their wicked women to the masculine literary tradition of Milton and Shakespeare associated by feminists with a patriarchal order.131 Yet female alter egos are asserted in Shakespeare’s androgynous roles and Milton’s Eve tempted by Satan.132 Milton’s Paradise Lost associates ‘man’s first disobedience’, with becoming fully human and upsetting the ordered chain of 125 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Zodiac Press, 1978): 119, discussed in Uglow, 1987: 230.  126 Wollstonecraft, 1992.127 Louisa May Alcott, Behind a Mask (London: Hogarth Press, 1985); Alcott, 1989: 265-269, 345-356; Steiner, 1967: 26-27.128 Alcott, 1985.129 Margaret Oliphant ‘Modern Novelists - Great and Small’, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 77, May, (1855): 554-568.130 Showalter, 1989.131 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000): 189.132 John Milton, Paradise Lost (London: Penguin, 2000); Gilbert and Gubar, 2000: 187-212.

being under a jealous God. This hierarchal patriarchal order is represented as vulnerable to the rebel angel through Eve’s desire for the forbidden fruit’s promise of equality.133 Ironically Milton historically supported regicide and Alcott’s Jo identifies with Shakespeare’s regicidist Macbeth rather than the tamed shrew. Symbolically Alcott, the Brontes and other women novelists adopted male pseudonyms to escape the cultural strictures placed on women’s imagination. Tellingly Eliot liked to sign herself Pollian or Polly – after the Apollyon, the Angel of Destruction, subverting the Angel in the House identity.134

The novel’s feminised world of feeling is only ostensibly opposed to masculine values of action, when the imperative of securing an eligible suitor demands action. Heroines’ ruthless pursuit of marriage may resemble Clausewitzian stratagems: whether the single-handed campaigns of Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair or Jean in Alcott’s Behind a Mask.135 Since the domestic realm is permeated by the demands and the characteristics of the external world, the novel thereby questions the apparent clear-cut gendered distinctions between the domestic world of feeling and the external world of action. This perspective is reinforced by the way that the domestic world and the world of action are pitted as rival empires, and the female pursuit of marriage as the conquest and domestication of male suitors. Sharing this understanding of marriage, Kant asserts that ‘one party must be subject to the other’ for a union’s harmony, but fears that women may disarm a man’s capacity ‘to command in the house’:

He loves domestic peace, and readily submits to her regime, if only so that he will not be prevented from attending to his own business: she does not shrink from domestic warfare, which she wages her tongue; and nature came to her aid here by endowing her with loquacity and emotional eloquence, which disarms the man.136

Kantian ethics and masculine virtue waiver in the face of Kantian anthropology, whose military metaphors associate domestic peace with surrender and pacification. The tensions between Alcott’s melodramatic and family fiction, which became more sentimental and conventional after Little Women, suggest how Alcott struggled to develop a consistent political or moral philosophy beyond the angel of the house–Apollyon dichotomy. Both de Beauvoir and Arendt sought a politics going beyond the paradigms of violence and subjection, de Beauvoir highlighting the uncertainties of violent action achieving its goals and therefore justifying its violence, and Arendt opposing the conflation of power (grounded in human relations) and violence (based on physical force).137 I do not have the space here to develop how the novel could specifically contribute to their ethics of ambiguity. Instead my concluding comments simply draw attention to the genre’s broad potential contribution to contemporary International Relations debates.

133 Gilbert and Gubar, 2000: 196.134 Gilbert and Gubar, 2000: 479; Uglow, 1987: 35.135 Alcott’s Behind a Mask (1985)136 Kant, 1974: 167.137 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (London: Allen Lane, 1970); Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Citadel Press, 1978); Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Feminist ethics and political violence’, International Politics, Vol. 44, (2007a): 90-106; Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Simone de Beauvoir and the ambiguous ethics of political violence’, Hypatia, No. 223, (2007b): 11-132.

Little Women and global therapeutic governance  

The opposing traditions of the novel and International Relations have been informed by fundamental conflictual relations between the individual and world history, as Kant’s philosophical thinking was conscious. The declared ‘end of history’ of 1989 implied both lessening tensions between the individual and the world, and the international and public realms becoming less distinguishable from the domestic private realm. Global governance strategies of the last two decades have questioned distinctions between the national and the international, and between the public and the private realms. The ‘personal is political’ was a key feminist slogan in the ‘battles of the sexes’, associated with the women’s liberation movement. Feminists challenged the divisions between the public and private realms for excluding women and women’s concerns from politics such as their unpaid domestic labour, and domestic violence, and denying their rights to equal pay, abortion, and legal redress. Western post-Keynesian social policies see social reform arising through improving individuals’ attitudes and behaviour.138 They have taken up gender politics and enlarged therapeutic governance of the personal - modelled on Western functionalist social psychology rather than Freud’s tragic psychoanalytical philosophy.139 Global strategies, through mechanisms such as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, have become concerned with populations’ life cycles and seek to change community and household (gender) norms and relations deemed dysfunctional to enhance people’s survival in the absence of significant material transformation.140 Here the global community assumes a role analogous to the head of household.

Developments domesticating International Relations and globalising domestic norms need to be understood if the discipline follows Hedley Bull’s expectation to pursue contemporary questions. The evolving global governance has been linked to the Kantian ideals but Kant’s ethics and philosophy of history are in tension, as discussed above.141 Kant believed humans were purposive beings, whose individuality and restlessness propelled history.142 Since humans were distinct individuals and could never be content, the potential for history and conflict could not be eradicated.143

Kant’s fears over world government’s tyranny and peace as pacification imply his scepticism towards global therapeutic or biopolitical governance.144 Global prescriptions restrict the world of action and imply the public realm takes on aspects of the stifling character of domesticity, while the private realm loses its intimacy.

The novel could help today’s pursuit of International Relations because of its extensive exploration of tensions between the public and private realms and the negative consequences for individuals who cannot escape from domesticity into the

138 Ruth Levitas, The Inclusive Society? Social Exclusion and New Labour (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998; James Nolan, Therapeutic State (New York: New York University Press, 1998).139 Nolan, 1998; Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Free Association Books, 1999); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Penguin, 2002): xvii, 4.140 Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Vanessa Pupavac, ‘Human Security and the Rise of Global Therapeutic Governance’, Conflict, Security and Development, Vol 5, No. 2, (2005): 161-181.141 Kant, 1970c and 1970e.142 Ibid.143 Arendt, 1992: 9, 13.144 Arendt, 1992: 16, 75; Kant, 1970e: 113-114.

world of action or from public scrutiny into a private world. The novel illuminates the individual as a site of conflicting feelings and suggests the tensions in global governance and global prescriptions of social justice, even where well-intentioned. A sense of the tragic human condition perhaps most closely unites the Great Tradition of the novel and International Relations, where conflicting rights and imperatives may lead to the tragic historical necessity of war.

The idea of tragic historical necessity, uniting the opposing traditions of the novel and International Relations, is missing from global governance and its conflict management and sustainable development models. The worldview of global governance is distant from the novel’s Great Tradition and is much closer to that expressed in the girls’ fiction of the Progressive Era, which follows Alcott’s Little Women. Stories such as Pollyanna, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or Ann of Green Gables present a world with wrinkles and sorrows that is encouraged to smile by the simple artful actions of a girl. The tragic impossibilities expressed in the novel’s Great Tradition are smoothed away in their sunny homilies. Alcott had sought to distinguish her writing from these secularised morality tales, but her family’s novels after Little Women became more conventional. Instead of tragedy, the girl’s stories suggest an essential harmony of personalities and interests exists in the world if only people open themselves up to each other and can be taught to communicate better. Alcott elsewhere satirised how philosopher-kings might happily preach their schemes for simple living far away in comfortable lecture halls while women endured their realities.145 Concurrently the individual as an end in herself appears increasingly insecure and a means of progress as human rights are subsumed into global governance, whether in the Millennium Development Goals or rights-based humanitarianism.146

I began with the frustrations of Little Woman confined to home knitting and sewing. Global governance seems to share traditional ideals of womanhood and womanly occupations, against which the heroines of Little Women, Jane Eyre and Mill on the Floss rebelled. In their numerous sewing, weaving or knitting projects for women, global policy-makers evidently find it difficult to shake off the ‘Angel in the House’ image of women, even following women’s involvement in the Abu Graib atrocities or paramilitary groups. Moreover global policy-makers such as, Radhika Coomarasarmy (UN Under-Secretary-General, Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, and former UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women), seem to imagine even former female soldiers will want to become seamstresses rehabilitation programmes training former female soldiers, whose experiences have taken them beyond traditional domestic roles, will want to take up sedentary occupations and become seamstresses.147 Indicatively too global advocacy has preferred the cause of diminutive ‘girl soldiers’, rather than adult female or women soldiers. The novel’s questioning of women as self-sacrificing domestic angels and notions of unwomanly conduct could illuminate the reductive stereotypical ways women have been allowed to enter the international sphere. It would also raise questions about how feminist concerns have been co-opted to support paternalistic forms of global governance over

145 Louisa May Alcott, Transcendental Wild Oats (Boston, Mass.: Harvard Common Press, 1975).146 Duffield, 2007.147 Address 22 October 2009, Brussels.

populations. As Cynthia Weber provocatively asked over a decade ago, are only good little girls allowed into International Relations?148

The novel has long offered insights into humanitarians who have lost their humanity.149 But more than that, the novel’s individual stories testify to how humanity is made up of individuals who cannot be managed simply on mass as a species. New individuals will be born who, precisely because of their individuality, always have the potential to transform world history.150 If ‘theater is the political art par excellence’,151

if ‘the modern age – which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity – may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known’,152 the novel suggests frictions between the individual and society cannot be administered away by global governance and illuminates our contemporary post-‘prepolitical’ and post-‘prehistorical condition of history’.153

Little Women’s potential to illuminate international politics may appear far-fetched, but then the reach of global governance into the private realm would once have appeared far-fetched. The forces eroding the former boundaries, which separated the dominant traditions of the novel and International Relations, may not necessarily welcome Little Women and their companions. Administrators of global governance who recall Plato’s warning over fiction undermining political authority could rightly be wary of their interference into debates. For Behind a Mask154 lurk ‘dangerous little’ persons keenly aware of the etiquette and inequalities of polite society and ‘inimical’ to its peace.155 They defy global governance’s understanding of individuals’ feelings and aspirations, and behavioural prescriptions.

A defensive discipline of International Relations, concerned that its disciplinary identity is imploding, may seek to retreat to its traditional canon as a way of preserving itself. However the discipline would miss how the novel could help understand the meaning of the former boundaries, and what significant could be lost if they were dismantled and life were to fall ‘under a single set of terms’.156 Kant’s philosophy spoke of the tragic tensions between the individual and world history, Arendt’s philosophy spoke of the human vitality fostered by our experience of distinct public and private spheres.157 International Relations scholars pursuing today’s international political questions should welcome the novel’s critical potential to analyse global developments and recapture a sense of human subjectivity in world history. After all Kant recalled the novel, albeit sceptically, when he outlined his aspiration to write a general world history affirming human potential to create a better

148 Cynthia Weber, ‘Good Girls, Little Girls and Bad Girls: Male Paranoia in Robert Keohane’s Critique of Feminist International Relations’, Millennium, Vol. 23, No. 2, (1994): 337-349.149 Bronte, 1980; Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 2003); Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Granada, 1976). 150 Arendt, 1998: 175-188.151 Ibid.: 188.152 Ibid.: 322.153 Ibid.: 184.154 Alcott, 1985.155 Oliphant, 1856.156 Elshtain, 1981: 335.157 Arendt, 1998; Kant, 1970c and 1970e.

world.158 But in admitting the novel, International Relations would be admitting some bad girls159 who might upset polite international society.

158 Kant, 1970c: 52.159 Weber, 1994.