Nussbaum, Felicity A. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.

Grinnell library catalog page

This book examines how women in the emergent British empire affected women in England. Specifically, Nussbaum analyzes how the new 'other' women brought about a 'cult of domesticity in England' and led to the labeling of sexualized women as exotic or savage--Nussbaum argues that "a particular kind of national imperative to control women's sexuality and fecundity emerged when the increasing demands of trade and colonization required a large, able-bodied citizenry, and that women's reproductive labor was harnessed to that task" (1).

The book places the more private issuess, e.g. reproductive and sexual, within larger social structures, focusing on literary representations ranging from novels to legal records. Nussbaum also addresses actual practices. She uses the term "women of empire" and argues this includes all women "around the world in the eighteenth century Europe and the colonies, because they share the threat of unregulated sexuality and the promise of maternity; what unites them in feminist theory is their mutual oppression" (2). Political economy and ideology are important frames of discussion.

The title of Nussbaum's books stems from her decision to "take as a central metaphor for the consideration of maternity and sexuality the concept of torrid zones, both the geographical torrid zones of the territory between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, and the torrid zone mapped onto the human body, especially the female body. A premise of my study is that the contrasts among the torrid, temperate, and frigid zones of the globe were formative in imagining that a sexualized woman of empire was distinct from domestic English womanhood" (7). Nussbaum divides her work into seven chapters. For instance, the first discusses the ideological battles between sexualized mothers and chaste daughters and focuses on authors like Daniel Defoe and Amelia Opie; the second discusses mid-century narratives of maternity, reading Samuel Johnson and British travel writing.

Entered by Elisa on 15 July 2004 at 12:05 PM.