Spectacular confessions

About this book

The only book-length critical study devoted to a diverse array of suffragist writings, Spectacular Confessions explores a neglected well of literary resources that includes prison diaries, letters, pamphlets, novels, journal essays, and feminist histories, produced by militant suffragettes in Edwardian England. Combining literary criticism, cultural studies, and feminist theory, Barbara Green investigates the cultural function of these writings and the suffragettes' attempts to make the feminist body visible. Green describes these writings as examples of a modernist autobiographical gesture - the "spectacular confession" - that crosses generic borders to blend the documentary with the performative, offering dramatic displays of self-representation. Believing that "who wins the eye wins all," these feminists built their campaign around visual representations and in the process were forced to endure beatings, prison, and forced feedings. The writings of suffragettes such as Elizabeth Robins, Lady Constance Lytton, and Emily Wilding Davison and of feminist onlookers Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf are examined to reveal how they gave female spectacularity a variety of subversive meanings. In addition, Green links the suffrage movement with women's autobiography and feminist studies of literary modernism.