Yasemin Hacıoğlu is an Associate Professor in English Literature, Culture and Didactics at Volda University College. Her work encompasses feminist literature, cognitive literary theory, and queer and feminist social movements. Her first monograph, Thinking Through Poems: Composition, Emotion and Decision-Making in Romantic-Era Women’s Novels, which we discuss below, is published by Bloomsbury as part of the Cognition, Poetics, and the Arts series.
1) How did you first become interested in how women in novels construct their choices?
My starting point was a summer holiday during undergraduate studies that I spent reading Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. The heroine’s ability to concentrate on landscape description and composition, throughout a narrative characterised by long, repetitive cycles of what we now term gaslighting and threats of sexual violence, was incredibly powerful. I hadn’t read anything like it before. Back at university I ended up getting quite angry, and rehearsing counterarguments for what I wish I had said in the moment, after the novel was discussed on a Romanticism course through derogatory euphemisms about the supposed pressure to include the (one) woman author.
I liked but wasn’t fully convinced by the summary on the back cover of my OUP paperback that Udolpho represents “psychological disintegration” which influenced “Sade, Poe, and other writers”. I thought that, perhaps, this focus emerged by reading Udolpho through critical and genre frameworks that overlooked something more challenging in the novel: that the heroine is able to construct decisions in situations of domestic violence, situations that are otherwise deliberately contrived to dismantle her capacity to think.
2) How did you decide to focus specifically on the composition of poetry within novels?
I’ve been thinking about the “sea-nymph” poems in Radcliffe’s Udolpho for over 10 years at this point. These poems are repetitive, and they take on slightly different forms as the heroine Emily handles new uncertainties over how to judge and respond to the situation she faces. I think the power that I found in their repetitive nature also led me to the cognitive narratological approaches that I use in the book. I didn’t think their repetitive nature could be summarised as symptoms of a lack of imagination – a “not quite Romanticism” that women authors from the time period often get as their epitaph. I also didn’t think the poems work by notions of unconscious, buried thinking: the “if only she had been fully aware she was in a bad situation” line of summary. Or, in some critical strains, “if only her head was properly screwed on”. In a plot situation were thoughts and perceptions are deliberately dismantled, the red thread offered by these repetitions and recompositions work to match up recurring uncertainties, amplify perceptions that something isn’t quite right, and use fantastical composition to build that narrative enquiry. Studying how composition processes offer modes of rethinking feelings and imagined responses for the protagonists was also central to reassessing the philosophical and political work of these novels.
3) How did you select your case studies (Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Eleanor Sleath, Charlotte Dacre and Amelia Opie)?
Moments that I found especially powerful were when heroines refused the affective terms expected of them. In Eleanor Sleath’s The Orphan of the Rhine, for instance, when the heroine Laurette is told to consider the danger she is in, she responds (to paraphrase) “why should I?”. I read these moments as responses crafted in the poems through composition practices. Similar affective stances across the poems in Charlotte Smith’s Celestina have received criticism from her contemporaries, and in current criticism alike, for a narcissistic quality. And yet this positionality allows Celestina to refuse and even advise other characters to stop empathising with and returning to patriarchal characters who endanger them.
The author I spent the most time unpicking during the PhD was Amelia Opie. The moments where minor characters in her late novels voice feelings and take decisions that depart from plot and social expectations were like a puzzle, that, once figured out, came back to the heroines’ compositions of elaborate emotional arguments in their poems. Opie’s heroines write affective scripts for other characters and then hand them out, so that they can puppeteer others’ minds. Opie allows us to laugh at how easy it is to plant emotional scripts into the minds of hapless characters who believe these feelings are their own authentic, spontaneous and individual responses. But this ridicule is unsettling because it raises question over how our most seemingly personal responses are scripted and socially constructed.
As I read more gothic novels, I circled back to thinking about how cultural narratives about responding to gendered violence are still too simple and dangerous. I thought about how social realities are still absent from judgemental popular cultural imaginaries and narratives, such as the increased danger to life women are in when they try to leave domestic violence. Now that I reflect on the process, one lens I had in mind when developing the book was looking for narrative structures that complicate or change our expectations of how characters in these situations make decisions. Women’s fiction that does not quite fit the genre classifications we currently work with provides a rich archive and resource for challenging how we imagine these narratives work.
4) Which poems within novels did you come to admire most as you worked on the project?
In Charlotte Dacre’s Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer, the heroine Cazire composes “The Exile: Written on the Sea” when she is pregnant, unmarried and starving. In an alternative move to feeling penitence and rehearsing self-destructing moral narratives – that would fit this plot situation in a conservative seduction tale – Cazire’s poem instead imagines an expansive, disembodied subject “struggling with an host of foes, / That more elastic from oppression grows”. In the prose, Cazire adopts this position for herself: she reimagines herself as a Romantic hero who will intellectually benefit from this experience. This position allows her to dismantle intensifying social prompts for her to adopt the role of a passive, feminine subject.
Dacre’s protagonists have mostly been received as monstrous or psychologically disordered – again, both by her contemporaries and in some influential strands of criticism now. I think such categorizations of women characters who dismantle social affective scripts, both in academic criticism and in social imaginaries, are concerned with the imagined line of “going too far” from gendered social expectations. In this imaginary, there are safe ways to “protest”, that do not significantly challenge, or might even reinforce, social structures that play out through gendered social emotions. Dacre’s protagonist seems actively to seek to cross that imagined boundary, almost as an intellectual exercise and as an end in itself. I think that this poem and novel represent an aesthetic vehicle to imaginatively remove that boundary and construct a narrative of what happens after: the poem occurs partway through the novel, rather than at a moment of ending or “closure”, and the protagonist uses this poem as the starting point of a new self-awareness.
5) What new projects are you currently working on?
Working on Opie and her reworkings of conservative moral tales in particular got me thinking about the study of social narratives: how they cross between fiction and daily use, manifest in unexpected places, and can be strategically recomposed. I live in rural Norway now and am working with some brilliant colleagues on LGBTQ+ Pride events.
There is a parallel I think between the backlash in anti-gender movements now and the post-French-Revolution politics that I study in the book, where there is a mixture of rhetoric about the lack of ongoing need for gender equality campaigns, while at the same time old narratives that normalise intolerance are being reworked into new forms that are framed as timeless or “natural”. There are now additionally systematised campaigns to frame such reactionary narratives and actions stemming from by them as “mainstream” or socially acceptable thinking. It is important to look at the work of activists and authors who try to show the workings of these narratives and how they can be altered.
I am also interested in how protagonists in contemporary feminist novels use a strategy that parallels the compositions by gothic heroines. Namely, they refuse to think with the narratives that they are told they should think through, narratives that have emerged from anti-gender and abortion campaigns into mainstream discussions and healthcare systems in recent years. Lotta Elstad’s novel Jeg Nekter å Tenke (in English I Refuse to Think) starts with the protagonist’s refusal to think through narratives that she is told she must use before she can access an abortion.
I think there has recently been a reappraisal of the connection between trauma and gendered narratives concerning women in popular culture across creative media. There is more work to be done on understanding how these compositional moves offer us tools for handling and providing alternatives to the proliferation of anti-gender narratives.