Family and society in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell Book

Desire and Domestic Fiction assigns a lot of historical agency to 19th century domestic fiction, and especially to the women who wrote such novels, and the female subjects at the center of those novels. Armstrong argues that these novels produced the modern subject and produced that subject as specifically female. As she asserts, "writing for and about the female introduced a whole new vocabulary for social relations" (4). The novels (starting with Richardson's Pamela), which drew first on conduct manuals, replaced "political" antagonisms with the sexual contract. By removing sexual negotiations from the realm of the political, a new modern form of political power was produced. Specifically, psychological issues of character replaced other categories to explain the relationship between men and women. She explains that the major underlying argument here is that "modern culture depends on a form of power that works through language - and particularly the printed word - to constituted subjectivity." Her examination of the politics of the way the texts instruct the reader to read adeptly demonstrate her point here. Certainly the rise of the middle class is central here.
Armstrong balances a theoretical approach with close and interesting readings of well-known novels (Jane Eyre, Wurthing Heights, Emma, etc), and historical context. I appreciate the way the self and the subject are tied to material as well as ideological histories here.