SOURCE: Danahay, Martin A. “Class, Gender, and the Victorian Masculine Subject.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 5, no. 2 (fall 1990): 99-113.

In the following essay, Danahay discusses the masculine, bourgeois ideals of individual autonomy constructed in the autobiographical works of Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, and Edmund Gosse, comparing these with the feminine, communal subjectivity of Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography.

The interrelated categories of class and gender have become increasingly subject to scrutiny in recent analyses of autobiography. Following the deconstruction of the concept of the unitary individual, criticism of autobiography has begun to tackle the role of such complex social codes as class and gender in the construction of the writing subject.¹ The increasing influence of the works of French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu on literary criticism reveals a desire to move beyond the deconstructed categories of the subjective and objective, or individual and social toward an account of the...