INTRODUCTION

What makes any discussion of modernism problematic for feminist critics is that modernist aesthetics, while not directly reflecting modernity, are inevitably put under pressure by modernity's machine technologies and dynamism. Erroneously or not, such features are often characterised as masculinist. Increasingly feminists analyse modernist women's aesthetics within this wider context. Abjuring a critical tradition which addressed an exclusionary canon of key male writers (James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and D. H. Lawrence), feminists focus on the complicated tensions between modernity's gendered subjectivities and modernism's gendered stylistics. As I outlined in Chapter 1, there are now diverse feminist critiques but, in brief, feminists are revivifying modernist women's writing while simultaneously reading women's writing as a disruptive and emancipatory discourse of personal and cultural empowerment (see Chapter 1; DuPlessis 1985; Gilbert and Gubar 1988a). Yet, for the most part, feminist critiques focus on modernist women's fiction and poetry, ignoring journalism such as cinema reviews, which remain on the margins of criticism.

So that while decades of feminist contestations have transformed our knowledge and understanding of modernist women's texts, this major work of re-evaluation has not refigured the terrain of modernism itself quite so radically. For example, Virginia Woolf and H. D. are seen mainly as literary figures and in the case of Woolf as an essayist, rather than figured in a composite continuum of domestic visual practices and journalism. Analysing the interweaving of visual stylistics and the stylistics of journalism in women's cinema writing, which is the topic of this chapter, reveals how modernity's technologies did not necessarily force women into a mechanical, masculine critical rhetoric.

One of the first important schools of alternative film-making within French cinema was that of pictorialist naturalism.1 Influenced by nineteenth-century traditions of realism, naturalism and impressionist painting, this school was characterised by a concern for landscape and the picturesque.2 More specifically, films such as L'Herbier's L'Homme du large (Man of the Ocean, 1920), Louis Mercanton's L'Appel du sang (1920) and Jacques de Baroncelli's Ramuntche (1919) can be related to what has been referred to as the tradition of French, picturesque regional genre painting.3 Many of these films, shot on location in regions such as Provence, Brittany and the Auvergne, attempt to invoke a landscape's atmosphere through a series of evocative impressions, and are centrally concerned with the relationship between regional communities and the surrounding natural environment.

A sense of lyricism, as well as veneration of the power and beauty of nature pervades these films as, for example, in Baroncelli's series of mountain films, or André Antoine's La Terre (Earth, 1921), which draws on the pictorial lyricism of the Barbizon school, and the paintings of Millet and Corot in particular. In addition to what might be referred to as an ‘animated impressionism', clearly influenced by impressionist and post-impressionist painting, these films also draw on subject matter common to the naturalist tradition. So, for example, L'Herbier's L'Homme du large (1920), Antoine's L'Hirondelle et la mésange (The Swallow and the Finch, 1920) and La Terre, Mercanton's Miarka (1920) and Jacques Feyder's Crainquebille (Old Bill of Paris, 1923) all deal with issues of entrapment, obsession, alienation and mental illness.

Dundee is one of Scotland's best-known but least understood towns. This book, the third in a series of three, attempts to change this. Perceptions and realities of Dundee are, and often have been, in conflict. In most people's eyes a jute manufacturing centre – and a grim one at that – Dundee's heritage as a major religious centre in medieval times, with a bustling maritime quarter that had much in common with the Baltic ports then and thereafter, has been largely overlooked. So too has the fact that in early modern times Dundee was Scotland's second burgh (it was only in the later nineteenth century that it was accorded the rank of city), ahead even of Glasgow. It is still one of Scotland's biggest towns. The catch-phrase ‘Jute, jam and journalism’ is often applied to Dundee, but jute has all but disappeared. Keillor's – the firm associated with Dundee marmalade from the eighteenth century – abandoned Dundee a long time ago; much ‘Dundee’ marmalade is now made in Robertson's factory at Droylesden in Manchester. Whilst D.C. Thomson continues to keep the flag flying for journalism, newspaper sales – even of the Sunday Post – are no longer sufficient to sustain a company which has been moving strongly into IT. D.C. Thomson, however, is at the heart of an expanded publishing empire – selling some 100 million copies of its publications annually – which still include titles of what when they were launched were examples of sheer publishing genius: the Beano, Dandy and People's Friend.

There is no tidy conclusion to be reached from evaluating and valuing the ways in which gender and film mesh together. This is particularly so because one of the aims of Feminism and Film is to braid and unbraid many and various elements of gender representation involving differing ethnicities, sexual preferences, and aesthetic issues: the chapters of Feminism and Film criss-cross disciplines to engage psychoanalysis, postmodernism as well as literary and other theories. But if there is no conclusion, as such, one assumption which pervades this book has certainly been confirmed. That assumption is that the relationship between gender and film is primarily cultural - a web of constituent social, psychological, political and aesthetic presences and absences which catch all women (and men) in complicated negotiations too dissonant to be netted in a singular, racially undifferentiated psychoanalytic sweep. For this reason the experimental, disciplinary diversity of feminist theory can be a crucial comfort to film analysts eager to see a wider range of filmic desires and representations than those sighted by a singular white'spectator’.

Many critics now fast forward and rewind films in search of evidence of family histories, political obsessions and sociological concerns (Kuhn 1995; Medhurst 1995; Plummer 1990). I hope that others might be intrigued to find how many telling representational effects of gender surface in feminist theories which range from a broad analysis of same-sex experience to specific questions about scientific stereotypes. Feminists are using the tools of theories to deconstruct representations of gender discrimination in exciting and radical ways.

In January 1924, a local New Jersey newspaper printed a heartfelt appeal to Congress, urging them to take oil pollution seriously and pass legislation to curb it. The author, Republican state Senator J. S. Frelinghuysen, had delivered the same impassioned statement in person to the nation a few days earlier during a Senate hearing in Washington, DC. ‘The menace of oil pollution is widespread … It is so great,’ he explained, ‘that it is affecting the life, health and property of everybody along the coasts.’ From Long Island to New Jersey shores, waters were almost everywhere ‘coated with a thin, sticky substance which adheres to the bodies of bathers, affects the eyes and health, and makes bathing practically impossible’. Blazing fires along the coast were common too, due to the oil that covered harbours and ‘soaked’ wooden piers. In the nightmarish scene Frelinghuysen described, everything was oil-smeared, both above and below the water, where tar covered oyster beds, suffocating life and posing unprecedented challenges to the fishing and seafood industry.

A few months later, in October 1924, New Jersey newspapers reported on another health and safety hazard that suddenly caught people's attention in the state and beyond. At the Bayway plant of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, located just outside Elizabeth and across from Staten Island, at least five people had died, and more than thirty were hospitalised within a matter of days. They all worked in manufacturing a new type of fuel, a product whose name – ‘ethyl gasoline’ – skilfully hid its key ingredient: lead. The accidents marked the first visible consequences of the introduction of leaded gasoline to the market, which General Motors’ chemical engineers had successfully achieved just a few months earlier.

The standing monuments and their decoration are the primary focus of this book, and they provide the evidence for the architectural aesthetic employed in the monumental architecture built in lands under Qarakhanid control. However, there is increasing archaeological evidence for the vast scale of the broader urban development across the region from the late tenth century onwards. The compilation and synthesis of all of the published archaeological reports which address Qarakhanid sites of all kinds, from the nineteenth century until today, is a vast undertaking that extends far beyond the scope of this book. Having said that, in order to provide some context for the very limited corpus of surviving monuments, some of the developments in the major cities, as well as some of the more out of the way urban centres that are known only from archaeological or textual sources, are examined below. Increasing numbers of sites are being either re-examined or re-discovered by archaeologists working in the various modern states encompassing the territory formerly ruled by members of the Qarakhanid dynasty.

The vast scale of construction and urban expansion that took place across the areas of Central Asia under Qarakhanid rule remains very poorly understood. With such a small corpus of standing monuments spread across the region, it is possible to determine only a limited amount of information concerning the process of change in the period from the late tenth century to the early thirteenth century. In order to gain a clear understanding of the bigger picture it is to the textual and archaeological evidence that attention must turn. The major cities, as well as some of the recently excavated smaller urban centres, are examined below in order to demonstrate a sense of what is known to have been built and to gain as wide an understanding as is possible, with the limited evidence, of urban development under Qarakhanid rule.

INTRODUCTION

Understanding the personal as political - how identity is constructed and represented - is the task of feminist theory. Questions about the place of sexual difference in our conscious and unconscious understandings of identity, and the relation between difference, identity and social and economic inequalities are the specific questions which invite feminist theory into the political arena. As Chapter 1 above argues, the processes by which individual women recognise themselves as female are often caught up in compulsions of the visual. Indeed, the social face of femininity is constructed by mechanisms of visual representation, such as advertising and film, which gain women's collaboration and consent via specific forms of identification. The power of politics resides in the production and dissemination of ideology which in turn can rest on an ability to re-present the personal within a specific visual realm. The theme of Feminism and Film is that the power of feminism comes from its ability to show how individual women are collectively constructed politically in that realm and usually oppressed.

BRITISH FEMINIST FILM-MAKING FROM 1970 TO TODAY

During the 1970s, feminist independent film-makers and media groups joined other activists and academics in a counter-culture existing outside mainstream cinema, theatre and television. The expansion of higher education including the founding of four new universities in the mid-1960s with their annual arts festivals, the ending of theatre censorship in 1968 and the growth of feminist and gay theatre (for example, the Almost Free Theatre's Women's and Gay Theatre Festivals of 1973-4), combined with feminist film production (the London Women's Film Group was founded in 1972), to create a progressive cultural force (Wandor 1981).

While more than half of all commercial films have literary origins, the coupling of author/auteur or literature/film is continually contested. So, to discuss some of the ways in which literary criticism, specifically feminist literary criticism, offers possible tools for film study might seem to add further problems and complications. Yet two relevant events suggest that the marriage of literature and film is one unlikely to be easily dissolved even if it is always in crisis. The South Bank Centre in London chose to celebrate the centenary of British cinema in 1996 not by creating a mediatheque but with Writing in Light, a series of Voice Box lectures looking at'the ways in which the language of film has influenced poetry and fiction and how they share technique, construction and form’ (South Bank Centre 1996, p. 1). While in America in 1996, the annual conference on Literature and Film has reached number twenty-one with Genre and Gender in Film and Literature.

But to begin with, what is usually meant by literature/film study? While there is no exact critical method the term has served for some time as a general umbrella for criticism about the relationship between cinematic and literary forms and I need briefly to mark out my own exact concerns before assessing the precise contributions of feminist literary criticism.

The writing of a book of this nature was an undertaking I had long promised myself and other people, before the Publisher's invitation introduced a note of urgency to the project. In the event it has been slowly matured and quickly blended, and it can only be hoped now that its flavour will pass.

Many friends and teachers and students could be thanked for their interest over the years in Gaelic poetry, and I have felt enriched and encouraged by this interest. The last quarter-century has deepened our understanding of the Gaelic poetic tradition in important ways, as scholars have probed it more thoroughly and more sympathetically. And in the same period the tradition has enjoyed a new lease of life in contemporary writing and in public interest. It is not a bad time to take stock.

I wish to express my own and the Publisher's thanks to all living authors whose work has been translated in this book, and to their Publishers who have given permission to quote or translate. I should like to mention in particular Michael Carmichael who gave permission, as Trustee, to quote from Carmina Gadelica\ The Scottish Gaelic Texts Society; William Maclellan; Messrs Oliver and Boyd; An Comunn Gaidhealach; Gairm Publications; and Victor Gollancz Ltd. In addition I should like to thank Donald Macaulay, George Campbell Hay and Iain Crichton Smith for permission to use their translations of a number of poems.

Providing affordable, accessible and effective healthcare services to the highest number of people has been one of the main challenges of modern societies. Countries across the globe have tried to address the issue in various ways, often by adopting policies and frameworks very different from each other, mirroring the discrepancies in the structure and ideology of their political regimes. The result has been a patchwork of approaches to healthcare research, delivery and reform. Particularly for democracies, improving and ensuring access to quality healthcare – a key dimension of the UN Human Development Index – has been a defining struggle that governments have not always won.

This is also true for the United States, where debates about access to public health have been fierce and highly consequential for social change, and where life expectancy has recently seen the biggest drop in a century amid a deep economic and institutional crisis. The difficulties in managing the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused over 1 million deaths in the United States, are the main reasons for this dramatic fall, but not the only ones. Drug overdoses – driven mainly by the opioid epidemic that has engulfed the country – are the second leading cause of decreased life expectancy and are evidence of another recent, major public health failure. Meanwhile, diseases long considered eradicated, such as polio, have made a dire comeback in states like New York.

These developments demonstrate how complex and multifaceted health governance is and how difficult it remains, even today, to address public health challenges effectively, even for a state like the United States, whose resources, reach and ambitions have grown immensely during the last century.

In Juteopolis, a breed of strong, independent-minded women was forged and more than any other place in Scotland certainly, possibly in Europe, Dundee is very much a matriarchal society.

In the popular history of Dundee, the city is commonly characterised as a ‘women's town’. The participation of women in the city's workforce, especially the jute industry, has been largely influential in this characterisation. Yet Dundee remained an overwhelmingly patriarchal society throughout the twentieth century, which reflects the national picture at a Scottish and British level. This was evidenced in the largely inequitable employment opportunities available to the women of Dundee. This chapter will consider the ways in which Dundonian women were affected by their involvement in the workforce, and how far they were able to take advantage of the economic and cultural circumstances of the city.

JUTE AND DUNDEE BEFORE THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The roots of the characterisation of Dundee as a ‘women's town’ can be found in the imbalance of the city's population structure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with there being three women for every two men in 1911. In the same year women formed 43 per cent of the labour force, and 54.3 per cent of women aged over fifteen were in employment. The jute industry dominated Dundee's economy, employing 34,000 people, and women accounted for 75 per cent of the workforce. Conversely, the percentage of married women employed in domestic service was unusually low in Dundee, partly as a result of the opportunities offered by the jute industry.

Well-nigh a generation ago there began to arise a not inconsiderable art movement in Dundee. To a Public Library and Museum was added a Picture Gallery, which by and by had to be enlarged; and their capable and enthusiastic organiser … greatly daring, began a series of picture exhibitions. This was the golden age; with new factories and new big houses going up everywhere, and more space and ease even in a good many older ones; so the pictures sold well; new ones came in accordingly, and went off in their turn, till the sales and shows were second to none out of London itself.

Writing in 1907, Patrick Geddes was here describing the extraordinary artistic renaissance that Dundee had undergone in the late nineteenth century. Geddes had come to the city in 1888 to take up the chair of botany at the new University College, but quickly extended his interests into helping to foster Dundee's burgeoning art culture. His chief artistic protégé was the painter John Duncan, who also wrote about this artistic development in the city. At an address given in 1911, he claimed that by the last decade of the previous century, ‘Dundee had had a run of fine Exhibitions that were equal to anything outside London. The most distinguished works by the most distinguished artists had been ours to love and live with. The best artists of the country were coming and going amongst us, the guests of our merchant princes; and the fame of Dundee as an art centre was spread far and wide.’

Change came swiftly to Dundee's politics at the beginning of the twentieth century. In no other Scottish city did Liberalism decline so rapidly or from such a seemingly unassailable position. Dundee had been Liberal since the creation of its parliamentary seat in 1832. The Unionist gains of 1895 and 1900, which wiped out all of the Liberals in Glasgow, had little effect on their dominance in Dundee. And yet in 1906 Dundee was one of the first places in Scotland to elect a Labour MP, one of only two seats the party won in that year in Scotland, and one of only three the party held before the First World War in Scotland. While the rest of Scotland was returning to Liberalism, Dundee was turning against it. By 1910 Dundee was the ‘least Liberal city in Scotland’. By 1922, the year of Labour's electoral breakthrough across Scotland, Dundee was far more left wing than any other city – a deeper, and more vivid, red than even Clydeside. In Glasgow that year, just over one third of the registered electorate voted for a Labour or Communist candidate. In Dundee nearly half voted Labour, Prohibitionist or Communist.

Dundee's precocity in turning against Liberalism is matched by a paradoxical lateness in recognising the importance of independent Labour representation. The Scottish Labour Party's James Macdonald gained only 354 votes in the parliamentary election in 1892 and 1,313 as an Independent Labour Party (ILP) candidate in 1895: over 8,000 away from victory in 1892, and 6,000 away in 1895.

The relationship between cultural modernity and modernist visual cultures and literature is complex and contested. In English Art 1860–1914 the editors, David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry, argue that, in art history, there are two competing readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, drawing on two different understandings of this relationship (Corbett and Perry 2000). On the one hand modernism is seen as a purely formal development leading to abstract expressionism. The other reading argues that modernism's subject matter is modernity: the representation of urban and technological experience and ‘the spectacular surface of modern life’ (Corbett and Perry 2000, p. 2). From this second perspective, the formal appearance of an art work alone does not define its quality, but rather a work becomes significant if it responds to modern conditions, the major one being technological advances including cinema and photography.

Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, H. D. and Dorothy Richardson took a marked interest in different ways of looking at modernity utilising the new technologies of photography and cinema. Women modernists were fascinated by the relationships between aesthetic developments and the way in which the new technologies could offer new depictions of themselves and their visible worlds. Sanford Schwarz argues that modernist writers’ new attention to decentred subjectivities resulted from this fascination, which came with a refusal of positivist rules of representation: ‘They maintained that intellectual formulations are simply practical instruments for arranging the sensory flux in a convenient manner’ (Schwarz 1988, p. 17). Schwarz's description captures the essence of domestic photography. Photography offered modernist women a ‘practical instrument’ with which to experiment with different representations of their place in the flux of modern life.

During the nineteenth century, Dundee became first and foremost an industrial city and, by the end of the century, it looked it. Although still dependent on its ever-expanding harbour, it was no longer merely a seaport or entrepôt but a major manufacturing centre, the industries of which lay in a virtually impenetrable semi-circle around the medieval core. This chapter examines how significant elements of Dundee society hoped to represent and symbolise this confident and modern city along the waterfront, then being transformed by enormous dock expansion, against others who sought to create that symbol up on the plateau on the largely empty Meadowlands lying to the north of the ancient centre. However, the ambitions of the former were vitiated by predatory and ruthless railway companies, and those of the latter by civic indecision and poor foundation conditions.

The relationship between the town and the River Tay had been central to the life of the ancient port, and over the centuries the burgh had serially encroached upon the intertidal sandbanks and mudflats of the northern shore – beginning with the construction of New Shore in the mid-sixteenth century, followed by further developments outwards – particularly in the 1760s. However, the burst of dock expansion in the 1820s, attributable to the new Harbour Commissioners, led by their ambitious harbour engineer James Leslie, was of an entirely different scale. They had a clear vision of the impact they wished to create for visitors to Dundee arriving by sea, and they were duly impressed by the ‘displays of opulence, and by the romance of its crowded quays the proud and opulent series of docks which are at once the boast of Dundee, the chief means of its wealth, and the best evidence of its enterprise and taste’.