Two of our current critical storms centre on two wronged young women: Dora, the hysteric of the turn of the twentieth century, and Clarissa, the paragon of the eighteenth. Dora and Clarissa have become contemporary critical heroines, subjects of (or subjected to) endless analysis and questions. Both controversies show, in a particularly acute form, the difficulties we encounter in working with texts that work with violence to women (and perhaps do some violence of their own). And both dramatize

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... the struggle of a male writer to contain the potentially disruptive force of fragmentary feminine narratives.